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“I read once, passingly, about a man named Shakespeare. I only read about him passingly, but I remember one thing he wrote that kind of moved me. He put it in the mouth of Hamlet, I think, it was, who said, ‘To be or not to be.’ He was in doubt about something — whether it was nobler in the mind of man to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune — moderation — or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. And I go for that. If you take up arms, you’ll end it, but if you sit around and wait for the one who’s in power to make up his mind that he should end it, you’ll be waiting a long time. And in my opinion, the young generation of whites, blacks, browns, whatever else there is, you’re living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, a time when there’s got to be a change. People in power have misused it, and now there has to be a change and a better world has to be built, and the only way it’s going to be built is with extreme methods. And I, for one, will join in with anyone — I don’t care what color you are — as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.”
–Malcolm X, speaking at Oxford University on December 3, 1964, eighty days before his death.
The fall semester began this morning — one week late — at Michigan’s Oakland University.
Yesterday a judge ordered OU faculty and administrators to begin round-the-clock negotiations to end the university’s week-old strike, an this morning at 3:30 am the two sides reached a deal.
The agreement will have to be put to a vote of the faculty, and that vote may not happen until next month, but in the meantime faculty and students are heading back to the classroom.
On the first day of classes since last Friday’s protest at Howard University, journalists from the Hilltop, Howard’s student newspaper, sat down with university president Sidney A. Ribeau.
Ribeau went through the protest’s demands point-by-point. He said he would implement a couple of them, and that a few had already been addressed. For most, though, he said that he needed more information, or that the proposal wasn’t feasible for logistical or financial reasons.
Leaders of the Howard University Student Association (HUSA), which helped organize the protest, were invited to meet with Ribeau yesterday as well, but they declined, saying that public dialogue, not closed-door meetings, were what was needed.
Last week the protesters set today as Ribeau’s deadline to respond to their demands.
As of 11:30 pm on Monday, talks to resolve America’s first faculty strike of the 2008-09 academic year were still ongoing.
Michigan’s Oakland University, which had been scheduled to begin the fall semester last Thursday, has yet to start classes because of a strike by the local chapter of the AAUP. The two sides are said to be close to a deal, however, and a message on the OU website encourages students to check back in the early morning to learn whether classes will be held on Tuesday.
Tuesday morning update: Oakland University faculty and administrators suspended strike negotiations at 4:30 this morning, after overnight talks failed to produce an agreement. The two sides are scheduled to come to the table again early this afternoon, but this morning OU announced that it would be seeking a court order to force faculty back to work.
Tuesday evening update: Representatives of OU’s faculty and administration are meeting in court tomorrow morning for hearing’s on the university’s claim that the Oakland strike is illegal. Classes for Wednesday have been officially cancelled.
Thursday morning update: Classes are back in session after the two sides reached a tentative deal last night.
The PA State Police sent fifteen cops dressed as college students to a Haverford dorm party Thursday night, citing more than thirty students for underage drinking.
Drinking in the dorms is allowed for over-21s at Haverford, and the party was advertised on Facebook. But cops planned the raid after checking out the profiles of students who’d put themselves down as planning to attend and finding that many of them were underage.
Police showed up at the party 10:30, hoping to arrive as it was getting underway, but by the time they got there most of the alcohol was gone. They hung around for half an hour, observing, then announced themselves and started asking partiers for ID. They detained about forty students, and issued citations to 31 of those.
One interesting tidbit: The cops didn’t give the university a heads-up before crashing the party. Haverford’s president, Stephen G. Emerson, learned about the raid when a student called him after the police started asking for ID, and Emerson arrived on the scene himself about half an hour later.
studentactivism.net 
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