Last semester brought confusion over who would pay what, and to whom, when Saint Louis University accepted about 140 transfer students from universities in the Gulf Coast region who were forced to close after Hurricane Katrina.

Now it’s clear that SLU charged full tuition to those transfer students, and the storm of opposition continues to rage: Last week, the Student Government Association of Loyola University New Orleans sent a letter to University President Lawrence Biondi, S.J., asking that SLU reimburse Loyola for the money it received from Loyola students.

Loyola’s SGA stated in the letter: “We would like to know why Saint Louis University made the atypical decision to charge Loyola students its tuition. We would like to know why Saint Louis University did not make this arrangement clear to the students up front.” The letter is signed by 27 SGA members, including the Loyola SGA’s president and vice president and one Loyola student who attended SLU last semester.

SLU took in about 170 displaced students for the fall semester; the majority, 129 students, came from Loyola NO. While SLU was not the only university to charge tuition to refugee students, it was the only Jesuit school to do so.

In the wake of the devastation caused by Katrina, the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities posted a recommendation on their Web site, which said that Jesuit schools taking in students from Loyola should allow the students’ fall tuition dollars to remain at Loyola. This was a suggestion that Jesuit schools were not required to follow, but it seems that most schools heeded it.

AJCU’s Director of Communications Melissa Di Leonardo confirmed that SLU was the only Jesuit institution that did not conform to the agreement.

“AJCU recommended that Loyola students be admitted as visiting students . and it was suggested that tuition not be charged, but each institution was free to respond in its own way,” Di Leonardo said.

Loyola’s SGA contends that SLU should have been upfront in its decision to charge full tuition to the Loyola transfer students, so that students could have chosen to attend a different university.

“The decision . came several weeks into the semester. Due to the delayed notification, students did not have time to transfer to schools that would honor their Loyola tuition,” Loyola’s SGA stated in the letter.

Andre Breaux, a Loyola Arts & Sciences senator, said that the SGA decided to write the letter after passing a statement resolution on Jan. 24.

“We felt that the resolution expressed our feelings well but would not accomplish anything,” Breaux said.

“It would only seem fair that the schools would be understanding of each other’s needs in a situation like this. I believe it’s a little hypocritical for Saint Louis University, as a Jesuit institution, to espouse social justice, when this decision seems to be antithetically unjust,” Breaux said. “Every other Jesuit school in the country let Loyola keep the fall tuition money so that we could pay our faculty and staff and begin to repair the damage.”

The issue came to the attention of Loyola’s SGA when the Maroon, the student-run newspaper at Loyola, ran an article in their first spring-semester issue, which exclusively discussed SLU’s decision to charge full tuition to the transfer students.

SLU’s vice president of enrollment and academic services, John Baworowsky, has been candid in interviews regarding SLU’s decision to charge full tuition. In a letter to the editor published in The University News two weeks ago, Baworowsky reiterated that SLU “has been clear and consistent from day one.”

“From the first moment, we posted a document on the Web site that stated we would match aid given by the home institution and expect students to pay the balance . Our initial inquiry to the AJCU was met with a response to do what we thought best.”

In the letter, Baworowsky also pointed out that “nearly every student [SLU] enrolled this past fall was not from the city of New Orleans . I think some are confusing the damage caused to the New Orleans institutions with the financial hardship felt by their students. If you are not from the hurricane-damaged areas, your own financial hardship is somewhat limited.”

Matthew Lorio, a senior at Loyola who attended SLU last semester-and one of the signers on Loyola SGA’s letter to Biondi-said that he would not have attended SLU if he had known that SLU would charge him SLU’s tuition. Loyola keeps tuition consistent for each class; increases are applied to the incoming class only.

For Lorio, whose tuition at Loyola is $10,722 per semester, SLU’s per-semester tuition is $2.403 greater.

“This may not seem to be much of a difference, but . you have to understand that at the time all I had was a bag of clothes and textbooks. I didn’t even have a backpack until the end of September, because I was flat broke,” said Lorio, who is from Wentzville, Mo.

Lorio said that the financial office at SLU told him when he registered that SLU would charge him the exact amount he would have paid at Loyola; he received no official letter telling him that he would be charged SLU tuition.

“Our school and the Loyola students who attended SLU were taken advantage of by SLU,” Lorio said. “Many of the Loyola students would not have gone to SLU if [SLU] had been upfront about charging full tuition and keeping all of it.”

SLU’s decision to charge tuition did not crystallize until late in the semester. Transfer students received bills for full SLU tuition in October, but the University said that the bills were sent out in error; at the time, Baworowsky explained that the plan was to collect tuition dollars directly from Loyola.

But when Loyola went back on that agreement-which Loyola Assistant Provost John Cornwell said was an oversight and not an intentional slight to the university-SLU was forced to collect the tuition directly from students.

At press time, Loyola’s SGA had not received a response from Biondi. Biondi did not return a phone call from The University News on Wednesday.