Thousands march against school budget cuts
Students take to Capitol building
John Hornberg
Issue date: 4/22/08 Section: News
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Students from the California State University, the University of California and state community colleges turned out to march down the Capitol Mall in protest of $1 billion in cuts to higher education in the state and $4 billion in cuts to all education.
SJSU Associated Students President Benjamin Henderson, who proposed last summer the idea of the march to the state student association, said he was satisfied with the results.
"I'm really happy to see the CSUs, UCs and community colleges come together for a cause," he said.
Henderson dedicated his work on the march to his cousin, a student at San Francisco State University who died of cancer a year ago, he told the crowd.
"This march was constructed as a masterpiece of love for the importance of higher education," he said.
Also marching was Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, who stressed the importance of this event.
"This is really the first very visible day of action by the students where they are getting the message out," he said. This march is being replicated several places across the state, he added.
One of the key goals for Ann Grabowski, A.S. director of internal affairs, was for students at SJSU to see that they are not alone in facing tuition increases and problems with budget cuts, she said.
"It pulls students out of the San Jose State bubble," she said. "It helps students realize that there are 400,000 other students, if not more, that are facing the exact same issues as them.
"We are never going to make effective changes if we don't realize that and work together."
The march also included more than 100 decorated mannequins, which were originally made for the community college march in 2004, from the Missing Student Project. Each mannequin represented a student who would not be able to attend a college, said Simone Latham, a freshman political science major at Sonoma State.
Joy Masha, a senior human services major at Cal State Dominguez Hills, helped carry the missing students banner. She said she was optimistic about the prospects of the protest's message.
"People aren't going to be coming back here," Masha said as she walked with her banner at the front of the march. "Everyone will be doing their part."
Once at the north steps of the Capitol, several speakers, including several students, spoke to the protestors. Joel Francis, the student government president at Cal State Los Angeles, was one of them.
"In order to build the American dream," he told the crowd, "we need access to that dream."
Several members of the state Assembly, including Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles), also addressed the crowd about the importance of the protest.
"Education is important. It is a reflection of our priorities as a society," he said.
Don Perata (D-Oakland), the current president pro-tem of the state Senate, said raising taxes to save education is a better solution than the steep cuts proposed. He also said the legislature would not pass the governor's budget as proposed.
"We will watch the World Series from this building if we have to," he said as he pointed to the Capitol building.
Garamendi hinted that this march would be the first step in the process to combating the budget cuts across higher education.
"This is the opening of the process," he said. "It's going to take several more months and several more rallies before things will really be resolved in the Capitol."
Daniel Yorke, a senior sociology major, said he felt the march had an impact.
"I feel like we actually made a difference, which is rare in the fragmented generation we seem to be coming from," Yorke said.
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Mo
posted 5/10/08 @ 3:49 PM PST
I am a student from the Philipps university in Marburg (Germany). We have been struggling against the introduction of tuition fees and the commercialisation of education (as part of the Bologna Process) in the past few years as well. (Continued…)
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