Click Here to watch a video of Thursday’s jazz funeral Click Here for more pictures from Thursday’s jazz funeral
 
A somber jazz funeral march of more than 300 faculty and students Thursday carried coffins and signs mourning the “death of higher education.”
 
A New Orleans-style jazz band rallied spectators to join the march around the Parade Ground with songs like “When the Saints Go Marching In” and a solemn version of the Alma Mater.
 
Protesters carried signs for LSUnited, the new proposed faculty union, and members of the student-run grassroots organization ProudStudents rallied a couple hundred students to attend the event.
 
ProudStudents co-founder and biology and philosophy senior Bradley Wood said he was impressed with the turnout.
 
“We weren’t sure if it was going to happen,” Wood said. “I think it’s going to do the job to bring attention to people watching the news and people on campus.”
 
Wood said ProudStudents is planning a protest Nov. 10 at the State Capitol, but it needs to keep the public’s attention until then.
 
Biology senior Claiborne MacKnight, who is also in ProudStudents, said the November protest will be in collaboration with  the University of New Orleans and the University of Louisiana-Lafayette.
 
MacKnight previously took a class with Italian instructor Dennis Martinez, one of the “foreign language 14” whose contracts will expire in January 2011.
 
“I think the foreign language cuts [were] the final straw,” MacKnight said. “We started brainstorming what we could do to bring awareness.”
 
Martinez said he expected more apathy from students. He and other members of the foreign language 14 carried a coffin mourning the elimination of four foreign languages.
 
“It’s to commemorate what is and will be lost,” Martinez said. “In the upcoming years [higher education] will continue to deteriorate.”
 
Instructors from UNO and Southeastern Louisiana University also attended the funeral march.
 
SLU German instructor Andrea Morshaeuser said it’s important for universities to band together to make authorities realize higher education is struggling.
 
SLU is already letting go of tenured professors, Morshaeuser said.
 
Communication studies graduate student Jonathan Broussard held a Mardi Gras-style feathered fan as he marched. He said he comes from an educational family, so the future of the University is important to him.
 
“I realize we have to do something with the budget — given that education is cut, it’s devastating to see,” Broussard said.
 
Broussard acknowledged the tough decisions administrators have to make, but he said “people need to realize the value of higher education.”
 
Faculty Senate President Kevin Cope said the march had two purposes: to stress the University community is united in the common project to save LSU and to save the University on two levels — economically and within the faculty.
 
Cope said the purpose of having a jazz funeral was to show how grave the situation is and how outraged faculty and students are. Cope criticized Gov. Bobby Jindal’s limited view of how the University affects the state.
 
“A respected leader should not play games,” Cope said. “We are doing this in part to say the game is over.”
 
Joyce Haynes, Louisiana Association of Educators president, said it is important for everyone — students, faculty and other universities — to join in the battle for public education.
 
“This event is important because it tells the public we’re not waiting for Superman,” Haynes said.
 
Several members of LAE were at the protest to mark the creation of the new branch at the University and to stress the severity of the budget situation.
 
The funeral march is one of the first actions of LSUnited.
 
An LAE news release said the group participated in Defend Public Education Day “to remind elected officials that funding public education at the K-12 and higher education levels is key to economic growth in Louisiana.”
 
Universities across the state and nation also participated in Defend Public Education Day.
 
UNO students hung five banners reading “Class cuts? Class war!” across New Orleans. A news release from UNO students said they’d like to see “an immediate end to the suspensions imposed upon the three UNO student organizers who have been made examples of by the cowardly school administration and bumbling UNO Police Department.”
 
Links for Literacy at ULL also held a protest, hoping to raise awareness of budget cuts and the possibility of cuts to come.
 
Jennifer Saputo, a member of Links for Literacy, told the Lafayette Daily Advertiser “if they sit back and allow the kinds of cuts being considered, students will pay far more for it in the future.”
 
 
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
 
 
 
 
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Contact Catherine Threlkeld at [email protected]