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Two hundred students at Mississippi’s Delta State University walked out of classes yesterday morning to rally against planned budget cuts at the state’s small public colleges. Among those protesting were DSU’s Statesman and “Fighting Okra“ mascots, both in full costume.
Mississippi’s public higher education trustees have announced plans to divert funding from several smaller institutions to the flagship University of Mississippi. Ole Miss will receive nearly $2 million in additional funding next year, while DSU stands to lose $175,000. “They are taking money away from a school that produces teachers and nurses,” undergraduate Samantha Styers said, “and giving it a school that produces lawyers and engineers.”
The incoming chair of the state’s College Board said the entire system is “grossly underfunded, and that’s making us have to make very painful choices.”
Nathan Duff, editor of DSU’s Daily Statesman and an organizer of the walkout, said that the protests were not over: “we’re going to keep the pressure on.”
The College Board is slated to consider tuition increases at its next meeting in May.
Eight students were arrested last month when an anti-war protest at New York’s Binghamton University ended in an off-campus confrontation with police.
The protest, which began on the BU campus, culminated in a march on an army recruiting center in a nearby strip mall. Police claim that the march was the cause of two accidents on a nearby roadway, and that one protester jumped in front of a moving patrol car.
When the first arrest was made, other marchers began yelling. Officers contend that there was shoving as well. Police used pepper spray, and ultimately arrested nine protesters, including eight students.
Protesters and members of Binghamton’s undergraduate and graduate student governments met with university administrators last week and received pledges that none of the students will face campus judiciary action as a result of the incident. Criminal charges, including obstructing governmental administration in the second degree, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct, are still pending.
University of Illinois junior Frank Calabrese, 20, lost his campaign for student body president earlier this month. So now he’s running for the Illinois House of Representatives.
Illinois House District 103 includes the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana, and nearly half its constituents are UI students. The district has been represented by Democrat Naomi Jakobsson since 2002, and Calabrese is running as the nominee of the Republican party.
The UI student body president is selected by the campus student senate. Calabrese, a three-term student senator, placed last in a three-way race for the presidency in an April 3 election.
The Wichita State University Sunflower has been told that its 2008-09 student government funding will not be disbursed until a review of the newspaper’s activities has been completed.
The funds in question are from student activity fees, which amount to approximately half the paper’s total budget. The review, however, seems to have been initiated at least in part by university administrators rather than students.
Budgets for student organizations at WSU are set by a Student Fees Committee composed of five students and two administrators. The student members are appointed by student government, but the committee is chaired by Ron Kopita, the university’s vice president for campus life and university relations. Sunflower editor-in-chief Todd Vogts says Kopita questioned Sunflower staffers about the newspaper’s operations and editorial content in mid-March, two weeks before the Student Fee Committee recommended a formal investigation of the paper.
The task force that will be reviewing the newspaper’s operations will be appointed by Kopita, not the student government, according to a memorandum that the Sunflower received from Dean of Students Cheryl Adams.
The Sunflower’s current fiscal year ends in October. Kopita has not guaranteed that the task force’s work will be completed by then.
Update: The Sunflower task force is the subject of an article in the Wichita Eagle.
In a 6-3 vote yesterday, the United States Supreme Court upheld an Indiana law that requires voters to show photo identification at the polls. Six other states — Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Louisiana, Michigan, and South Dakota — currently have such laws on the books.
Because students frequently maintain driver’s licenses from their city or state of origin, such laws can make it difficult for students to prove residency when voting in their campus community.
In a January press release, the executive director of the Student Association for Voter Empowerment, an advocacy group, said, “I know from hundreds of conversations, testimony at our hearing, and evidence on the ground that voter ID laws have deterred out-of-state residents from voting where they attend school nine months of the year.”
Update: An article on the ruling’s effect on students and youth.
There’s talk at the University of South Florida about merging or downgrading the school’s Women’s Studies Department, Africana Studies Department, and the Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean. This blog is trying to stop it.
