However, these few protesters do not speak for all students.  Their goal was to use violent tactics to make their presence seem larger than it was.  In fact many student groups are opposed to both their policies and their practices.

The state of California is currently facing a major budget crisis.  For decades the state rode a wave of economic growth which allowed them to continually increase public spending.  The state and particularly the public university system were living well beyond their means.  Now that the growth has stopped the state has two choices, to make drastic budget cuts or drastic tax increases.  Ankur Chawla, founder of the Young Americans for Liberty at the University of California, San Diego, had this to say on the matter:

“As a student at the University of California, San Diego, I don’t understand why other students don’t see the disastrous long-term consequences of public funding at their university.  The massive government spending that they are demanding will raise taxes across the board for everybody while simultaneously shooting us into even more deficit…and all this in the midst of one of the biggest financial crises since the Great Depression.  These protesting students are essentially the equivalent of special-interest union thugs clenching their fists and demanding more money at the expense of everybody else.”

As Ankur demonstrates, the money for public higher education has to come from somewhere.  While private citizens are cutting back during the recession, the public sector and universities must be expected to do so as well.

The other issue at hand here is the tactics used by these protesting students.  Peaceful civil disobedience and protest are to be encouraged, but many of these student protests were not peaceful.  At UC Fullerton students occupied a university building and attempted to barricade themselves inside.   In Oakland, protesters blocked a major freeway and caused traffic backups for hours.  There were reports of smashed windshields and vandalized property on many campuses.

While these protesters are likely well intentioned, their acts are misguided.  They have not succeeded in changing public opinion or public policy, but only in hurting the education of their fellow students.  Every other student on campus is there to get the education they paid for. These disruptions forced universities to cancel classes and took educational opportunities away from other students.

Seizing buildings and vandalizing property may seem exciting at first glance.  Confronted with serious problems, the idea of going “to the barricades” is a romantic one.  However destroying other people’s property is not the way to make change happen.

As students for liberty we need to make it known that these misguided protesters do not speak for all students.  We recognize that higher taxation and spending are not the solutions to our problems and that violence is never the answer.  Through peaceful education and activism we must show the world that individual freedom, not state control, is the way forward.

Date: Monday, March 22nd from 6:00-7:00pm Eastern Time

Registration: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/647627883
Facebook Event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=366099673656

Description: As unemployment continues to be acutely-felt across the country, employers are receiving more applications for positions than ever before. Oftentimes, a resume provides prospective employers with their first — and perhaps last — impression of a candidate, and so crafting a resume that is comprehensive, succinct, and well-designed is of the utmost importance to recent graduates in the job market. In this first installment of this joint E-Leadership Series between SFL and AFL, Talent Market’s Claire Kittle will provide a crash course in writing a resume that will get you an interview and land you a job at the firm of your choice.

Speaker: Claire Kittle is the Executive Director of Talent Market and has a decade of experience in the talent development field. She operated her own headhunting firm for more than three years before transitioning into a career in the free-market nonprofit movement.  She joined the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation where she served as the Program Officer for Leadership and Talent Development. While at Koch, Claire managed the hiring process for the Foundation and launched and managed two talent programs – the Koch Associate Program and the Koch Internship Program.

Most recently, Claire served as the Vice President and Director of Research of the Buckeye Institute, Ohio’s free-market think tank. Claire currently serves on the board of TNReport.com, an independent, not-for-profit news organization in Tennessee.  Claire earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Notre Dame and a Master’s in Public Policy from Georgetown University.

Advanced registration is required, so make sure to use this link to register today: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/647627883

Most student governments are funded by student fees, a tax or surcharge levied on all students in addition to their tuition.  These fees are mandatory and usually automatically collected via the tuition payment process.  Most students never notice that line item on their bill and wonder where their money is going.  Rarely do they give a second thought UNR SfL Group to what their student government is and why it needs their money.  Student government elections are notorious for having the lowest voter turnout of any electoral process.

The student governments then take that money and redistribute it as they like.  Expenditures can include such things as special events, trips &  junkets for their members, food for their meetings, campus improvements (rarely), and most importantly funds for student groups.  These student bureaucrats are the gatekeepers to large pools of cash for student groups, cash which is usually distributed to their friends and cronies who helped get them elected (shocking, right?).  Pro-liberty groups usually struggle to get a dime of their money back from these governments and spend endless hours trying to navigate the bureaucracy.

Now the University of Nevada-Reno Students for Liberty finally grew tired of the status quo and are fighting back, launching a campaign to abolish their student government, the ASUN.

The idea was simple.  Show other students just how wasteful the student government is.  The UNR SfL members would master the bureaucracy so they could obtain as much funding as possible.  Then in deciding what to spend it on, they asked themselves, in the words of UNR SfL member John Russell, “What are the most ridiculous things we can buy with other students’ money?”

The answer: a festival.  Not just any festival, but an Abolish the ASUN festival.  It would have pizza.  It would have a bounce house.  It would have a mechanical bull.  And it would have ponies.  Yes, ponies.

The project took months to plan, and the UNR SfL documented every step on their website www.unrforliberty.com.  They launched a petition to gather signatures in support of their cause.  They made flow charts to show how complicated the bureaucracy was.  They created videos of the process to show just how wasteful they were being:

Yesterday their plan came to fruition.  The Abolish the ASUN festival occurred in all it’s pony filled glory.  The event was covered in the school and local press.  Visit http://unrforliberty.com/2010/03/abolishing-asun-makes-local-news.html for a full media roundup.

