College students ready for Round 2 of budget-cutting fight

College kids who turned out by the thousands in January to whine, protest and generally annoy the heck out of the state's governor are going to do it all again. But with less whining this time.

"Although our first rally was great, we didn't have a specific, focused message at the event," said David Waterhouse, the student president at the College of Southern Nevada.

Waterhouse and leaders from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and Nevada State College are planning a second budget cut protest rally for March 26 on UNLV's campus. Between 2,000 and 5,000 students showed up there in January sporting signs such as "Please wear condoms when you screw our education" and "Impeach Gibbons."

The rally featured a couple of dozen speakers, including bureaucrats and students, and a rock-concertlike atmosphere.

Mostly, its point was to get a notoriously apathetic student body to pay attention.

It came a week after Gov. Jim Gibbons had proposed cutting the state's higher education budget by more than a third, a cut that leaders have said would devastate the system.

And though students were encouraged to contact legislators at that rally, the effort was limited to form letters.

Waterhouse said this go-around will be more focused on specific legislators.

"Our job is to keep the pressure on," he said.

Student leaders, who have testified before legislative bodies since that first rally, have identified which legislators can be persuaded to avoid the cuts and which cannot, he said.

Good for them, said Jim Rogers, the higher education system's chancellor.

"I want to make sure we keep up the momentum," he said. "We've got a good chance of having maybe no budget cuts, at worst very limited cuts."

Rogers, an outspoken Gibbons critic, has encouraged all kinds of lobbying on behalf of higher education. He has asked system employees, students and the public to put pressure on legislators.

Rogers said he even encouraged this second rally.

"They were probably going to do it anyway," he said.

Higher education system Regent Ron Knecht, a fiscal conservative and frequent critic of Rogers, is on the same side with him this time.

Knecht said he, too, thinks the governor's proposed cuts go too far and that it's a good thing that the students want to stop them.

It is especially smart for the students to concentrate on key legislators, he said.

"If they're focusing on things that will have an effect, instead of just making themselves feel better, that's good," Knecht said.

Such a focus is especially more productive than personal attacks on the governor, he said.

Student leaders aren't promising there won't be any such attacks this time, only that they're not encouraging them.

"At this point, it's a waste of time to focus on the governor," Waterhouse said.

Contact reporter Richard Lake at rlake @reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0307.