Voices and questions raised at Town Hall Meeting
By Alisha Green
(Poster by organizers of event)
Though posters around campus proclaimed MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon would speak to students about budget cuts in a Town Hall Meeting, a lone administrator stood in her place while students fired questions about the elimination of programs.
The Director for the Office of Planning and Budgets, David Byelich, stood at the front of a nearly full Room 109 in South Kedzie at Thursday’s Town Hall Meeting. The event was sponsored by ALLeft, Movimiento Estudiantil Xicano de Aztlan, Real Chicano Latino Studies, Students for Economic Justice, Undergraduate Alliance and Spartans Against MSU Budget Cuts and Tuition Hikes, according to the flier posted around campus.
Simon was handed the flier for the Dec. 3 event on Nov. 30 and could not attend due to “prior commitments,” according to the letter Simon sent to the organizers of the event and posted on her Web site. She also wrote that her office was not contacted “prior to the creation and mass distribution of the flyer.”
At the opening of the meeting, students encouraged each other to mobilize for changes after many programs were eliminated as part of budget cuts.
Students had a range of reactions to a question and answer session with Byelich. Nearly half of the students and audience filed out of the room after voices were raised in the most heated minutes of the two hour event. Warning: This video contains strong language.
Students repeatedly asked for specific answers as they questioned Byelich, asking why programs in Michigan were cut while the University’s Dubai campus operates for a third semester without filling enrollment.
See photos from the meeting and hear more quotes in this photo essay:
great footage. i felt like i was there myself.
This is great footage. I agree that there is no dialogue. MSU is slowly turning into a company/business that serves its own interests. Its apparent that students need to find other ways to educate themselves.
NICE FLYER!
Half of the students may have left – but have of them stayed.
MSU is full of micromanagement administrators living high on the hog. One they strip this campus of its academic integrity, they’ll move on to another. Question your Deans and administrators to the reasoning behind these cutbacks. It is a manufactured crisis. Pressure faculty to pressure the administrators and Deans.
[...] Event organizers promised the president without securing her commitment firstSpartanedge editor Alisha Green took these videos during the recent Town Hall meeting between students and MSU administrator David Byelich, the director of MSU’s Office of Planning and Budgets. (Click here for the full Spartanedge.com coverage.) [...]