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10:20 pm: Students at the University of Vermont (UVM) are sitting in at the university president’s office, protesting budget cuts. Some arrests were made earlier today, more possible at any time.
I’m still getting up to speed with this story, and following it primarily on Twitter. Check out the @studentactivism feed for updates.
10:50 pm update: Multiple reports on Twitter suggest mass arrests going on at the sit-in. I’m not going to try to cover this minute-by-minute, since info is so sketchy right now. I’ll post again tonight if I get anything major and unambiguous, though, and I’ll have a full write-up in the morning.
Midnight update: The building has been cleared, with about 30 students arrested. One report says all but one were processed and released. Hundreds of students were outside the building supporting the arrested protesters as they were let go. A rally is planned at the university library tomorrow at noon.
10:00 am update: The morning follow-up post is up.
“You are not a committed anti-racist until you can look at the ugliness of racism without flinching.”
—Womanist Musings. (Go read the whole post.)
Last week the Cal State Northridge Daily Sundial ran an article on student drinking habits that claimed that American first-year students “spend more time drinking than studying.” Their source for this claim was a deeply flawed report produced by a company that markets anti-alcohol programs to college campuses.
As we reported last month, the study in question was little more than a marketing handout for Outside the Classroom, a for-profit company that produces anti-drinking programming for use by student affairs administrators.
The study received quite a lot of attention on its release, in large part because it was presented at the annual meeting of NASPA, a professional association for professionals in the student affairs field. What received much less attention was the fact that Outside the Classroom is a major corporate sponsor of NASPA, and paid for time at the group’s annual meeting.
And the problems with the study don’t end with its sponsorship. Its methodology is questionable and its most often repeated conclusions are not supported by the evidence it offers.
In short, the Outside the Classroom “study” is shoddy, anti-student research from a company with a financial interest in portraying students as problem drinkers. Disseminating it doesn’t bring us any closer to actually understanding student drinking habits, healthy or unhealthy.
J Street, the liberal Jewish advocacy group founded a year ago to support a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, announced last week that it will be launching a new campus outreach program this fall.
As part of that program, J Street will be incorporating the Union of Progressive Zionists, a four-year-old group whose tagline is “Student Activists for Peace and Social Justice in Israel & Palestine.”
J Street and the UPZ are currently fundraising to hire two full-time campus organizers for the upcoming academic year.
On April 22, 1969, hundreds of black and Latino students at New York’s City College took over seventeen campus buildings demanding reforms in the university’s treatment of students and faculty of color.
They shut down the university for two weeks, and their protests — which continued throughout the spring — led directly to the establishment of open admissions at the City University of New York a year later.
Open admissions nearly doubled the size of CUNY, and transformed the university forever. (It also helped open the door to the implementation of tuition in the system for the first time six years later.)
Today, students at City College will mark the anniversary with a 2 o’clock walkout in protest of budget cuts and tuition increases.
studentactivism.net 
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