Texas college muzzles concealed handgun protest

Fort Worth, Texas —In a dramatic blow to freedom of expression, Tarrant County College has prohibited its students from wearing empty gun holsters to protest policies that forbid students with concealed carry licenses from carrying concealed handguns on campus.

A TCC administrator told interested students that they could not wear the holsters and could only conduct a protest in the school's tiny and restrictive free speech zone. TCC student and protest organizer Brett Poulos has turned to a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania civil liberties watchdog for help.

"TCC has cast aside decades-old Supreme Court precedent strongly protecting symbolic expression by refusing to recognize its students' right to wear empty holsters to make their point," said Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

"The students were using the empty holsters to protest policies that they believe render students defenseless. They have every right to engage in this symbolic protest, and TCC's cynical attempt to ban dissenting views is both shameful and transparent."

To read more, go to FIRE's Website. Also, to find out more about the protest taking place nationwide, including WVU Tech, go to Students for Concealed Carry on Campus.

Teaching about Myanmar through M & M's - Minn. diversity program found to be a political slush fund

Minneapolis, Minn. - Schools in Minnesota are saving money any way they can, including laying off teachers.

But a 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS investigation has uncovered a huge pot of money that just keeps growing.Experts say that money has been budgeted with no clear purpose.

The $85 million program has a lofty goal—enhance diversity in school districts across the state. But our investigation discovered hundreds of thousands of dollars in questionable spending.

For more on this story, go to KSTP-TV 5.

Montgomery colleagues take note - WVU faculty takes stand for free speech

MORGANTOWN - The faculty overwhelmingly defeated another motion that had recommended any faculty member who threatens or intimidates a university employee, board member or other state executive be disciplined or dismissed immediately.

The motion, offered by professor Dallas Branch and rejected 527-23, stemmed from two fliers found in the engineering building last week that used the word "kill.'' The composition and font size were crafted carefully to avoid qualifying as a direct threat, and State Police said last week they did not consider the language criminal.

From a distance it reads, "Kill Joe Manchin,'' although when read closer, does not advocate killing the governor -- just his candidacy for re-election.

But campus Police Chief Bob Roberts said last week he found the language disturbing, as did Branch.

"Faculty colleagues, this is unacceptable. It may be seen as a joke to some,'' Branch said. But after the mass murder at Virginia Tech last year, "Something like this cannot be taken as a joke.''

Two professors opposed the language of the motion as overly broad and warned it could have discourage free speech on campus.

This article is condensed version of a larger Associated Press article found in the May 14 edition of The Charleston Daily Mail. To read that article in its entirety, click here. Also, for more information on what lead to the resolution, click here.

Tech loses $1.2 million in 2007, similar losses expect in '08

This article originally appeared in the April 28 edition of The Charleston Daily Mail, and is reprinted with permission.

by Kelly Halloran, staff writer

West Virginia University Institute of Technology had a $1.2 million deficit last fiscal year, and school officials estimate they'll have a similar budget shortfall this year.

Last year marked the first time the university dipped into the red, after several years of declining enrollment and falling revenue.

The college had had a surplus at least for the previous two years. In 2005, the budget had $1.3 million left over, and in 2006 the surplus amounted to $233,000.

But according to financial statements recently made available on the Higher Education Policy Commission Web site, revenue in 2007 fell $1.2 million short of expenditures.

The deficit is due to declining enrollment and an insufficient accounting structure at the school, Associate Provost Scott Hurst said.

Total enrollment dropped to 1,450 in the fall of 2007, down from 1,474 at the same time in 2006 and 1,539 in the fall of 2005.

Enrollment has been steadily declining since 1992, when it peaked at 2,163 students.

In 2006, worries about falling enrollment and facility problems on the Montgomery campus spurred lawmakers to propose moving the institute's engineering school to a technology park in South Charleston. Backlash from eastern Kanawha County andschool alumni nixed the move, and the state pumped millions into renovations and overhauled the administrative set-up of the entire college.

It's now a division of West Virginia University, which shifts much of the financial and recruitment responsibilities to the Morgantown aministration.

A lingering problem that led to this year's deficit is that Tech had not had a good system of tracking expenses, Hurst said.

"One of the problems we have had when we started to address the problem was getting an accounting structure in place," he said.

The school is attempting to turn things around, Hurst said.

In July, for example, school officials began to look more closely at controlling expenditures, he said.

