REGENTS: STUDENTS WITHIN RIGHTS TO REJECT MOVING PLAN

Southeast Missouri State University students living in Towers North were within their rights to reject a proposed mid-academic-year move to other campus residence halls, regents said Friday.

President Kala Stroup and SueAnn Strom, the university's vice president of student affairs, told the Board of Regents Friday that school officials abandoned plans to move students out of the Towers North residence hall because of strong student opposition.

Strom said that Stroup indicated she hadn't seen such student hostility since the anti-Vietnam War protests.

Stroup said university officials had hoped for a more positive reaction from students to the proposed move. "We thought they would be a little more excited than they were."

University officials last month scrapped plans to close Towers North by Jan. 10 for renovation work after a majority of the 317 students in the residence hall voted against it.

"Students were perfectly in their rights (to oppose it)," Regent Donald Dickerson said. It shows that Southeast has "a very independent and stubborn" student body, he said.

Donald Harrison, president of the Board of Regents, said the university, in effect, was asking to renege on its housing contracts with Towers North students for the academic year.

"From their perspective, we were turning their apple cart upside down," said Strom.

She said the students simply didn't want to move in the middle of the school year.

Strom said students presented a united front in a Nov. 10 meeting with university officials. "They basically told us that was their home," she said. "They told us they weren't going to move."

She said some students were particularly hostile about the issue. "Frankly, there was some discourtesy shown to us that evening."

Strom said many students didn't want to move unless they could move en masse by floor to other residence halls on campus.

The university offered some incentives in an effort to get the students to move. But a majority of the students in the high-rise dormitory remained opposed to the move: Of 317 students eligible to vote, 51 percent voted against moving.

Closing the residence hall early for renovations instead of waiting until the end of the semester would have resulted in a minimum savings of about $250,000 for Southeast, officials said.

But Strom told the regents that Sverdrup Corp. of St. Louis, the architectural firm managing the project, needed to know by Nov. 24 if the building would be available for renovation work to start in January.

The university, she said, simply had no more time to try and convince students to make the move.

"It was an imposition on them (the students), but at the same time $250,000 (in savings) is a lot of money, and that will have to be paid back somewhere," said Regent Mark Pelts.

"It was a good thought," Dickerson said of the plan to get an early start on renovation work.

Strom said one good thing that has come out of the episode is that there is a sense of "community" among students living on each of the 12 floors of the Towers residence hall.

At the November meeting, students voluntarily sat grouped by floor, said Strom.

Regent Lynn Dempster said students now know that the university does listen to them.

In regular business, the regents approved an audit report on the university's federal financial assistance programs.

According to the report by the accounting firm of Coopers and Lybrand, Southeast had almost $5.9 million in federal funding for the fiscal year ending June 30.

Ken Dobbins, Southeast's executive vice president, said most of the money -- $4.6 million -- was in the area of student financial aid.

In other action, the board approved:

-- An exchange agreement between Southeast and the University of Orebro in Sweden.

-- The annual audits of the Student Recreation Center and housing system bond funds.

-- Conferring of degrees on the 550 students who will graduate from Southeast in commencement exercises today.

-- Reappointment of Alton Bray to another three-year term on the Show Me Center Board of Managers.