According to the blog, the USF Women’s Studies Department has been around for 35 years, and is “the only free-standing department of Women’s Studies in the State of Florida.”
The 31 protesters arrested in the Penn State admin building sit-in earlier this month will be charged with “defiant criminal trespass,” police announced Friday. The charge is a third-degree misdemeanor, and carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison and a $2,500 fine.
Penn State United Students Against Sweatshops plans a rally for the arrested students at 2 pm this Thursday, May 1.
An online petition in support of the students and contact information for the president of PSU can be found here.
The Columbia University takeover of 1968 began forty years ago this week. The anniversary has been commemorated in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as on Democracy Now.
The University of Georgia has been buffeted by sexual harassment scandals in the last year. One professor has resigned, another was placed on administrative leave, and the women’s golf coach left under a cloud.
In response, the university has initiated a massive restructuring of its sexual harassment investigation procedures, a restructuring that has attracted criticism and is still ongoing.
Given this context, the administration’s decision to invite Clarence Thomas to be the undergraduate commencement speaker this spring has proven predictably controversial.
Two years ago an undergrad at the University of Portland, a private Catholic college, asked a male friend to walk her back to her dorm after a party. He claims they had consensual sex when they got there. She says he raped her.
Some time later, she reported the incident to the campus police, but the university brought no charges against the alleged assailant. When she criticized them and asked why no action had been taken, she received a letter from the university’s judicial coordinator that read as follows:
Based upon my findings in my investigation, I am unable to determine if a sexual assault occurred. I have reason to believe that intercourse occurred, but both parties admit to drinking and therefore, consent—or lack of consent—is difficult to determine. Given these facts, there are possible violations for which you could be charged.
Students at the university are now pressing for new campus judiciary policies to ensure that students who come forward with charges of sexual assault are not themselves targeted by campus judiciary authorities. “The school owes it to the students to do everything they can to make sure rapes are reported,” says junior Devon Goss.
The university reported no instances of sexual assault for the year in which the incident took place, although the federal Violence Against Women Act requires that campuses disclose all such allegations, no matter what their disposition.
(Via Feministing.)
The anti-sweatshop sit-in at UNC is heading into its second weekend, with no end in sight.
Last weekend the UNC administration closed the administration building down over the weekend — they allowed students who were sitting in to stay, and they allowed students to leave at any time, but they refused entry to new students from Friday afternoon until Monday morning.
This week protest organizers have a new strategy to bulk up the weekend sit-in contingent — they’re throwing a dance party in the admin building rotunda on Friday night. Here’s the latest entry from their blog:
HEY ALL.
So tomorrow (Friday) we are throwing a slammin’ dance party at our new pad… South Building. At 6pm. But you must get there early! Before 5pm.
Our house is PERFECT for it… it’s got a rotunda-esque dance floor and great acoustics.
YOU WON’T WANT TO MISS THIS.
So here’s the deal… there is going to be really tight security at our place. We are hiring police to patrol the area. But don’t feel threatened. This is only a precautionary measure to ensure everyone’s safety. Also, we are expecting HUGE attendance, so security will help keep track of numbers.
THIS IS IMPORTANT…. EVERYONE WHO WANTS TO ATTEND THIS AWESOME PARTY HAS TO BE IN SOUTH BUILDING BEFORE 5PM ON FRIDAY. We are going to close down the place after 5, and no one else will be let in. So you better get here early, because it’s going to get crowded fast.
THE DANCE PARTY WILL BEGIN EXACTLY AT 6. It will end… never?
Heck. Stay the entire weekend if you like. We have plenty of floor space for you to crash with your friends. But if you want to leave early, you can. Although, we will feel sad.
SPREAD THE WORD. Join the facebook event for it. Much love. Buh bye.
(remember to get here before 5pm… Friday the 25th)
As of Friday morning, thirty people had confirmed for the dance party on Facebook, with another four hundred yet to respond to the invitation.