"We need to not have excess capacity in areas where we do not need it," Hurst said. "I'm talking about non-academic services."

Administrative functions, such as human resources and financial aid, have been moved to Morgantown.

Rather than establishing supervisory roles at the school, officials at the two schools also have agreed to centralize the roles at WVU, Hurst said in an earlier article.

The move will save about $700,000 in the coming year, he said.

The school primarily receives its revenue from tuition and fees, Hurst said.
Only one-third of the school's funding comes from state appropriations.

In a court-ordered plan the school released in February, officials focused on ways to recruit and retain students.

The plan calls for enrollment to increase by about 12 percent to 1,650 by 2012.

One way to do that is to offer more scholarships, Hurst said.

"There are things that we have to do on our campus and services that we have to get in place," he said.

School officials expect to run a deficit in fiscal year 2008 similar to this year's, Hurst said.

They hope to be back in the black in a few years with the help of the changes they are making to the school.

"If you invest in the appropriate things and run a deficit in the process of doing that, sometimes it will turn the fiscal situation around," he said.

The state is conducting an audit on the school this year, but officials are not sure when that will be complete, legislative auditor Aaron Allred said last week.

How not to prevent a recession

by William L. Anderson

I recently heard a radio interview with a prominent economist who was defending Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's moves to shore up the markets on Wall Street. Bernanke, the economist said with emphasis, had spent years studying the "mistakes" of the Fed during the Great Depression and was not going to repeat the "errors" that the Fed directors committed from 1930 to 1933.

The "errors" of which the economist spoke were outlined by the late Milton Friedman both in his 1963 A Monetary History of the United States (written with Anna Schwartz) and his popular Free to Choose (with Rose Friedman), published in 1979. According to Friedman and his coauthors, the economic collapse that occurred in the United States from 1930 to 1933 came about because the Federal Reserve System failed to act in the face of bank failures and banking panics, leading to a massive contraction in the amount of money in circulation, which ultimately led to the calamity.

Friedman made his arguments as a means to counteract the common explanation of the Great Depression — that it was the result of the "internal contradictions" of capitalism. The typical explanation, popularized by John Kenneth Galbraith as well as the gaggle of Keynesians that proliferated in US universities, was that the capitalist system tends toward "underconsumption" or its evil twin, "overproduction."

(Galbraith held that underconsumption occurred because the income "gap" between the wealthy and poor grew during the 1920s — another "natural" outcome of capitalism — while John Maynard Keynes and his followers held that private investment spending was volatile because of the "animal spirits" of investors. The system had a built-in, self-multiplying, downward spiral whenever private investors were unwilling to throw more money into the economy.)

Those who blamed the Great Depression on the "failures" of the free market were all too happy to come up with their own "solutions," including attempts to cartelize the entire US economy or to force up wages via increased minimum-wage legislation or through the endorsement of expanding labor unions. Some, like Galbraith, went further and advocated out-and-out socialism and central economic planning. The free-market system, they have argued, is too inherently unstable to be left to its own devices. (This is the same argument that Paul Krugman makes twice a week from his perch on the New York Times op-ed page)

Thus, Friedman was seeking not only to explain why he believed the Great Depression occurred, but he also was trying to defend the free-market system, or at least was trying to defend most of the free market system. There was one portion of the system that was prone to failure, he argued, and that was the monetary system.

For more on this article, go to the Ludwig von Mises Institute's Website

Bill makes community colleges independent

The Community and Technical College at WVU Tech is among the institutions affected by this bill.

by Walt Williams, The State Journal

CHARLESTON -- A bill passed during the final hours of the state Legislature's 2008 session would sever the administrative link between the state's universities and their associated community and technical colleges in a move that has many people from the Parkersburg area crying foul.

House Bill 3215 started out as legislation to remove the administrative link between Shepherd University and Blue Ridge Community and Technical College in Martinsburg. But when it hit the state Senate, the bill was amended so that five community colleges associated with other four-year universities would be run by their own governing boards, making them independent institutions.

For more on this article, go to The State Journal

As nation observes Sunshine Week, open government adovcates report a mixed bag

By A. Matthew Deal and Emilie Yam, SPLC staff writers

Washington, D.C. - In a new, $450 million, state-of-the-art museum of news in Washington, D.C., media professionals, government officials and open-government advocates gathered on March 14 at the 10th annual National Freedom of Information Day Conference to discuss recent changes to the Freedom of Information Act and the importance of sunshine laws to journalists.

