UL students concerned about the future of the German-language degree program are circulating a petition on campus and have established an on-line petition urging the administration not to discontinue the program.
On Tuesday, Dr. Caroline Huey, the coordinator of the program and the lone German instructor at UL, was summoned to the office of Provost Steve Landry to meet with Landry and Interim Vice President of Academic Affairs Carolyn Bruder. No decision was made at that meeting and the group will likely meet again next spring to review the program. But it’s little secret on campus that more drastic budget cuts to higher education will come down from the state next year and that programs with low numbers of majors are in the greatest jeopardy of being discontinued. Currently four students are majoring in German at UL and about half a dozen are minoring in the language; other students take German courses to satisfy foreign-language requirements for their majors. Last year the state Board of Regents eliminated the philosophy degree program at UL due to a low completion rate.
“A lot of the students are working very hard to prevent this because there’s a lot of students who enjoy the German program and it’s very important to many people,” says UL senior Claire Dronet, who has a double major in English and German and who is one of the students pushing the petition drive. “It gives me an opportunity to study about German culture and the German language. It’s a part of our cultural diversity in Louisiana as well. Seven percent of Louisiana is of German heritage.”
Sign the on-line petition here.
MAY 21 Gambit columnist Clancy DuBos writes about the Mother's Day shooting, and how the stages of shock and blame and healing mirror those traveled by the same city following Hurricane Katrina. The city will recover, just as it did following the storm, by reaching out to help the people injured most seriously by the event, DuBos writes. It's how we heal, he says.
MAY 21 Here's a post on the Advocate (but buried on a subpage, not on the front) that reports something Louisiana Voice reported some time ago: a top DOE official lives in Los Angeles and "commutes" to Baton Rouge. The positioning of the story caused a stir on Facebook Monday, with several posters asking if the Advocate was covering someone's hiney. Sentell's stories on DOE are notoriously soft, and this one is no different: don't expect any hard questions in here.
MAY 21 Here's another post from blogger Tom Aswell about the "course choice" program. He's already reported on kids being signed up without their consent or knowledge, and has more here: For example, he tells of a six-year-old who was signed up for high school Latin. He also digs a little deeper into the sister companies of the main one operating in Louisiana; all of them seem to have complaints against them. Stinky.
MAY 21 Given the 80 percent cut in higher ed funding since he's been in office, it's clear Gov. Jindal would rather give tax cuts to out of state companies than have a functioning system, blogger Dayne Sherman argues in this post. The cuts have been such a disaster, Sherman says, that it will take 30 years to fix what's been broken. He says he believes the aim is to shut down most of the schools before Jindal leaves in 2016.
MAY 21 Blogger CB Forgotston says there are too many elections in Louisiana, and they're costing us too much money. The proof is in the pudding: turnout for most of these nonsensical pollings gets worse and worse, CB opines, even as millions of dollars that could be spent on health care or higher ed go down the tubes. The legislature must take action to stem the tide of pointless elections, he says.
MAY 21 Here's an interesting investigative piece by WVUE on the retirement benefits of some Jefferson Parish public employees. According to the story, the taxpayers are paying 100 percent of the retirement contributions of employees who started work prior to a certain date in April 1986 -- and have done for more than 30 years. It costs the parish millions annually, and might not be legal, the story reports.
MAY 21 This post on Bayou Buzz provides insight from Louisiana's intrepid pollster, Bernie Pinsonat, on the winners and losers from this year's legislative session. But to hear Bernie tell it, there's almost nuttin but losers: Jindal, the Republican party, the Fiscal Hawks all get big goose eggs in his win column.
MAY 20 This post on The Lens takes a look at a huge (either $500K or $250K) bill that one NOLA charter now has for school lunches. The RSD says the charter group didn't fill out the proper paperwork for federal reimbursement, but the story details how the RSD didn't ensure the people running the charter had the proper training, despite requests from hapless charter employees trying to fill out forms. Either way, somebody's asleep at the wheel.
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I understand the majors want to keep a program locally but there will need tbe some consolidation due to the state budget problems; and not just in German, but ALL programs operating at inefficient utilization levels.