Students suing UA over tuition hikes ask for trial to be moved

Four UA students suing the State of Arizona and the Arizona Board of Regents will go to court today to fight the state's request to move the trial to Phoenix.

A judge will decide whether the state can move the trial to Phoenix under a statute that allows any lawsuit against the state to be heard in Maricopa County.

Paul Gattone, a UA history graduate student and the lawyer for the students, said that the state's request is inappropriate given that all the plaintiffs live and attend school in Tucson.

"My concern is that it may be a tactic to make litigation more inconvenient," he said.

Cathy McGonigle, spokeswoman for the regents, said because the lawsuit has been filed on behalf of all students at the three universities, state attorneys decided it would be best to hold the trial in a more central location.

As evidence of the state's good faith, attorneys had asked for an accelerated hearing to move the case along quickly, McGonigle said.

The four students are suing Arizona and the Arizona Board of Regents because they say that last year's record-setting tuition hike of $1,000 violates a clause in the Arizona Constitution that requires university tuition to be "nearly free as possible."

Today's hearing will be held at 3:30 p.m. at Pima County Superior Court, 110 W. Congress St.

UA alum responsible for USS Arizona bell donation, dies at 100

Bill Bowers, who salvaged a bell from the USS Arizona, which now hangs in the clock tower of the Student Union Memorial Center, died Friday in Colorado.

He was 100 years old.

Bowers, who graduated from the UA in 1927, came across the bell accidentally while working as an army captain at a Washington Naval Yard in 1944.

The bell, which was one of two bells salvaged from the USS Arizona battleship that sank in the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, was sitting in a crate ready to be melted for raw material. After calling the governor of Arizona and the president of the UA, the bell was delivered to the university in 1946.

Bowers had an open invitation at the UA to ring the bell, and participated in a memorial last fall to commemorate UA alums killed in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. He rang the bell for the last time in February, during the grand opening of the Student Union Memorial Center. After spending 20 years in the military as an army captain, Bowers went on to run a photo gallery with his brother-in-law in Colorado Springs, Colo. He also worked as a photographer for Hewlett-Packard.

He is survived by two sons, Dale Bowers and Ralph Bowers, and two grandchildren. His family requests that donations in his honor be made to charities or to the University of Arizona Alumni Association.