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Abortion abolitionists
By Alex R. Cocilova The Collegian
A group with no affiliation with the university, Justice for All, occupied the Free Speech Area Tuesday and plans to hold a discussion Wednesday. The Wichita, Kansas-based organization showcased displays featuring graphic images of aborted fetuses. Representatives said the group is aimed at training people across the country to believe that the idea of abortion is “unthinkable.” The group also passed out leaflets that compared abortion to genocide and animal testing. The group’s representatives said they plan on having an open-mic session today in the free speech area hoping to foster productive dialogue on the issues of abortion. The group primarily visits college campuses around the nation in order to promote their beliefs that abortion is an injustice. The representatives for Justice for All said they were invited to the campus by Fresno State Students for Life, a campus-based club.
enough for me to pay $26 per unit here at City,” said Fresno State biology major Vanessa Cantu who takes elective courses at Fresno City College. “I’m paying all my fees out-ofpocket.” “I wish I could just go to school for free,” Cantu said. “I don’t even care about extra financial aid. I can afford my materials, but tuition is outrageous even with AB 540.” At Fresno State, nonresident and foreign students are required to pay $372 per unit in addition to the mandatory registration and course fees if not under AB 540. So, an undergraduate student taking 12 units must pay $4,465.50 on top of the regular $2,336.50 tuition. Undocumented AB 540 students are ineligible for state and federal financial aid and scholarships sometimes require citizenship. According to Whitman’s official website, “as governor, Meg will support policies that will not allow undocumented immig rants admission to state-funded institutions of higher education, such as UC, CSU and community colleges.” Whitman’s GOP rival has similar postings on his website. “Ending in-state tuition for ille g al immig rants at California’s public colleges and universities,” is bulleted in Poizner’s immigration plan at stevepoizner.com. It further
F re s n o n at ive T i m Z . Hernandez will be the keynote speaker at this year’s Young Writers Conference (YWC) on April 21. About 200 Central Valley high school students are expected to gather Wednesday morning to see Hernandez, an award-winning author, read from his new novel Breathing in Dust. He is currently working in tandem with UCLA’s Center for Book and Poets and Writers Inc. This will be the 30th annual Young W r i t e r s Conference held on the campus. The participants are Tim Z. Hernandez encouraged to submit their works for Spectrum, a journal-length anthology of student work that can be used in classrooms on campuses across the valley. The conference has solicited creative writing submissions from high schools all over the Central Valley for submissions. A board consisting of Master’s of Fine Arts (MFA) students evaluated the submissions and selected winners for at least 14 separate awards, which will be presented during the conference. Her nandez’s collection of poetry, Skin Tax, won an American Book Award in 2006 and he will also be reading from this if time allows. “This year’s journal is excellent,” conference coordinator Tanya Nichols said. Nichols said the conference has many useful applications, for educators and students alike. The students who attend the conference will have the opportunity to participate in creative writing workshops where their work will receive feedback from Fresno State MFA students. “I have had students in my college courses tell me that attending the conference and having a story published in our journal helped them gain acceptance to college,” Nichols said. She said the two Pulitzer Prize winners have come from Fresno, and that supporting the creative writing arts in high school is an important task. “ T h e Yo u n g W r i t e r s Conference showcases the valley’s terrific literary potential and Fresno State’s commitment to the arts,” said Timothy
See AB 540, Page 6
See WRITER, Page 6
Matt Weir / The Collegian
Undocumented students less than 1 percent By Christian Beltran The Collegian Less than 1 percent of students who attend California public colleges and universities benefit from Assembly Bill 540, which allows them to pay the same as citizens regardless of immigration status. The data comes in part from a University of Califor nia
(UC) annual report after both Re publican guber natorial candidates, Steve Poizner and Meg Whitman, threatened to repeal the bill, stating undocumented immigrants are a burden on taxpayers and further harms California’s struggling economy. Edgar Jimenez, an undocumented Fresno State senior under the Assembly Bill (AB) 540 waiver pursuing a double major in civil engineering and mathematics, said the bill has been an enormous opportunity for him. “My parents are farmworkers,” Jimenez said. “I was brought to this country at age 15. If the law is changed, many students like me would not be able to attend college.” Lawmakers approved AB
igrant students are M exempt from out-ofstate costs in California,
Illustratoin by Michael Uribes / The Collegian
Fresno native headlines writing conference
because of Assembly Bill 540, passed in 2001. The students eligible for the exemption make up 1 percent of the population across California’s threetiered college system. The numbers below are for the California State University system.
total students enrolled 2008–2009
540 in 2001 with GOP support, which requires applicants, including citizens, to have attended a Califor nia high school for at least three years and graduated. It is estimated that a majority of the 65,000 undocumented high school graduates resides here. The report highlights that documented students account for more than two-thirds of AB 540 recipients every year at the University of California’s (UC) 10-campus system since the program’s introduction; graduate students comprise more than 96 percent of the total each year. Also, 1,941 students were AB 540 recipients of all 226,000 enrolled for the 2007-2008 school year. Also, 581 could be undocumented, and only 267 are Latino. I n t h e C a l i fo r n i a S t at e University’s (CSU) 23-campus system there were 3,633 students under the AB 540 exemption of all 433,000 students enrolled for the 2008-2009 cycle. It is unknown how many are undocumented since the CSU and community college do not divulge immigration status. In the case of community colleges, there were 2.8 million students enrolled in 2008-2009, 857,758 were Latino. Across its 110 campuses, 32,134 are covered under AB 540. “It is already expensive
students under AB 540 exemption