After a couple of weeks of experimenting and working out the kinks, we’ve finally gone public! Thanks for stopping by!
I’ll be putting up a lot of new content in the next few days, and doing a big publicity push starting on Monday. In the meantime free to poke around, and you can leave any suggestions you may have in comments to this post.
Racialicious offers a roundup of recent racist op-eds in campus newspapers, to which Feministe responds with a discussion of satire, hate speech, and the obligations of campus editors. Many more important links in both of those pieces.
Update: The comments at Feministe include a link to a 2007 Campus Progress report on the lack of racial diversity among student newspaper staffs, as well as comments from a student editor and a writer of satire pieces for a campus paper. Worth a look.
I’ve just stumbled across a guide to running feminist campaigns for student government offices, published by feministcampus.org.
It’s short, but it’s packed with practical information, and each section concludes with a series of questions to ask yourself about how to proceed. Well worth a look for anyone thinking about running an activist campaign for a student government position.
A new report in the Chronicle of Higher Education finds that the enrollment of poor students at America’s wealthiest colleges and universities is on the decline.
According to the Chronicle, just 13.1% of students at private colleges and universities with endowments of $500 million or more received Pell Grants in 2006-07, down from 14.3% two years earlier. At the wealthiest public institutions, enrollment of Pell Grant recipients fell from 19.6% to 18% in the same period.
Pell Grants are awarded to students with family incomes of less than $40,000.
Berea College in Kentucky had by far the highest Pell Grant enrollment of the schools studied, at 77.4%. The highest among public institutions, and the second highest overall, was UCLA, at 35.2%. Only six of the 114 colleges and universities studied saw an increase in Pell recipient enrollment between 2004 and 2006.
The administration of Evergreen State College has suspended that school’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society.
In February, students and others clashed with campus police after a Dead Prez concert in the university gym, overturning and vandalizing a police car. After that incident, the university declared a moratorium on on-campus concerts. In March, SDS held an anti-war folk music performance in defiance of the ban.
The chapter has been suspended for the remainder of the academic year and placed on probation until January 2009. According to an SDS press release, “the suspension means that SDS has lost its budget and office, can no longer hold meetings, book events, or use school facilities and equipment.”
An interview with two members of the suspended SDS chapter has been posted at the Dissident Voice.
“We forget that the necessary ingredient needed to make the past work for the future is our energy in the present, metabolizing one into the other.”
–Audre Lorde, “Learning from the 60s.”
The students’ union at England’s University of Manchester held a “Reclaim the University” march yesterday to protest the growing corporatization of university administration. Tom Skinnner, the union’s general secretary, said that
The university should be run for students and research and education and nothing else. It is now run like a business. Businesses are always asking themselves two questions: how much cheaper can we do things without losing customers and how much can we charge without losing customers? Some students are on courses where 20 years ago they would have got 200 hours a year — but now that’s down to 86.
The union has created a Reclaim the Uni Facebook group which at this writing has more than seven hundred members.
Shakesville reports on an event at The College of New Jersey in which men literally walked a mile in women’s shoes to raise awareness of rape and to emphasize male responsibility to fight sexual violence.
Shakes’ favorite part? The article that alerted her to the event was titled “OMG Shoes.”
(Good discussion in comments about the slightly iffy aspects of this action, too.)
The anti-sweatshop sit-in at the University of North Carolina that began last Thursday is now in its sixth day. About a dozen students spent Monday night outside the university chancellor’s office, and the university has so far made no move to expel them from the building.
Protest organizers have set up a blog where they are providing regular updates on the protest as it develops. That site also includes information on the sit-in’s demands, links to press coverage of the action, a roster of individuals and groups who have endorsed the Designated Suppliers Program campaign, and a series of short profiles of the members of the “occupying force.”
It also features a YouTube video of the university chancellor dancing to the protesters’ chants.
Police seized the cell phones of the nine students arrested in last week’s anti-sweatshop sit-in at the U of Montana, and have yet to return them.
