studentactivism.net

Morehouse College in Atlanta is the only all-male historically black college in the United States. This spring, for the first time in its 141-year history, its valedictorian is a white man.

MSNBC has the story, and the blog Stereohyped has some thoughts. (Both links via Racialicious.)

The national organizations of the Young Democrats of America and College Democrats of America will each send two superdelegates to the Democratic National Convention this summer.

Until now, all four of those superdelegates have remained uncommitted, but today YDA’s Crystal Strait announced for Obama.

A couple of weeks ago we reported that a “task force” appointed by a vice president of Wichita State University would be reviewing the operational and editorial practices of the WSU student newspaper, the Sunflower. It was announced that the paper’s student government funding for the upcoming fiscal year would not be disbursed until that review was complete.

That task force has now been appointed, and several other developments have taken place.

The task force will be made up of two students, two administrators, two faculty members, and the university’s general counsel.

Outgoing editor Todd Vogts attended the first task force meeting last week and said afterward that the faculty members seemed to be taking a stand in support of the newspaper’s first amendment rights.

In a potentially significant development, the university’s president has pledged that Sunflower funding will be disbursed as originally scheduled, and will not be contingent on the task force’s findings as originally announced. 

The task force will meet again in the fall.

About two dozen students at Ohio’s Ashland University have staged an overnight sit-in to protest a decision to bar students from take Ancient Greek to fulfill their foreign language requirement.

Ashland does not offer Ancient Greek, but students have the option of taking courses in the language at nearby Ashland Theological Seminary. In mid-April, the college’s faculty senate voted 19-15 that such students will have to take a modern language as well. The question is still under review by Ashland administrators.

Senior Bobby DeSeyn, a protest leader, said in a statement that the faculty senate vote reflected a “blatant de-evolution of academics” and a “disregard for student opinion.”

The sit-in was held at Ashland’s foreign language faculty offices. 

A detailed overview of student anti-nuclear organizing in the United States today, from WireTap magazine.

Administrators at the University of New Hampshire at Manchester have suspended the school’s Student Government Association without notice, locking student government officers out of their offices and cancelling elections planned for this week.

The administration claims that the SGA was allowing students to run for office in violation of eligibility requirements, and that its chartering documents may not have been properly filed sixteen years ago. UNH-M dean Kristin Woolever was also quoted as saying that she “wasn’t comfortable” with proposed revisions to the SGA constitution.

SGA leaders say that the student government has recently moved from an emphasis on “event planning” to advocacy for students. They also contend that the administration is seeking to assert control over SGA’s activity fee, which was raised by $65 per student per semester — from $10 to $75 — earlier this year.

We’ll be following this story as it develops.

An anti-abortion group at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point put up a display of four thousand white crosses on a campus lawn last week, symbolizing the four thousand fetuses that they say are aborted each day. Stevens Point student Roderick King objected to the installation, saying that because abortion is a constitutional right, “you don’t have the right to challenge it. … Do not put this in front of all of us. This is not your right.” He then pulled several hundred of the crosses out of the ground before being convinced to leave peacefully.

This was by all accounts a minor event. Leaders in “Pointers for Life,” the group that put up the crosses, told the Wausau Daily Herald that their displays are often targeted by vandals. But the incident has received wide coverage among conservative blogs and media outlets, in part because King is one of nineteen members of the UWSP student senate. 

The prominent conservative legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy described King as a student government official in their story on the incident. Michelle Malkin identified him as a student government senator. Many other sites called him a student government leader or simply a student leader. The group that put up the crosses has called on King to resign or be removed from his student government office.

King has written a letter to the Stevens Point Journal rejecting the calls for his resignation, and saying that he was “not acting in the name of UWSP Student Government Association, but as an individual who believes one person’s right to freedom of speech stops when it infringes on another person’s right to a secular education.”

Ten members of Tulane University’s Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity were arrested this week, and the fraternity was suspended, after a brutal hazing incident that sent two pledges to the hospital. In a statement, the university declared that it has “zero tolerance for any type of … incident which can potentially endanger the well-being of any student.”

But the Tulane student government urged the university to investigate Pi Kappa Alpha, known as PIKE, for drugging female attendees at its parties more than two years ago, and its complaint was ignored.

In March 2006 the undergraduate student government at Tulane sent a five-paragraph letter to the university administration raising concerns about Pi Kappa Alpha, stating that there was “legitimate reason to believe” that the frat had “served drugged beverages to unsuspecting guests” at a party the previous month.

According to the letter, such allegations had been made “every year” in “recent memory” by female guests at Pi Kappa Alpha parties, with attendees “suspect[ing] that they may have been date raped” while drugged.

The letter also charged that “numerous people were taken to the hospital or injured” as a result of incidents at Pi Kappa Alpha parties, and that the university had responded with “minor punishments and slaps on the wrist.” The fraternity was engaged in “egregious and continuous abuse of the students and the rules,” the letter said, and “the situation gets worse every year.”

In a statement this week, the Tulane administration said that there had “apparently” been “no response from Tulane to this letter.”

On April 26 of this year two Pi Kappa Alpha pledges were hospitalized with second- and third-degree burns after a five-hour hazing ordeal in which fraternity members poured boiling water, crab-boil, and cayenne pepper sauce on pledges’ bodies. Police learned of the incident this past weekend, and filed charges against ten fraternity members on Tuesday.

Tulane suspended the fraternity the same day.

As we noted last week, the US Supreme Court recently upheld Indiana’s strict voter ID law, raising concerns about the disfranchisement of out-of-state college students. Reports from yesterday’s primary voting suggest that those concerns were at least partially warranted.

College students often vote in their college communities but maintain driver’s licenses from their states of origin. Under Indiana law, out-of-state licenses are not valid ID for voting.

Public university students with out-of-state licenses were able to vote without incident yesterday, as their college ID cards are regarded as “state-issued” identification for the purposes of the law. Student PIRG poll-watchers did, however, report a number of incidents in which private-college students were turned away. One PIRG representative further noted that news of the stringent ID requirements likely kept some students away from the polls altogether.

Twenty international students at the University of Sussex in England have been banned from taking final exams because they have fallen behind in their tuition payments.

More than 150 Sussex students staged a protest against the decision late last week. The president of the university’s student union described the proposed payment schedules and the timing of the university’s action as unreasonable.

The protest follows a successful Facebook campaign on behalf of one of the students, Luqman Onikosi of Nigeria. When Onikosi’s sponsor in England died, he was unable to raise the money to pay the fees himself.

The university recently agreed to allow Onikosi to take his exams and put off payment until September.

Update: A follow-up protest is planned for this Friday, May 9.