UPDATE:
Thousands turn out to rally against budget cuts 
January 22, 2009 by Jorge Labrador
The message sent by Thursday’s Budget Cut Rally was loud and clear: Nevada students care about the endangered future of their education.
The rally was sponsored by UNLV, the College of Southern Nevada and Nevada State College.
University Studies Senator Jon Goldman opened the evening’s speeches by introducing Chet Buchanan of KLUC 98.5, who kept attendee morale high throughout the rally. Buchanan was followed by speakers representing the state’s colleges, K-12 education, and state employees.
“Do you want a state that is going to be successful? Do you want a state that is going to be educated,” said Student Body President Adam Cronis, “so we have a future? So that we all have jobs?”
Rally organizers estimate that about four or five thousand people attended the event.
The night’s speakers were greeted by a cascade of protest signs targeting the budget proposed by Gov. Jim Gibbons and supporting the state’s education system.
“Why did I vote 4 Gibbons?” read one sign in the audience.
“Why did you vote for Gibbons?” asked Board of Regents Chancellor Jim Rogers from the podium.
Although all of the evening’s speakers were well-received by the audience, Rogers, Faculty Senate Chair Nasser Daneshvary and UNLV President David Ashley received the loudest ovations of the night as they hotly contested the logic used by the governor to justify cutting from the state’s education budget.
“How can you protect prosperity by cutting higher education, the road to prosperity?” said Daneshvary. “I just don’t get it.”
The rally precedes a town hall discussion on the crisis facing education in Nevada, scheduled for 6 p.m. Monday at the Student Union Theater. However, the urgency of the situation was noted and it was made clear that the battle to save the education system has only begun.
Students were urged to contact their state legislators in an attempt to secure an alternative to the governor’s plan.
Executive Vice President and Provost Neal Smatresk affirmed that student voices were important in the state government’s dialogue over funding education.
“They’re waiting to hear you,” he said, before assessing the turnout to the rally.
“Today, I think it’s very clear where you stand.”
More photos of the protest can be found here.
[...] How about rationale letters to the legislators and/or the newspapers? How about letters to campus newspaper? Or even comments posted on the online Rebel Yell story about the rally? Last time I looked, there [...]
Good coverage. It was much more informative than what Thomas Mitchell wrote. I think what was important with this rally was the message of unity. We had not only the faculty, staff, administration, and students unified, but also the other public colleges in southern Nevada. I would love to see where the legislature has agreed on this level. Gibbons would like to see more business and industry in Nevada, but doesn’t want to help out his own cause by developing the educated work force to staff it.
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.” Arguably the greatest president in American history, Abraham Lincoln, characterized the importance of education in terms of its real life benefits in this quote. The building block of human society, the common ground of all knowledge lies within the ability to learn and educate so we as a people can progress socially, technologically and most important, intellectually. If we allow these budget cuts to come to fruition, it will be symbolic of a sad reflection upon us all that the bond that all human beings share, that of a yearning to learn and to educate, no longer is worth fighting for. In a time of economic uncertainty and fear let us hold true to the ideals that our country holds with such pride and fight not for a belief or a cause, but for the foundation that unites us all.
That rally was hypocrisy at its worst and this article is media bias at its worst! I thought the love-affair this paper had with Obama was sickening, but the coverage on this rally is detestable.
While the University propagandized to the moron students who attended, they purposely failed to talk about their own wasteful spending as they cry about budget cuts to projected numbers!!
President Ashley makes $237,000 a year plus an additional $170,000 in supplementary compensation from the university! Seven employees of UNLV make well over $200,000 a year! But do the students know that? And that fraud Jim Rogers makes close to $400,000 a year from his chancellorship! Go out in front of the MSU and FDH and you’ll see Mercedez, BMW, Audi, and Jaguars parked out front! I wonder who those cars belong to?
Also, there were students there who were passing out flyers about UNLV’s wasteful spending. A coach making over a million dollars! President Ashley’s desk cost $15,000! I wonder how the students would feel about that?
Yet, I read no coverage about that in this article. Just more whining from this paper who failed to do the job of the media and present both sides. I guess you all have to go back to Journalism 101 and figure out what objective journalism really means!
I say cut the budget, starting with the Administration and Jim Rogers!!
It is really funny that you say Rogers makes over $400,000. Do some research before you start spewing numbers around. Chancellor Rogers makes $23,666. Oh and one more thing… He donates every penny of it back to higher education
I can’t believe some of these responses. I was at the rally, right up in front with the sign that says “we are your future”. I attend CSN and I am working on transfering over to UNLV. I can’t attend there now because I can’t afford it. The only way I can even attend CSN is through financial aid, which Gibbons is trying to take away. How cna you sit here and say that it is OK to keep cutting the budgets? What is this going to do to the students who want to further thier education so that we can survive in today’s society. I can guarentee that if you were trying to pay for school and something lkie this happened you would be complaining right along with us. At least we are tring to stand up fpr ourselves and take what we deserve. Most of us have worked our asses off in school to get to where we are now, and he is just going to take it away from us? I don’t think so! He had his turn to go to college with a fair price, and now that he doesn’t ned it anymore, he obviously doesn’t care what happens to the rest of us. To him we’re just numbers that can be subtracted from his budget. How is this fari?
We were there, standing up for what we believe in. And if the administration at UNLV is being paid too much, how is raising tuition going to fix it? He is puttin the economy’s debts on the backs of college students. On the backs of your future doctors, police, teachers, lawyers, presidents, etc… “…the moron students who attended” (Peter). If you really believe that all of us students are “morons”, how in the world is cutting out Nevada’s higher education going to fix this problem?
Can’t we find another way to fix our money problem without destroying our state’s future?
Easy, you pay for your education. There’s no reason the hard-working, already over-taxed citizens of Nevada have to pay for your education. It’s your responsibility just like it is mine. This budget cut will affect me just as much as it will affect you, but at least I have the capability to understand that it is my responsibility, no matter what the cost, to pay for my own education.
So I suggest taking a little personal responsiblilty and making some tough choices even if that means you might have to graduate a little later than expected. Shit happens, the only thing you can do is wipe it off your shoe and keep going instead of blaming the shit for being on your shoe.
As rolls swell in the recession, workers find firms are contesting claims by alleging wrongdoing or quitting in a bid to not pay benefits.