NAU, U of A and ASU may have to issue IOUs , meaning late payments and paychecks and drastically cut class offerings. According to an inside source, several large departments are already slashing their course offerings to the bone and opening up far larger sections than usual. What does this mean for YOU, GAT? More students to teach and maybe not getting paid on time!
Provost Hay says in the AZ Star article (by Becky Pallack) that the UA could survive on cash reserves for a month. Well, most grad students couldn't survive even that long. Around here, "cash reserves" means loose change you find at the bottom of your backpack. Why don't we have the money we expected? The state has yet to pay the money it promised.
Write to your elected officials and tell them to pay up!
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What makes a volatile situation better? GUNS!
Senator Harper of Surprise (as in "Surprise! I have a concealed weapon!) has proposed allowing staff and students to carry concealed weapons on campus. Great idea: pile on the workload, cut pay and benefits, maybe pay people a little late, cut course offerings....arm everyone.
See our previous post on why arming everyone might not be the bestest idea ever.
1 comment:
Obviously, I disagree rather strenuously when it comes to CCW on campus, and I invite you to add any critiquing comment to my (admittedly more logorrheic) post on Sen. Harper's proposed bill.
http://www.desertlamp.com/?p=4394
Since we're both members of a community devoted to inquiry in search of truth, I would also be interested in any scholarly articles/meta-analyses demonstrating that allowing concealed-carry on campus would, in fact, make it more "dangerous." The post I wrote today, as well as a post from June, both reference academic articles looking askance at anti-CCW pivots. There's also this summary of the crime-and-CCW literature from Wikipedia, which only offers one paper alleging an increase in crime:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_carry_in_the_United_States#Research_into_the_effects_of_concealed_carry_laws_on_crime
There's also the case study of Utah, which allows all members to carry concealed weapons on campus, with a notable absence of gun-related crime.
In fact, our own university is a bit of a case study itself - since it has allowed guns in cars in glove compartments on campus, there has been a similarly noticeable absence of gun-related crime.
Hope all is going well, and look forward to a new semester of commentary.
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