Sunday marked an important landmark in the long reign of George W. Bush - he officially has one year left.
And while many are awaiting his final State of the Union address next week, we've decided to reflect on what his presidential leadership has meant for the state of our campus.
In 2003, both houses of Congress voted to lift the ban on travel to Cuba that would have allowed Americans to travel to the country for the first time in 40 years.
But, despite overwhelming popular support, President Bush threatened to veto the measure, arguing that the travel ban was necessary to deny revenue to the brutal regime of Fidel Castro.
So when the U.S. Department of State passed its own restrictions on travel to six "terrorist states," including Cuba, it paved the way for further restrictions on travel for students everywhere.
In 2006, the Florida Legislature passed the now hotly-contested Travel to Terrorist States Act, using the federal designation as a springboard to prohibit students, professors and researchers from using federal, state or private funds to travel to "terrorist" countries for academic purposes.
As we await a ruling on the Florida Legislature's overstep, we can't help but think that the president's rigid stance on Cuba initiated the blurring of the line between politics and academic freedom.
Another consequence of Bush leadership affected the wallets of college women.
When Bush was inaugurated for the second time, the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 went into effect that same month. The federal law changed how drug companies calculated Medicaid-related rebates paid to states in an effort to save taxpayer money and improve the national budget.
However, the act also had an unintended side effect. It made it more expensive for these companies to offer campus clinics substantial discounts on birth control - discounts that millions of budget-conscious students needed. Predictably, brand-name prescription prices for the pill at college health centers rose from about the $3 to $10 range per month to the $30 to $50 range.
It's not hard to believe that with a pro-life president who promotes abstinence-only education in office, the negative consequences of a federal law left scores of female students scrambling for other options.
But contraceptive prices weren't the only thing slowly rising on campus. The very cost of being on campus became higher.
In 2004, the eligibility for federal Pell Grants was changed to combat an increasing federal deficit and cut roughly 90,000 low-income students from receiving help for higher education costs. According to the College Board, while the cost of higher education continued to rise faster than inflation, total expenditures on Pell Grants decreased from $13.6 billion in 2004-2005 to $12.7 billion in 2005-2006.
Even with federal funding and student loans, American college students continue to be confronted with costs they simply cannot afford. Each year, more than 400,000 low- and moderate-income high school graduates who are prepared to attend a four-year university do not because of financial obstacles.
As if this wasn't bad enough, Bush proposed $2.5 trillion budget cuts in 2006 to reduce non-defense, non-security spending and divert necessary funds to the costly war on terrorism. Almost a third of these cuts were aimed at educational programs.
Watching the policies of this president continue to negatively affect college students across the country has us counting the days until the next inauguration. With one more year to go, we hope the next president, whomever he or she may be, will keep the nation's college students in mind.
