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Teenage students at a school in Loughton, England staged a boycott of one of their classes this spring when they discovered that the classroom it was held in had been fitted out with video cameras.
The students at Davenant Foundation School discovered the cameras when they arrived in class one Monday morning — they had not been consulted on, or even informed of, their installation. Seventeen of eighteen students in the class walked out.
It took school administrators two weeks to address the students’ concerns, saying that the cameras had been installed for teacher training purposes and would not be activated without prior notice to the class. Later, however, students discovered that microphones in the room had been turned on. (They turned them off.)
Last week two of the protesters, Lela Clancy and Sam Goodman, published an opinion piece on their protest, and the public response to it, in The Guardian, one of Britain’s leading newspapers. It’s well worth reading.
(via Boing Boing)
A federal appeals court in Colorado has found that administrators at Lewis-Palmer High School did not violate Erica Corder’s rights when they forced her to apologize for remarks she made in a 2005 valedictorian’s address.
Corder’s speech — one of fifteen short addresses by students at the graduation — had been cleared by school officials in advance, but abandoned the agreed-upon text, instead delivering one that included the following lines:
I need to tell you about someone who loves you more than you could ever imagine. He died for you on a cross over 2,000 years ago, yet was resurrected and is living today in heaven. His name is Jesus Christ. If you don’t already know him personally I encourage you to find out more about the sacrifice he made for you so that you now have the opportunity to live in eternity with him.
Administrators then refused to give Corder her diploma until she made a public apology. Corder did so, but later sued the school.
In its ruling, the court found that because the graduation was a “school-sponsored activity,” and the public might reasonably believe that Corder’s speech had been approved by school officials, the punishment was not an unconstitutional one.
Corder’s attorney told the Student Press Law Center that censorship of, or punishment for, graduation speeches is improper. “When the student goes to the lectern to speak,” he said, “it’s their own words.”
A study of forty thousand American college students finds that gays, lesbians, and bisexuals are more likely to place importance on political activism than straights, and that gay and bisexual men are more likely to be involved with student organizations. (LGB students were also more likely to value participation in the arts.)
The study, which was just published in the Economics of Education Review, is only available publicly as a pricey ($31.50) download. The above info is from the article’s abstract, and if I can get library access to it, I’ll bring you more details.
The Providence, Rhode Island mayor’s proposal to slap a “student municipal impact fee” on the city’s college students is being introduced as legislation in the RI state legislature.
The student tax, which I discussed here last month, would be an assessment of $150 per semester for all undergraduate and graduate students at the city’s four private universities. It’s intended to help close a multi million dollar municipal budget deficit.
Mayor Cicilline also put forward an alternate funding mechanism — a bill that would allow the city to collect fees directly from its largest tax-exempt institutions (the four universities plus five private hospitals). That bill would permit the assessment of such fees up to twenty-five percent of the taxes that the institutions would pay if they were not exempt.
There’s a good short post up at the law blog The Volokh Conspiracy on the do’s and don’ts of bringing a speaker to campus. (It’s intended for Federalist Society clubs, but most of the advice is universal.)
Here’s the meat of it:
Debates seem to get more of a turnout than lectures.
If you can’t set up a head-to-head debate, set up a two-person panel, or a talk-plus-commentary.
Events that involve a local professor — a debate, a panel, or even the professor’s just introducing a guest speaker — will probably get more of a turnout.
Publicize, publicize, publicize, using all the tools at your disposal — e-mail, flyers in mailboxes, postings on bulletin boards, postings on class chalkboards, if your school allows that, and whatever else you can think of.
For topics, the usual sexy ones are good: affirmative action, gun control, abortion, church-state separation, campaign finance, and the like. Other topics can work as well, especially if you can find a well-known visitor. But generally speaking the old standards work well.
If you want to bring in a relatively prominent speaker from out of town, offer to coordinate with other chapters in your city, so that the speaker can give several talks on one trip.
Provide lunch — the better, the better.
June 4 update: Although it wasn’t the point of this post, I should probably mention that I’m available for campus speaking engagements myself.
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