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Via Bitch PhD and Inside Higher Ed comes word of new directives on political speech sent out by the ethics office of the University of Illinois system to all university employees.
According to the directives, university employees are not permitted to engage in the following activities “while working, when on University property, while using University resources … or when acting as a representative of the University”:
- Preparing for or participating in any rally or event related to a specific political candidate, party, or referendum - this includes preparation and circulation of campaign materials, petitions, or literature
- Soliciting contributions or votes on behalf of a particular political party or candidate
- Assisting at the polls on behalf of any political party, candidate, or organization
- Surveying or conducting an opinion poll related to anticipating an election outcome, or participating in a recount challenge related to an electionoutcome
- Running for political office
The message goes on to say that wearing pins or t-shirts that support specific candidates or parties, “distributing, producing, or posting flyers or other campaign literature on campus,” conducting voter registration work that is identified with a particular candidate, displaying partisan bumper sticker’s on one’s car, and attending on-campus political rallies, even on one’s own time, are all prohibited activities.
Discussion of these regulations has so far focused on their effect on faculty free speech, but they are explicitly identified as applying to all university employees, including professional and non-professional staff. On their face, the rules would appear to apply to student employees of the university as well — did the university really mean to suggest that if you work as an RA or in a dining hall or staffing the check-out desk in the library a few hours a week, you’re not allowed to wear an Obama pin to class or attend a rally for a local candidate?
We’ll be following this story.
An interesting background piece from the First Amendment Center on the organizational relationship between student newspapers and campus administrators. The piece gives particular attention to the trend toward student papers organizing themselves as non-profit corporations independent of the universitites they cover.
The nuts-and-bolts assistance programs that student governments run for the students they serve may not be the most exciting aspect of campus activism, but they are activist endeavors. They represent students working for students to advance a student-centered agenda, independent of the priorities of the university administration.
Stories like this one are small stories, in other words, but important stories.
History geeks may want to check out the Free Speech Movement Digital Archive, a collection of documents from, and writing about, the historic Berkeley protests of 1964-65.
We’ve added the link to our collection at left.
As we reported last month, the student government of Toronto’s York University has voted to deny recognition to campus groups that oppose abortion rights. Now comes word that one such group, Students for Bioethical Awareness, is challenging the ban as a violation of the campus’s code of student conduct.
An essay on free-speech rights in high schools from a First Amendment scholar:
After 12 years of censorship and regimentation, many high school students will graduate this spring with little or no idea about what it means to be a free, active and engaged citizen in a democracy. When they march across the stage to get their diploma, let’s hope someone slips them a copy of the First Amendment – with instructions on how to use it.
Far too many public school officials are afraid of freedom and avoid anything that looks like democracy. Under the heading of “safety and discipline,” administrators censor student religious and political speech, shut down student newspapers and limit student government to discussions about decorations at the prom.
Fortunately, a growing number of brave students defy the odds and take seriously what they hear about free speech in civics class…
From The New York Times comes word that small private colleges, anxious to increase enrollments and tuition revenue, are launching women’s wrestling teams to attract female students.
Women’s wrestling got a boost with the inclusion of the sport in the 2004 olympics, but today only five colleges in the United States field teams. Most of those teams are newly-formed, and three more will be starting up this fall.
Five thousand girls wrestled for high school teams in the US in 2006-07, and one college’s coach says her team brings in “20 to 25 extra students who normally wouldn’t have looked at Jamestown College” each year.
Twenty-nine students at New Jersey’s Readington Middle School protested the reduction of lunch hour to thirty minutes by paying for their lunches with pennies. Their principal sentenced twenty-nine of them to detention, but relented under pressure a few days later.
(The pennies story comes courtesy of Rad Geek People’s Daily, which I’ve added to the blogroll.)
Last month we reported that the University of Ottawa was considering imposing a new code of student conduct governing non-academic activities.
The university has seen a wave of student activism in the last two years, and students have expressed concern that this new code may be used to clamp down on campus organizing.
Shortly after our last report, several hundred students marched in protest against the proposed code. Opponents of the code have also created a blog to aid in their organizing effort.
(The above article says that several blogs and a Facebook group have been created, but we’ve only been able to uncover the one blog linked to above. If anyone is aware of other resources created by the Ottawa organizers, let us know and we’ll update this post.)
President Bush will give this year’s commencement address at Furman University in South Carolina, and the invitation has sparked bitter division on the campus.
A group of more than two hundred students, faculty, and staff have signed a petition opposing the decision to host Bush, saying his actions on military, civil liberties, environmental, and budgetary issues “violate American values.” The petition has been posted on the university’s website.
After the first petition appeared, a second was circulated. This one challenged the claims made in the first letter, supported the decision to invite Bush to speak, and made three requests of the university:
1. We ask Furman University to hold professors to their contractual agreement to attend commencement exercises in recognition of Furman’s graduating class and its accomplishments by refusing to grant any “conscientious objector” releases. We also request the names of all faculty members who have submitted such a request, as well as an update of any additional faculty members who do so between now and graduation. Students who have worked hard to earn a degree deserve to know who has decided not to honor their achievements, and surely such “conscientious objectors” would want their names to be known.
