Save UMass coalition plans State House rally against budget cuts

by Sarah R. Buchholz, Chronicle staff

aculty, staff and students from the Amherst, Boston and Dartmouth campuses plan to gather April 25 at the State House to encourage legislators to "Save UMass." In what the Massachusetts Society of Professors is calling "a follow up to the ...Teach-In days of early March," the group will hold a rally from noon to 1 p.m. on the Boston Common and then will spend the afternoon listening to speakers in Gardner Auditorium and visiting legislators.

     "It's going to be mostly students," said Dan Clawson, Massachusetts Society of Professors special vice president for campus mobilization. "Ideally we will have people from the legislative districts visiting [their representatives]."

     Story said the group would like to see faculty well-represented, too.

     "This can't just be a student and staff day," he told the Faculty Senate March 28. "We really would like to have faculty go to this. I know that everybody is tired and kind of wrung out, but please consider whether you can go."

     The event has been endorsed by the faculty unions at the state and community colleges, according to Clawson.

     "The specifics of the group's message will be fine-tuned up until the trip," Clawson said, "but the basic messages are already clear: "UMass is a great institution; we appreciate the investment the state has made in it; we pay them back with our contributions to the commonwealth; and to keep [UMass] great, it needs to be adequately funded," he said. "And, if necessary, resources should be raised in order to make it possible to fund it adequately."

     "We are going to take flowers with us," said Massachusetts Society of Professors president Ron Story. The group's floral offering is a response to a 1989 student rally, which caused $3,000 in damage to flower beds outside the State House. Although Landscape Architecture and Stockbridge School students traveled to Boston to repair the beds and plant an additional 20,000 tulip bulbs approximately one month after the incident, some University staff fear the incident hasn't been forgotten.

     "We are going...to leave [the flowers] in the State House," Story said. "We are going to try to deal with that right away."

     The Save UMass coalition is seeking donations to help pay for busing.

     "We're asking people who go to pay $5, so that'll help defray the cost," Story said, "but we're still a bit short." The local office of the MSP, the state office of the Massachusetts Teachers' Association, and the local Graduate Employee Organization have all made contributions, Clawson said.

     The event also follows an effort by the Student Center for Educational Research and Advocacy April 8, when seven area legislators and approximately a half dozen legislative aides toured the Amherst campus, ate lunch with students, and heard about the impact of budget cuts on the University.