This petition is made for the benefit of all students who attend Southern Methodist University. Please let us come together as a united student body and demand a change to help us on our academic journeys.

As SMU students who attended the university last semester, we can attest that between the challenges of online learning, reduced accessibility to office hours, limited social events, lesser options at dinning halls. and much, much more, attending Southern Methodist University was not the experience that we paid for.

As new students coming in, we are concerned for the experiences we might be loosing out on and are not told yet. Freshman who came in 2020 were told that they would have Stampede in person, but then were left to watch videos in their dorms when that morning they woke up excited to experience the Stampede generations of students ahead of them had. Students were not notified of this change until an hour before this event.

Recently, SMU has required masks to be on campus. This was announced after majority of students all ready have moving, housing, and financial plans for Fall 2021 with the idea that the semester would be normal like the Spring 2020 semester. This leads to a false advertising of the expectation for what students are paying for, and now many are stuck because of outside commitments such as to Dallas housing, to continue to go to school in conditions they do not want and were not notified of until too late.

As students, we are cornered in retaining high grades and somewhat acceptable mental health under uncertain conditions. Many have lost scholarships in the previous semester because of similar circumstances, and it is not fair that our tuition continues to rise, while we are notified so late of vital changes to what we are expecting for what we are paying for. On the other hand, SMU has not announced they have faced any financial hardships because of these changes.

We come together as a student body, regardless of our ages, fields of studies, genders, political affiliations, and more, to demand a financial break in the form of reduced tuition for fall 2021 to make up for the lost experiences we have and will face.