UNLV students plan walkout
Students at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas will participate in a walkout to protest upcoming budget cuts to the Nevada System of Higher Education today. The walkout will be followed by a protest at the Grant Sawyer Building in Las Vegas, where the state legislature’s Southern Nevada offices are located.
The student-organized protest was met with criticism from leaders at the University of Nevada, Reno.
“It draws attention, but I don’t think it’s the right kind,” UNR President Milton Glick said. “Talking to the legislature, either in mass session or one-on-one, is more effective.”
Students’ personal stories and appeals to save funding would hold more sway with state officials than a walkout, he said.
“I think that students should go to class,” Glick said. “They should do whatever it takes to get an education. To show the importance of that education.”
Adam Cronis, the undergraduate student president at UNLV, said despite the drawbacks, the walkout is intended to show what would happen if class sections were cut en masse or enrollment caps were implemented.
“People would be left out in the cold,” Cronis, who helped organize the walkout, said. “We want to show what that would look like while we still have the power to stop it.”
Cronis said that when the walkout was planned, invitations were sent to students, staff and faculty at UNLV and he has received enough feedback to be “cautiously optimistic” about the rally’s prospects of success.
“I think that after this is all said and done, it will have been successful,” he said.
Associated Students of the University of Nevada President Eli Reilly said that while he wasn’t necessarily against the idea of a rally, organizing it as a walkout could set the rally up for failure.
“You have to do it constructively,” he said. “Even if they get enough people to go, legislators might not take it as good as they hope. It will show them that we can all just afford to miss a day of class when we’re trying to argue how valuable higher education is.”
Jay Balagna can be reached at jbalagna@nevadasagebrush.com.
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5 Responses to “UNLV students plan walkout”
So even in times like this, we still take shots at fellow student leaders? Wow…
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Say no to education cuts! there are ways to solve our budget problems without selling out our kids and our future.
Sign the petition! http://www.progressnownevada.org/SaveOurState
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Leave it to Eric Thornley as soon as anyone disagrees with anything related to UNLV. A planned ‘walkout’ to protest education won’t accomplish anything. If all those students who plan on protesting would write a letter to our state legislature, it would be much more beneficial. UNLV is such a joke…
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The truth is every Nevadan in the state should be voicing their dissent for higher education budget cuts. Nevada only has two major universities, UNLV and UNR. Why would we want to compromise accreditation, past, present, and future degrees, and the futures of young people trying to acheive the American dream?
The student walk-out of UNLV and CSN was right because it provided a visual for state lawmakers and a tool of organization. It doesn’t just stop today at the rally as much as it begins here. The rally served as the spark that has ignited the fire within every UNLV and CSN student to buck the SYSTEM of self interested failed politicians like Gibbons. From here we will vote, write letters, and continue the fight. As should students of UNR and every Nevada college in between. We need to give k-12 a reason to do good in school as much as we need to save the college students now.
Shame on Gibbons for not offering real solutions and sounding like an old nanny begging for the whining to stop.
Shame on UNR president Glick for not recognizing the power of peaceful organized student demonstrating.
All students and parents and supporters must get in involved.
If you don’t vote you don’t matter.
If you don’t speak up you don’t matter.
UNR if you do nothing to speak up the real joke will be on all of you.
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Unity is more important.
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