The conference was an early kick-off for Sunshine Week, an event that educates the public about open government, which began March 17 and runs through March 21. The week-long observance is sponsored by the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Sunshine Week often features events like the Newseum's FOI Day to promote awareness among journalists and policymakers on issues concerning public access to information. These events serve as a way to educate journalists on recent changes and trends that affect their ability to get records from public institutions.

Sunshine Week focuses not only on the federal Freedom of Information Act but also on other topics surrounding open government, such as state open-records laws. These laws are the functional equivalents of the federal Freedom of Information Act for state public institutions, and they are usually more relevant for student journalists reporting on issues involving their high schools or universities.

Recent examples of both progress and setbacks to open government are prevalent.

In Connecticut, a commission decided Feb. 13 that the Yale University Police Department was performing a public function under state law, and that the public should have access to its records. In Virginia, the General Assembly on Feb. 26 passed a bill restricting the disclosure of information about donors to three public universities, much to the chagrin of open-government advocates. In Pennsylvania, a new law was signed Feb. 14 that updated the state's open records laws, informally regarded as one of the worst in the nation.

For better or worse, sunshine and access to information are news these days.

In December, Congress passed and President Bush signed a bill updating the federal FOI law for the first time in more than a decade. Corinna Zarek, FOI Service Center director for the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, said two of the biggest changes are the addition of penalties for agencies that take too long to respond to requests and the creation of an agency to mediate disputes when FOIA requests are denied. At FOI Day, however, some open-government advocates voiced concern over how well the law will be implemented.

In the spirit of Sunshine Week, the Student Press Law Center each day will feature stories devoted to open-government issues. We have conducted several open-records tests to see how easily we could access information such as police incident reports at public and private universities, reimbursement records for high school superintendents, and student government association minutes and annual budgets.

We hope student journalists can take this collection of information and use it to enhance the quality of reporting at their institutions, learning from our experiences and drawing from the most effective strategies that we have learned through this process.

To learn more on open-government initiatives, go to SPLC's Website, or Sunshineweek.org.

Kissing the Republicans goodbye

by Emily Mullin

Before I delve into the core of this column and its fundamental purpose, I must first preface by telling you a little bit about myself.

I am a student at Ohio University where I study journalism and political science. I write for the local newspaper as a campus reporter and am the vice president and acting president of the OU College Republicans. I was, up until recently, actively involved in the presidential campaign to elect Rep. Ron Paul for many months.

Last week, a column I wrote assessing GOP presidential candidate and now nominee, John McCain, appeared in my local newspaper. While I found no fault in the article (in fact, I thought it to be well-written and more than adequately researched), my Republican companions and those of the right persuasion were not impressed by my candid evaluation of John McCain and the state of the Republican Party as it stands.

Many members of the club and local county Republican Party approached me with concern and some were outright enraged at my public display of criticism for the Arizona senator. I was accused of being "divisive" and "irresponsible" and was told that I should not have exercised my journalistic influence because my views were in conflict with those of the club and county party. I was advised that – despite my personal feelings – I must support John McCain for the "sake of the club" and for the "good of the party" or the club would take necessary steps to resolve the problem.

When I made it known that I had no intention of supporting or campaigning for John McCain, I was asked to step down from my position because it compromised party and club unity. When I refused to simply acquiesce and give up my position, I was threatened with impeachment.

For more on this op/ed piece, go to LewRockwell.com

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

State universities to arm police with assault rifles

by Toby Phillips

Tempe, Ariz. - Police departments at Arizona's three universities plan to arm their officers with military-style assault rifles within the next year, officials said Tuesday.

The new rifles would give campus police officers long-range shooting capabilities, allowing them to hit targets at the end of long hallways or atop tall buildings, officials said.

For more on this article, go to the Arizona Republic

The coming fall of higher education

Population Shift Sends Universities Scrambling Applicant Pool Forecast To Shrink and Diversify

By Valerie Strauss,Washington Post Staff Writer

Colleges and universities are anxiously taking steps to address a projected drop in the number of high school graduates in much of the nation starting next year and a dramatic change in the racial and ethnic makeup of the student population, a phenomenon expected to transform the country's higher education landscape, educators and analysts said.

For more on this article, go to the Washington Post. Also, check out the following post by Lew Rockwell on the LRC blog on where to find a real education.