Students must support bill to restore funding for education
Every year, more students are unable to afford to go to college. Next year will be a repeat of past years, and the number of low-income students unable to meet expenses and attend college to follow their dreams will increase, especially if the Oregon Opportunity Grant keeps getting cut out of the state budget!
When the Oregon Opportunity Grant was started, it covered full tuition plus some additional costs; now, because of higher education budget cuts in Salem, the grant covers less than 9 percent of annual educational costs. Because the Opportunity Grant gets money from the Education Stability Fund, when Measure 19 passed last September, the Opportunity Grant lost funding for about 3,300 grants for the next couple of years.
In order to restore access to higher education for everyone, students need to support House Bill 5052 as it is being considered. This bill would put $5.5 million more into the Opportunity Grant and ease some of the cuts the grant experienced when Measure 19 passed last September. Everyone should have equal access to higher education.
On May 5, a group of students is traveling to Salem for Student Lobby Day. They will be speaking on behalf of or against several bills, or just showing student support. It’s important that anyone who wants to and is able to comes and shows his or her support for the Oregon University System budget. If you are interested, contact the ASUO Legislative team. Please come and show your support!

Kaitlin Kerwin

ASUO legislative intern

Frohnmayer deserves thanks

for shared governance plan
Your University president deserves your thanks. Recently, the OUS Board approved a shared governance plan that will ensure greater opportunities for students to participate in campus decision-making processes on all of our campuses. Everything from setting tuition levels to approving new academic programs, your University president thinks you ought to be involved.
Through the hard work of the OSA staff and their board, the university presidents and the OUS board, this policy came to life. We are all quite proud of it, and thanks should be shared all around the table — but don’t forget the presidents.
It is these individuals who saw the value in the student perspective and made it their objective to formally include the student voice in campus governance. Kudos!

Tim Young

student member

OUS Board

Bush was right

in freeing Iraqis
I’d like to say that every anti-war protester out there needs to apologize to the people of Iraq. President George W. Bush got it right, whether or not they want to admit it. I can understand being a peace-loving people, but so many of the liberals that jumped on the anti-war bandwagon just wanted to be retro (’60s hippies) and part of the liberal academia scene. Let the Iraqi people have freedom. I hope democracy and freedom spread to the rest of the world, too. George got it right, George got it right…

Richard A. Berger

soldier

South Korea

PPPM majors wrongly ‘undeclared’ in ASUO primary elections
The Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management, for those of you who don’t know, is a division of the School of Architecture and Allied Arts and is located in Hendricks Hall. It is a small school, with about 50 undergraduates. I represent these students, and all AAA majors, on the ASUO Student Senate. And I feel compelled to point out a great injustice that recently happened to PPPM majors during the recent ASUO primary elections.
During the primary elections that took place April 9-11, PPPM majors, including myself, were forced to vote for the “undeclared” seat, instead of the AAA seat as they should have. Furthermore, it appears as though this has been a problem for a couple of years now. A lazy elections board member a couple of years ago decided not to bother to look into what seat PPPM would fit under (which would have taken minimal effort) and decided instead just to lump it in under “undeclared.”
It is only a fluke that a PPPM major even had a chance to represent AAA this year, as I was appointed to this seat. And I know of at least one PPPM major who was denied that same right for next year, as he was unable to run an effective write-in campaign due to the elections board mess-up. I hope that future election boards will look more closely when placing majors under senate seats so that no students will be aggrieved like PPPM was in this year’s ASUO primaries.

Eric Bailey

senior

PPPM and political science

Speaking out against

injustice is a duty
Early in the 19th century, abolitionists protested contemporary thought on race by challenging the “accepted” practice of slavery. Some even defied federal law and assisted fugitive slaves in their flight to freedom along the Underground Railroad.
Later, men and women stood up to the bosses, unionized, struck, faced imprisonment and even died, with the end result being the 40-hour work week, minimum wage, laws prohibiting child labor, health care for workers and general advancement of the concept that all people, not just the wealthy, have a share in America.
In the ’50s and ’60s, women and men such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King defied Jim Crow and the Klan– and now, people of color, or with Hispanic surnames, can attend college right alongside their Anglo counterparts.
Speaking out against perceived injustice is not just a right, nor a mere privilege abused by spoiled brats in the age-old rebellion against mommy and daddy, as some would have it; it is in fact a duty. It can be said to be an integral part of a broader humanistic campaign as well, and as such may thus be far more responsible for real social progress than any military action.
Perhaps, if either Salena De La Cruz (“Majority Support,” ODE, March 31) or the people in Bush’s war machine had ever actually been in a war, they might realize this, and thus not be so quick to send others to die for a vague cause — or to condemn those who challenge the act.

Bill Smee

kiosk attendant