Campuses Get Ready For Fight With Weld

All is not well in the state's public school system. Across Massachusetts' five campuses, classes have come to a virtual standstill as faculty and students wage a "No Business as Usual" campaign to protest the $79 million in cuts to public education proposed by the Weld administration.

And that's just where the problems confronting Gov. William F. Weld '66 start.

If there is anything to the recent rhetoric of student leaders and public education spokespersons, Weld will look out from the windows of the State House to find a massive army of outraged students and faculty demanding that he hold the line on the education budget.

Tomorrow morning, Weld will likely get his first hard look at a student populace ready to make political trouble over his plan to drastically cut and restructure the state's public school system. The governor's opposition on the issue so far has come mainly from the resignation of several high-ranking public school officials.

In the long run, they will say, the state school system is an investment, not an expenditure.

Business, especially in times of recession, needs public education, they will argue. Approximately 80 percent of graduating state school students remain in Massachusetts to enter the job market. Cutting education means fewer qualified workers, they will say.

"People in Massachusetts must make a decision. Our goal is to convince them that education is not only important but essential," says Angus G. McQuilken, who is a student trustee for the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "We're the ones that are going to pull Massachusetts out of a recession."

Organizers say they will also emphasize the inability of the state's higher education system to absorb any more reductions.

"To take another cut of this magnitude will be the final blow," says McQuilken.

Figures released by the vice chancellor of administrative finance at the University of Massachusetts at Boston reveal that the government has cut higher education eight times within the past three years.

"We're not saying, 'Don't touch higher education'. We're saying that we're bleeding enough," says Thomas P. Shields, chair of the Public Policy Committee at UMass Boston.

Student government leaders on campuses say that the student body is angered and threatened by the proposals.

"It's on your mind every day...this is a very stressful place to be," says Marjorie C. Decker, assistant to the Trustee at UMass Amherst.

Jeremy P. Levinson, the editorial editor on the campus's daily newspaper, says that the protest is unlike past education demonstrations because the threatened cuts will be deep enough to hurt all students. "It's not just hitting a fringe group really hard--it's hitting everyone...it's causing chaos here with people's lives."

Although Levinson says it seems students often protest at the drop of a hat, this demonstration is a case of ordinary people saying "enough is enough," he says.

Weld's education budget proposal includes increased tuition demands on students and a furlough plan which will force many professors to work without pay.

Protestors tomorrow will argue that higher education is the state's only hope for full recovery from the current fiscal disaster.