Monthly Archive

The Wisconsin budget bill is moving toward a vote in the state senate this afternoon, having passed in a party-line vote in that body’s budget committee late last night.

University of Wisconsin officials are pledging to keep the system’s campuses open today in the face of a planned walkout by faculty and students. Here’s an editorial from the University of Wisconsin Badger Herald supporting the walkout.

Public schools in Madison, Wisconsin’s capital, are closed for the second straight day today as teachers stage an ongoing sick-out. The closure has spread to more than a dozen districts in the capital region since yesterday.

A number of small changes were made to the bill yesterday, but none touched the core complaints that demonstrators have. Republican leaders say they have the votes in hand to pass the legislation in both houses today.

More to come…

Update | Organizers claim thirty thousand people joined yesterday’s protests.

Three days after Friday’s surprise resignation of the president of the University of Puerto Rico, Governor Luis Fortuño finally bowed to a key student demand and pulled police from the university’s campuses.

Students have been protesting fee hikes and other university policies for a year, with the Fortuño administration launching a major crackdown about two months ago. More than two hundred activists have been arrested since, and clashes between cops and demonstrators have grown steadily more violent. In recent weeks, reports of police harassment and molestation of female protesters have also begun to mount.

Last Wednesday, faculty declared a 24-hour strike in support of the students, a strike which was later extended to a second day. On day two of the strike, UPR President Ramón De La Torre resigned, effective immediately, giving no advance notice.

Acting President Miguel Muñoz said yesterday that he may ask the governor to return police to the campus if coming negotiations with protesters break down.

Protests against a proposed Wisconsin state budget that would slash faculty pay, eliminate university unions, and dramatically scale back other state employees’ collective bargaining rights continue to heat up today, as Governor Scott Walker tells the Associated Press that he has the votes to pass his bill.

Highlights of the last 24 hours’ developments:

• As many as ten thousand activists demonstrated against the governor’s plan at the state capitol yesterday.

• A state senate committee hearing on the bill dragged on until the early hours of this morning, with citizen testimony continuing even after Republican members of the committee finally went home at three o’clock.

• Several hundred demonstrators remained in the capitol rotunda all night long — some waiting to speak at the hearing, others just occupying the space. Many brought pillows and blankets with them, and a local pizza place made a late-night contribution of provisions.

• The Madison school district closed all of its schools today after some 40 percent of its teachers failed to show up — union officials had encouraged their membership to call in sick and participate in today’s protests.

• Governor Walker claimed this morning that he has the votes in hand to pass his proposal, though the Washington Post reported that there were signs in his party that support might be softening. A vote could come as soon as tomorrow.

Note | This post has been edited since it was first published. See updates below.

The student member of the University of California’s Board of Regents was arrested in November on charges of sexual battery, UC Irvine student newspaper New University has reported, but no charges have been filed in the case.

Student Regent Jesse Cheng, a fifth-year undergraduate at Irvine, is a little more than halfway through his one-year term as a voting member of the Board of Regents.

According to New University, a UCLA grad student contends that Cheng “attempted to rape her in his off-campus apartment on Oct. 3 after she said no to his advances.” She reported the incident to police in late October, and Cheng was arrested on November 4.

The Irvine Police Department contends that they passed the case on to the county District Attorney in November, and grad student now says that she was told by an Irvine detective in December that the department had decided not to press charges. The DA’s office, however, told New University that they have no file on the incident. Neither New University nor Matt Coker, who blogged about the case for the OC Weekly today, has yet been able to resolve this discrepancy.

Wednesday Update | In an interview with local newspaper the Bay Citizen, Cheng today asserted his innocence and said that he does not intend to step down as student regent. The Bay Citizen also reported that a spokesperson for the District Attorney’s office told them yesterday that there was an “insufficiency of evidence” to charge Cheng with any crime.

In their story yesterday, the New University said that they had obtained copies of email messages from last October in which Cheng “repeatedly apologized to Laya for sexually assaulting her.” In his interview with the Bay Citizen, Cheng described those as “the supposed e-mails,” and said that there was “no evidence” behind the complaint.

Thursday Update | The OC Weekly has posted new information on the case, including a fuller explanation from the District Attorney’s office as to why they declined to pursue charges, and a more detailed account of the situation from Cheng himself. The updated piece also makes clear that Cheng was arrested for misdemeanor, rather than felony, sexual battery.

Also, I missed this yesterday, but the Bay Citizen’s original piece on the story reported that UCI has appointed a senior administrator to conduct a review of the university’s handling of the case “to ensure that appropriate polices were being followed for a fair investigation” given Cheng’s position as student regent. (For their part, the District Attorney’s office told the OC Weekly that they were unaware that Cheng was UC’s student regent when they made the decision not to pursue the case.)

Yesterday saw protests against Governor Scott Walker’s budget plan — which would slash faculty pay and roll back unionization rights for state employees — across the state of Wisconsin. A hundred high school students walked out in Stoughton, for instance, while in Madison, at least a thousand students, faculty, and supporters marched on the state capitol.

Today hundreds of people packed a state senate finance committee meeting to offer comments on the plan, while at least ten thousand more rallied at the statehouse.

DefendWisconsin has more on Twitter.