University of New Orleans students held a protest Oct. 6 against imminent budget cuts. Students signed petitions, e-mailed legislators, acquired legislators’ phone numbers to make calls and handed out bumper stickers and posters to spur action in opposition to the $20 million projected to be cut from UNO.
This was the second protest UNO has held — the first resulted in several arrests.
Fast forward to Oct. 8. LSU’s Faculty Senate organizes a jazz funeral for higher education. Students and faculty marched around half of the Parade Ground holding protest signs — perhaps not as effective.
Why aren’t LSU students nearly as riled up as UNO students?
The answer isn’t as simple saying “LSU students haven’t been affected yet” or “LSU students are uninformed” — it’s different from that.
The reason why LSU students haven’t made a stand against the cuts is simple — LSU students aren’t worried about their education as much as their social lives.
That being said, I’ve attended both LSU and UNO, and by no means is UNO a social campus, which is the reason I transferred.
From my experience, UNO’s students separate school from the rest of their lives. Most of the students leave campus and go home as soon as class lets out. Most aren’t caught up in extra activities at UNO. They are simply there for education.
Because their minds are solely set on education while at school, UNO students get pissed when their school starts to fall apart.
Contrasting UNO, LSU’s students’ social lives are rooted in the University. It seems most students overshadow the University’s purpose as an educator with the social services it provides.
Simply put: Until someone messes with the social realm of the University, we won’t take action. The real reason why we’re here — education — can be threatened endlessly to no effect.
I’ll use a hypothetical situation to explain: Say the Chancellor’s Office sends an e-mail to every student saying, “Tailgating has been banned from campus.” I don’t think I’d even have to explain the amount of rioting that would go on.
Consider this: The Chancellor’s Office sends an e-mail to all students saying, “$62 million could be from the University’s budget.” Sounds inflammatory, right? Apparently not at LSU.
As a matter of fact, it seems most students can’t tell you how much the University is planning to see cut. I polled 30 students in the Quad asking if they could tell me the monetary value the University is preparing to cut, or even if they could give me a general idea.
Most didn’t have the slightest notion. They guessed “around a million,” and some just said, “I think it’s supposed to be bad.”
Only one student knew the answer — and he was involved with Student Government.
To the 29 who were ignorant, the answer is $62 million. And I use the word ignorant because every student at the University received an e-mail informing them of the cuts, and the pages of the paper you are reading right now publishes the number almost every day.
But why didn’t they know?
I doubt all of these students were far too busy with school to read and e-mail or check The Daily Reveille. I have a feeling their social lives and personal tribulations have overshadowed their care for the academic aspect of the University.
To prove LSU students are far less concerned about the budget crisis, I asked Alexander Johnson, English junior and writer for UNO’s student newspaper, The Driftwood, to do a similar poll.
Johnson polled 20 people, asking if they could tell him the percentage expected to be cut from UNO’s budget. Eleven out of 20 knew — significantly higher than LSU.
Now for another example of LSU students putting academics behind social life.
Take a look at The Daily Reveille’s website, lsureveille.com. As of Thursday, only two of the top seven most popular pages regard budget cuts. Now look at the remaining five. Two refer to sex in their titles, two are sports stories and the last has the word “drunk” in it.
Now back to social lives. I don’t think it would be stupid of me to say that sex, drinking and sports are huge aspects of many of the University’s students’ social lives.
And once again, tell the students they can’t do one of those, and they’ll freak out more than if they had to find new majors because theirs had been cut.
In the end, we need to applaud UNO students for their vastly superior efforts to fight cuts.
But while we applaud, we must also look to them as an example as to how we can make a mark on our legislators, who determine our University’s fate.
And the first thing students need to do is stop the mentality of, “It’s OK if the University suffers — I’ll still be having fun,” and become more aware that if the Flagship takes a big enough cut, she’ll start to sink. And the students will be left drowning.
Chris Grillot is a 19-year-old mass communication and English sophomore from New Orleans. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_cgrillot.
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Contact Chris Grillot at [email protected]