The Lumberjack

Issue date: 11/14/07 Section: Opinion

Protester at February 2007 rally against the budget cuts

Protester at February 2007 rally against the budget cuts

If you're not mad about what's happening around you on campus, then you aren't paying attention. Think about a frog in a pot of water. Students - the frog - are being slowly boiled to death as college fees rise.

Throw a frog in a pot of hot water and it will jump out. The same goes for students having huge fees dumped on them all at once.

In 2002, it cost an in-state student at Humboldt State $947 to attend the Fall semester. It now costs in-state students almost $2,000 this Fall semester. See something wrong with this?

We all know what taxes are, right? There is an idea that rallied colonists hundreds of years ago. The idea was that they should have a say in the taxes being pushed on them by a king thousands of miles away. Those colonists revolted and chose their own leader to represent them.

No taxation without representation! We students are being taxed with little or no input whatsoever. A short list of the "taxes" students paid this semester:

*$250 Instructionally Related Activities fee (raised $202 this year which students voted against)

*$135 Student Health fee (students voted against this one too)

*$28 Commencement fee (raised this year)

*$25 Diploma fee (also raised this year)

*$51 Student Body Association fee

*$93 Student Body Center fee

*$5 Computer Lab Paper fee

Don't forget tuition. In 2001, tuition was $714 a semester for a in-state full-time student - now it's $1,260. Students face another 10 percent tuition increase, to be decided this week.

Our voice is silenced by those running the CSU system and Humboldt State. Our voice is also silenced by student apathy.
Academic programs like German face execution. Programs like Native American Studies and Ethnic Studies keep getting deep cuts. Plans to "prioritize" all programs are in the works, where the bottom third will be weakened, merged and/or cut.
Class sizes increase every semester.

President Rollin Richmond continues to take the university in a direction different from the one we, as students, expected when we applied. Top that off with a faculty growing more fearful for their job security.

If you, as students, care about small class sizes, low-cost education and quality programs, then you should be making sure you have it. Stand up for what you want, press your demands, stir shit up!

Every year students pay more to be at this university. Unless students stand up united and demand our fees stop rising without our voice and our consent, then those making the decisions will boil us in a pot of fees.

"If we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately." Thomas Paine

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