Nicholls State University students have started their own budget cut protest campaign to make businesses realize how important their university is to the area.
The long-term goal of the group, called “Stand Up 4 La,” is to get a constitutional amendment to protect higher education or lift protections on other parts of the state budget, leveling the playing field when it comes to budget cuts, said Nicholls State art senior Amy Marie Mahler.
Since 2008, Nicholls has suffered a 29-percent budget cut and is facing another 35-percent cut in July 2011, Mahler said.
“Which means, if worst case scenario, we would lose about 2,000 students,” Mahler said. “We’d lose 18 degree programs, and we’d lose countless faculty and staff.”
Stand Up 4 La was started by students who were upset with budget cuts, Mahler said.
“We kept saying, ‘I wish we could do this,'” Mahler said. “Instead of just talking, we decided to do something. It’s not just one department. It’s made up of students from all over campus.”
One point the campaign is pushing is the My Dollar Campaign, where each time patrons visit businesses in Houma and Thibodaux, they bring fake dollars.
Mahler said a faculty member brought a fake dollar to a local gas station.
“The next week he went back to the same gas station and asked if they’d gotten any more dollars, and the person behind the cash register pulled out a really big stack of dollars that they had kept,” Mahler said.
Mahler said if the university goes away, so do the local businesses.
“You start to realize a lot of your money comes from Nicholls State students, faculty,” Mahler said. “A lot of these businesses thrive on the college students, so we wanted to make sure they knew what was going on.”
About 100 Nicholls State students in the Stand Up campaign attended the “Rally for Higher Education” on Wednesday, said Nicholls State graphic design senior Lauren Jones.
“There were a ton of people and from a very wide range of schools,” Jones said. “I feel like it’s really good to have this broad range of people.”
 
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Contact Catherine Threlkeld at [email protected]