The Paper Trail

Budget cuts from the student government association and the university could next year reduce the famed Florida A&M marching band to a mere fraction of its current size, the FAMUan reports. The band, which received $130,147 from student government this school year, was told this month that it has been awarded only $30,000 for next year, according to the paper.

That cutback could reduce the band from its now customary size of 400 members to its namesake Marching 100. The student government "didn't want to solely fund the band. We want to explore the opportunity of the university administration providing supplemental funding," one student representative told the FAMUan. The band's leaders are looking to meet with university administrators soon to try to get more money. It's either that or high school band-type fundraisers. "Should we be washing cars and doing things like that for a class?" says Julian White, director of bands and chair of the music department. "We don't need the publicity of being on the street selling candy to save the band." –Kenneth Terrell

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Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama continued to woo campus support over the weekend. At Boston University Friday, nearly 6,000 people packed an arena to hear him speak, according to theHeights, the paper of rival school Boston College. Apparently, students at both schools are able to put their competition aside in support of the senator, who is just as eager to get them involved in government. "When the American people pay attention, things happen. That's the incredible thing about our democratic process. It doesn't work when people aren't involved, when people give up," the Heights quotes Obama as saying. "But when we decide to make it work, then things start happening."

Also over the weekend, at the University of Iowa, while a U2 song played over the loudspeakers, Obama entered and spoke about the threat of global warming for an Earth Day crowd. "When our energy policy is the absence of an energy policy–that diminishes us as a nation," he said, according to the Daily Iowan. "That diminishes the patriotism of all Americans."–Kenneth Terrell

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• The Howard University District Chronicles weighs in on the Imus/Rutgers flap, debating whether or not it will change the language used in rap music.
• The George Washington University Hatchet has an interesting article about a campus program that helps transsexuals learn to change their voices.–Kenneth Terrell

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Cardinal Points, the newspaper of Plattsburgh State University College, has an interesting article examining how professors on their campus think they would have responded in the face of the violence that occurred in classrooms at Virginia Tech. "The entire situation was too horrible for [Professor Jeff Hornibrook] to think about without feeling ill. Yet it was the stories of the professors who died at the hands of a suicidal gunman, the people who were standing at the front of the classrooms like human bull's-eyes when the shooter stormed through the doors, whose faces have haunted Hornibrook the most," the paper reports."I can't tell you how I would react if a shooter was outside my classroom door," Hornibrook concludes. "I hope I never find out." --K.T.

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