According to the chief of the UM office of public safety, the phones are evidence — he says “students were using the cell phones, some to take pictures within the building, some to communicate with the rally outside, helping them and facilitating the crime of disorderly conduct.”
Protesters claim that the seizures were intended to disrupt future protests. Ella Torti, a UM sophomore and one of the nine arrestees, told the local newspaper that she believes that the police are ”trying to hinder our ability to organize.”
Historians of American student activism will be familiar with Robert Cohen’s When the Old Left Was Young, a history of the American Student Union of the 1930s, and of the activism that surrounded it. Cohen has put a series of excerpts from that book up on the web, along with about a hundred documents and memoirs of the era.
The site, Activist Impulses: Campus Radicalism in the 1930s, is well worth taking a wander through.
I find this YouTube video of a “Freeze” action at the University of Vermont last Friday interesting for a couple of reasons.
First, I’m fascinated by the connections between contemporary Improv Everywhere style “actions” and pre-internet campus pranks and playfulness, and this blends those traditions in a compelling way.
Second, the freeze commemorated a 1988 administration building takeover — that a protest from that era is what’s being memorialized gives us yet another reminder that today’s activists have far more on their minds than the sixties.
Ten thousand people participated in Colorado University’s annual marijuana smoke-out on the campus quad yesterday, twice as many as toked up one year ago. In the past, campus cops have photographed offenders or turned on the sprinkler system, but yesterday, outnumbered 500-to-1, they simply gave up.
Because of the scale of the event, it became a magnet for students promoting other causes. CU junior Max Lichtenstein handed out more than a hundred Rice Krispies treats attached to flyers asking students to call the White House to protest the genocide in Darfur … “Tomorrow, when you’re sober.”
Men were invited to march alongside women for the entirety of Columbia University and Barnard College’s joint Take Back the Night march for the first time this year. (In the past, men have been permitted to join the march en route.)
A representative of Columbia Men Against Violence said that the inclusion of men for the full march was “an experiment.” A march organizer said that there would be a women-only section at the head of the march, and that the decision was made in part because “we recognize that men are survivors of sexual assault.”
An estimated five hundred students participated in Thursday night’s march.
A blog on the University of Montana anti-sweatshop sit-in. The most recent entry, from Friday, is a recap of the sit-in and the issues behind it.
A bill passed by a committee of the Arizona state legislature would prohibit groups “based in whole or in part on race-based criteria” from operating at the the state’s public colleges and universities. The bill would also ban courses and “school sponsored activities” that, taken “as a whole,” serve to “denigrate, disparage, or overtly encourage dissent from the values of American democracy and western civilization,” and would be binding on high schools as well as colleges.
“This bill basically says, ‘You’re here. Adopt American values,’” one state legislator told a reporter. “If you want a different culture, then fine, go back to that culture.”
The text of the bill is online here.
As I noted yesterday, three anti-sweatshop sit-ins have ended in arrests in the last week, but the Chancellor of UNC, where the most recent protest is still ongoing, is taking a different tack, at least for now. When he left his office yesterday evening, he went so far as to clap along with the chanting protesters, and wish them a “nice weekend.”
The Charlotte Observer has made an interesting response to the UNC protest — on Friday it posted an extended excerpt from the US Supreme Court’s 1969 Tinker v. Des Moines decision on its website. Tinker overturned a local school district’s ban on the wearing of black armbands to protest the Vietnam War, and is, as the paper notes, one of the court’s most important students’ rights rulings.
Here’s a quote from the Tinker ruling, snipped from the excerpt posted at the Charlotte Observer site:
In our system, state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism. School officials do not possess absolute authority over their students. Students in school as well as out of school are “persons” under our Constitution. They are possessed of fundamental rights which the State must respect, just as they themselves must respect their obligations to the State. In our system, students may not be regarded as closed-circuit recipients of only that which the State chooses to communicate. They may not be confined to the expression of those sentiments that are officially approved.
