Nayrouz News Agency : The University of Jordan (UJ) Students Union on Saturday evening launched an Arabic hashtag on Facebook and Twitter that translates into "#not_paying_for_the_summer_semester”, and accused UJ of "adopting financial policies that target students’ pockets”. 

"Students are the pillar of the university and their rights should not be violated, so in belief in the voice of every student who said ‘no’, rejecting the financial and investment mentality, we say ‘no’ to targetting students’ pockets, violating their rights and undermining them,” the union posted on its official Facebook page.

In the post, the union urged students to share the hashtag as of 8pm on social media. It became a trending hashtag on Twitter in Jordan. 

Later, the UJ Students Union announced that it will hold a press conference on Zoom and its social media pages to launch an "escalation campaign” against the university’s monetary policies, which the union said "the university implements under the pretext of the conditions the country is facing due to the coronavirus crisis”. 

The union also accused UJ of having already begun measures to increase tuition for certain majors to fill the debt gap from students’ and their families’ resources. 

Students from the Jordan University of Science and Technology have also posted the hashtag on their profiles and on university-related groups, with captions such as "on the steps of the University of Jordan”, followed by the hashtag. 

Students have expressed that they deserve their spring semester money back, claiming that remote education has forced them to forgo utilising any of the campus facilities and tools, which is "the reason they believe they should not pay for the summer semester”.

Meanwhile, on Saturday, the university posted that the period for adding and dropping courses will start on June 21 and end on June 27, "and will not be extended under any circumstance”. 

On Sunday, UJ posted a statement, in which it said that it had taken more than 46 measures to control its spending, "none of which are related to tuition fees”, noting that any news on a committee having been formed to increase tuition is "untrue”. 

However, the university said that a committee was formed on June 1 to "study the prices” of current programmes to make them competitive with what other universities have to offer, "which could include reducing the prices of these programmes, but only through a thorough scientific study”. 

"The number of students who registered and added their subjects for summer corresponds with the registration and payment for the summer semester of last year,” the statement said, urging media outlets to take news about the university from official sources only