Students Arrested at Board of Trustees Meeting

Eyes snapped up from cellphones and laptops in the middle of the Ohio University Board of Trustees’ open meeting on Friday, April 19 when 15–plus students stood from their seats and streamed from the audience in protest of the newly approved tuition increase, ending with the arrest of four student protestors.The board unanimously approved a resolution that increased tuition for full-time, undergraduate, in-state students by 1.6 percent, bringing tuition to $10,380 for the 2013-2014 academic year.Shortly after the resolution was approved, Megan Marzec, a member of the Ohio University Student Union, stood in front of the board along with about 15 other students and read aloud a statement demanding “no raises and no bonuses for six figure earners,” shouting over a banging gavel and warnings of arrest.Board of Trustees Chair Sandra Anderson warned the student protestors three times that they were “disrupting a lawful meeting” and advised them to cease or else be arrested. Under section 2917.12 of Ohio Revised Code, “no person … shall … do any act which obstructs or interferes with the due conduct” of a lawful meeting.Anderson suspended the meeting, and the trustees left the room as Marzec continued reading the statement and protestors brandished a banner saying, “Education is not a commodity” and “Students are not customers.”“When our university’s Board of Trustees is willing to sacrifice its own students at the altar of the free market, it is clear that they see us as nothing more than a revenue stream,” she said. “But we are not. We are humans with futures and dreams, so you can expect us to resist.”Marzec finished reading the statement amid warnings from police officers to leave the room and then sat on the ground in resolution along with three other student protestors.“We demand [that money otherwise paid to administrators and athletic coaches earning more than $100,000] be used to fund need-based financial aid instead, and we refuse to move until such a plan is adopted by the board,” she said in conclusion.The four student protestors who remained sitting – Marzec, Ellie Hamrick, Jessica Lindner and Eden Almasude –were arrested and charged with fourth degree misdemeanors for disturbing a lawful meeting.The board meeting was called back into session after the police escorted the protestors out of the room.The 1.6 percent increase had been proposed to the board by the university’s Budget Planning Council, which said that a tuition increase was necessary to cover needed expenses such as healthcare, financial aid, employee compensation and capital improvements, including the replacement of the heating plant and the second phase of construction on the new Scripps College of Communication.“We learned that even if we were to approve a tuition increase of 1.6 percent, even with that, to meet our additional needs, we would still have an operating deficit, a budget deficit of slightly over $3.4 million,” said Anderson.In addition to approving the resolution for the 1.6 percent tuition increase, the board also approved resolutions to increase room fees by 3.5 percent and board fees by 0.5 percent, to create and appoint members to a Ridges Advisory Committee and to ratify the agreement between the university and the union for non-teaching employees of OU, among others.The court date for the four arrested protestors is Monday, April 22 at 9:30 a.m. in the Athens Municipal Court at 8 E. Washington St.