The full text of the Tinker decision and an audio file of the oral argument in the case can be found here.
We reported yesterday on an anti-sweatshop sit-in at the University of Montana. Now comes word of a similar sit-in on Tuesday at Penn State that ended with 31 arrests, another at Appalachian State University last week, and a fourth underway yesterday at the University of North Carolina. All of the protests are directed at convincing the universities to adopt the Designated Supplier Program for university licensed apparel.
Update: The UNC sit-in continued overnight, and an article in the campus’s Daily Tar Heel quotes university Chancellor James Moeser as saying the protesters “are probably not going to be arrested.” The protest, he said, is “part of our tradition of free speech.”
Further Update: The University of Montana sit-in was reportedly the first on that campus since the Vietnam War. In related news, Washington State University averted protests this week by agreeing to sign on to the Designated Suppliers Program.
Yet Another Update: A detailed rundown of the Appalachian State sit-in can be found here. That blog, wataugawatch, is continuing to follow the story in the aftermath of the arrests.
The Tapped blog reported today that the Daily Pennsylvanian of the University of Pennsylvania had endorsed Hillary Clinton, calling the nod Clinton’s first “major college paper endorsement.”
Actually, according to the University Wire, the Pennsylvanian is the fourth college paper to endorse Hillary, joining the UT Daily Texan, Boston University’s Daily Free Press, and the George Washington University GW Hatchet.
That doesn’t mean it’s a contest, though — UW says Obama has 45 campus newspaper endorsements so far.
Nine student protesters at the University of Montana were handcuffed and arrested Wednesday evening, ending a sit-in in the university president’s office that had begun at noon that day. According to the Missoulian newspaper:
The nine people arrested are members of Students for Social and Economic Justice, a group that wants the university to adopt the “Designated Suppliers Program” promoted by the Workers Rights Consortium, a nonprofit labor rights group that monitors and investigates working conditions around the world. The DSP identifies manufacturing companies and factories that provide good working conditions.
The protesters were charged with misdemeanor counts of criminal trespassing and disorderly conduct and released.
In the wake of a series of campus protests, the administration of the University of Ottawa is circulating a draft code of student conduct that defines a new class of “non-academic” infractions. The last two years have seen an unusual upsurge of activism at Ottawa, with students organizing around issues ranging from “high tuition fees to language rights and campus safety. The most recent protests have concerned the corporatization of the campus and the elimination of ”a controversial course on social activism” taught by a physics professor.
The vice president of the Ottawa student government is described as concerned that the university is “trying to push through the code of conduct while students are preoccupied with exams and anticipating the summer break.”
May 24 Update: A follow-up report on the code struggle appears here.
Large quantities of student newspapers have been removed from distribution points in unrelated incidents at four college campuses in the last week.
At Ball State in Indiana, more than half of the print run of an edition featuring a story about the arrest of a member of the college’s soccer team were stolen while distribution was in progress.
At Loyola Marymount in California, stacks of a paper with two controversial stories were found in a campus recycling bin.
Approximately 300 copies of the University of New Orleans <i>Driftwood</i> were found in a trash can after an argument between newspaper staffers and student government officials. The issue in question contained an article critical of two student government officers.
And approximately 2,500 copies of an edition of the Kent State student newspaper were stolen for reasons that remain unknown.
According to the ACLU, Harvard University’s campus police department has been conducting plainclothes surveillance of campus protests. They say undercover campus cops photographed participants in a March demonstration, and they’ve filed a Freedom of Information Act request to uncover whether the university is passing surveillance information to government agencies.
A student who was at the protest says “it’s a little unnerving to find Harvard undercover police spying and taking pictures of Harvard students on public property.”
(via Cambridge Common)
A student protest at West Virginia’s Concord University has convinced the college’s board of directors to seek a 3.7% hike in tuition and fees for next year, instead of the 6.7% increase that had originally been announced. Student government vice president Curtis Kearns says the change will save students $300,000.
