BEIRUT: The American University of Beirut student body will be meeting with the officials from the institution sometime early this week to discuss demands to drop a proposed tuition hike, a representative for the students’ movement said Sunday.
“We will have a meeting with the administration at the beginning of this week,” Jinane Abi Ramia, AUB’s Student Faculty Committee’s vice president, told The Daily Star.
She also said the students would not be holding a strike Monday.
Abi Ramia said she received a message from the administration Sunday in which university President Peter Dorman expressed his readiness to meet with the committee after hundreds of students turned out last week to protest a planned tuition hike scheduled to take effect next year.
The students had given the university until last Saturday to respond to their demands, but the deadline was postponed after a separate issue with the faculty had to be dealt with first, Abi Ramia said.
The committee set to meet with the students is comprised of Dorman, Provost Ahmad Dallal and Dean of Student Affairs Talal Nizameddin.
AUB’s administration has defended the tuition hike as a necessity, saying that the university did “not possess huge endowments” and “must rely on student tuition” to be able to keep its staff, provide financial aid and manage its operations.
Although she said it was too early to predict the outcome of the meeting, Abi Ramia was adamant about one thing: “We will not compromise on our demands.”
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