Here is the video of the event itself from the Nevada Sagebrush:

The Ablolish the ASUN festival goes to show that if you put your mind to it, anything is possible.  The UNR SfL will have more pictures and video coming out soon.  We’ll keep you posted.

Summer Seminars on Individual Liberty

Join students around the world at a seminar sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies and learn more about the foundations of limited government and individual rights. Seminar topics include free market economics, the role of government in a free society, and applications to current public policy issues. Choose from 11 weeklong, interdisciplinary seminars held on college campuses across the US.

Participation is free! Application Deadline: March 31. Apply by March 15 to receive a free book!  Learn more and apply at www.TheIHS.org/SFL

There are two dates in April that are ripe for a student protest.  The first is Tax Day, April 15th.  This is the day that taxpayers are angry with the government for taking their money and a great chance to tell them that they don’t have to take it anymore.  The second is April 20th, commonly known as Cannabis Day.  In the past, students have protested against drug prohibition through events such as a “Pot Brownie” giveaway, where students place regular brownies in a pot and give them away along with information on why drug prohibition laws should be repealed.

These are just a couple ideas for how you can protest for liberty this spring.  Use these protest grants as an opportunity to be creative and have fun.  The application process is very competitive and the number of grants available is limited, so make sure to apply soon.  Click here to get started today.

Visit http://slf.chipin.com/student-liberty-front today to support their efforts.

Today, friend of Students For Liberty and FIRE President Greg Lukianoff kicked off the new HuffPo college section with his article Is College Censorship Destroying Our Society’s “Sophistication Machine”? In it he explains that the biggest challenge facing higher education today is not a lack of state funding but the often oppressive intellectual atmosphere on college campuses created by speech codes and other forms of censorship:

In my opinion, higher education is supposed to work as a sort of “sophistication machine” for our society. That is, it is supposed to help us produce a citizenry with a deep, nuanced, complex, and multifaceted understanding of the issues confronting our nation and world. Many critics of higher education point to ideological imbalance within the faculty, grade inflation and diminishing academic rigor, or the increased corporatization of the university as factors that prevent it from fulfilling this crucial function. These are all problems worth investigating. But I believe the most important factor interfering with the success and credibility of higher education is the continuing maintenance of campus speech codes and other policies and practices designed to discourage and even punish free speech and meaningful dissent.

Read the whole article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-lukianoff/is-college-censorship-des_b_485376.html

While the academy is supposed to be the heart of open intellectual discourse, we students of liberty know this is often not the case.  The intellectual atmosphere on campus is commonly one of group think and ostracization for those who dare to question the orthodoxy.   That is why the mission of the student movement for liberty is so critical.  If the faculty and administrators will not embrace an open dialogue, then it is up to us to bring the ideas of liberty to the forefront.  It is our mission to show our fellow students that liberty is not a fringe idea that can be brushed aside, but an intellectually strong and rigorous philosophy that must be taken seriously.

As the Huffington Post’s expansion of college coverage shows, there rest of the world is beginning to pay attention to these issues.  Now it is up to us to ensure that when others look at our universities they see communities where the ideas of liberty thrive.

Sex workers are a group ignored by the masses, stereotyped as moral deviants, and condemned by society. Yet society does not even have a clear perception of the sex working profession.  This Wednesday, the UC Berkeley community will have the unique opportunity to hear a first-hand account of the struggles surrounding the sex working community.

The event has received positive attention from the campus community, so much so that they have moved the location to a larger room to accommodate more attendees.

• Date: Wednesday, March 3rd
• Time: 8:00pm
• Location: UC-Berkeley, 220 Wheeler Hall
• Facebook Event: http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=318254149269

Today Cato Institute Vice President Gene Healy weighed in on the debate with an op-ed in the Washington Examiner.  In it he dissects a Pew Research Center study which claims the youth are more liberal and pro-government than past generations.  Pew claims that, “Millennials ‘are significantly less critical of government’ than their predecessors… They’re the only one of the four generations polled in which a majority says ‘the government should do more to solve problems.”  However Gene points out that the picture is not quite so black and white:

“True, moral-values conservatives and foreign-policy hawks will have a hard time finding a pony in Pew’s data pile.

Gen Y is more socially liberal, pro-gay marriage, and pro-immigration than earlier generations. They’re also the least likely age group to support an aggressive, interventionist foreign policy, and the only one in which a majority of respondents disapproved of Obama’s doubling down on a bad bet in Afghanistan.

Pew calls the Millennials ‘a pro-government, socially liberal generation.’ For libertarians, often described as “fiscally conservative and socially liberal,” there’s at least some common ground there.”

On the left side of the traditional spectrum libertarian issues are doing very well.  Gene further points out that libertarianism is becoming more popular among conservatives as well, and cited Students For Liberty’s recent CPAC controversy as an example:

“And at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, when an obnoxious lout named Ryan Sorba condemned the CPAC organizers for welcoming a gay organization, it was members of groups like Students for Liberty and the Ron Paul kids who booed him off the stage.”

You can read the full op-ed here.  For background on the CPAC Controversy check out the SFL video here.