Thursday, June 28, 2012

UBCLEAR Press Conference Statement Adam Drury, doctoral candidate in English at UB, organizer for New York Students Rising (NYSR) Student loan debt in the United States stands at over 1 trillion dollars today. Tuition at the University at Buffalo is set to increase 30% over the next five years. Students here are therefore asking, along with their peers nationwide, a question whose answer should be simple: Is the value of a college degree worth its soaring cost? If we answer yes to this question, we expect to receive the greatest possible value for the degrees we pay for, and this means we must both know what our tuition money supports and have a say in the funding decisions that shape the opportunities available to us. Because they have failed to be fully transparent to the people of New York, and because they have not held themselves accountable to students and to the faculty who educate them, the actions of SUNY, of the University at Buffalo and Dean Bruce Pittman, and of the Shale Resources in Society Institute directed by John Martin, have fundamentally and irrevocably compromised the value of a degree from SUNY Buffalo. They have also devalued the degree by trampling over the values of the degree, values of academic integrity, scholarly ethics, open and honest inquiry, the principles of which are taught to us as soon as we enter the university as the foundation for our studies in all fields. Students do not want to attend a University whose leaders demonstrate such callous disrespect for the values they are tasked to uphold. We are outraged by the frivolousness with which those values are repeatedly discarded because they challenge the prerogatives of corporate profiteering. We are disgusted by the servility of our university leaders to that profiteering. WE DEMAND INTEGRITY! The Shale Resources in Society Institute stands as an emblem of this disrespect, frivolousness, and servility. The Institute is anathema to the integrity of our University at Buffalo. Students seek higher education because we recognize the importance of developing the knowledge and skills needed to confront the political, economic, cultural, and environmental crises prepared for us by our governments and corporations.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

How can we trust the University at Buffalo to provide us with the resources and guidance to do so when it itself refuses to lead the way ethically and responsibly, when it itself installs an institute that not only devalues the degree by refusing to be accountable to the community and by making a mockery of its core principles, but that does so for the purpose of selling academic legitimacy to a hydrofracking gas industry responsible for wreaking permanent and catastrophic damage to the natural and public resources of the State of New York? The SRSI betrays the Mission Statement of the University at Buffalo along with its obligations to the community and the public good. It has squandered our trust and the publics trust and has shamelessly jeopardized the future of our environment. The SRSI is an embarrassment to the students of the University at Buffalo.