2. We further ask that Furman refuse to post the political views of a fraction of the faculty and student body on our Web site. Professors have the right to express their views, but we are under no obligation to reward their publicity stunt by providing a link to it from Furman’s home page. Their letter contains no objection relevant to the fact that President Bush will be coming to Furman to congratulate the Class of 2008.
3. If Furman continues to post the contents of their letter, we expect this response will be postedimmediately next to the professors’ letter on the same page and for the same duration. We also expect that all other responses from any students, parents, alumni, faculty, staff members, trustees, or anyone connected with the Furman community will be given the same privilege and posted in their entirety. To do otherwise would be placing a higher value on some expressions of “free speech” than on others.
The authors of the second petition claim that it has garnered nearly six hundred signatures, more than three hundred of them from students.
More news on this story as it develops.
Elon University senior Andrew Bennett has pledged to donate fifty thousand dollars to his school’s “Safe Rides” program, a service that provides students with free rides home from parties and bars on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights.
“Safe Rides” is a student-operated service that currently gives rides to about a hundred students a night. The program currently operates two cars, and Bennett’s donation will allow them to increase staffing and publicity. In the wake of the gift, the university announced that it would be donating a van to Safe Rides to allow it to extend its reach still further.
Story via SAFER Campus, which also covers the possible shutdown of a similar service at Coastal Carolina University. One distinction between the two programs that SAFER Campus doesn’t mention — Elon’s is student-run, while CCU’s is an administration-sponsored project.
Two years ago today John McCain gave the commencement address that prompted me to write the following essay.
In the course of John McCain’s speech at the New School’s commencement this week, he offered this appraisal of the development of his own character:
When I was a young man, I was quite infatuated with self-expression, and rightly so because, if memory conveniently serves, I was so much more eloquent, well-informed, and wiser than anyone else I knew. It seemed I understood the world and the purpose of life so much more profoundly than most people. I believed that to be especially true with many of my elders, people whose only accomplishment, as far as I could tell, was that they had been born before me, and, consequently, had suffered some number of years deprived of my insights. I had opinions on everything, and I was always right. I loved to argue, and I could become understandably belligerent with people who lacked the grace and intelligence to agree with me. With my superior qualities so obvious, it was an intolerable hardship to have to suffer fools gladly. So I rarely did. All their resistance to my brilliantly conceived and cogently argued views proved was that they possessed an inferior intellect and a weaker character than God had blessed me with, and I felt it was my clear duty to so inform them. It’s a pity that there wasn’t a blogosphere then. I would have felt very much at home in the medium.
McCain is here addressing a group of newly-minted college graduates. His message? “When I was like you, I was stupid.”
One expects politicians to pander to their audiences, but this is something different. In this speech, McCain is pandering to an audience other than the one in front of him. His oratory is designed to flatter the self-image of his peers at the expense of the people to whom he is speaking. His speech is an ugly, self-satisfied insult, and Jean Rohe, a New School student who shared the stage with him at the commencement, rightly called him on it. Speaking before McCain, but having seen an advance copy of his speech, Rohe said
Senator McCain will … tell us about his strong-headed self-assuredness in his youth, which prevented him from hearing the ideas of others, and in so doing he will imply that those of us who are young are too naïve to have valid opinions. I am young, and although I don’t profess to possess the wisdom that time affords us, I do know that pre-emptive war is dangerous and wrong.
Rohe explained her decision to confront McCain in an essay published at the Huffington Post the following day, and it didn’t take long for the McCain camp to respond. In a comment he left at the website Mark Salter, a senior McCain aide who had co-written the speech, rebuked Rohe, contrasting McCain’s “regard for his audience” with Rohe’s “comical self-importance” and patronizing her and her classmates:
Should you grow up and ever get down to the hard business of making a living and finding a purpose for your lives beyond self-indulgence some of you might then know a happiness far more sublime than the fleeting pleasure of living in an echo chamber.
As it turns out, though, Rowe is not the pampered child of Salter’s fantasies:
You assume that I have no experience making a living. I have been a full-time college student and have worked a job to pay my own rent and my own expenses for the past two years. You assume that I live in an “echo chamber” of liberal head-patting, when, in fact, I live in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a neighborhood notorious for its cultural diversity and sometimes, conflict.
John McCain was twenty-two years old when he graduated from the Naval Academy and, as his senatorial website puts it, “began his career as a Naval aviator.” Jean Rohe was twenty-two when she rose at the New School to respond to McCain’s insult to her and her fellow students. She is no less an adult today than McCain was in 1958, and it is a shame that neither McCain nor Mark Salter can see that.
An off-campus end-of-semester party turned into a melee in Middletown, Connecticut Thursday night, as Wesleyan students clashed with police.
One report contends that used pepper spray, tasers, and dogs on the students, five of whom were arrested on incitement to riot and other charges.
Before dawn, as many as sixty students converged on the police department to file complaints about officers’ tactics.
The Wesleyan student newspaper, the Argus, published a special edition on the disturbance on Friday. Wesleyan blog Wesleying has been covering the situation as it develops.
Update: Here’s an analysis of the events of Thursday night that struck me as well worth reading.
The mother of an economics student at Britain’s Lancaster University recently emailed one of his professors to complain that his courseload was too light. Because he was not being academically challenged, she said, her son “is now quite addicted to alcohol, smokes and has spent a great deal of time over the last nine months asleep.”
When the chair of the LU economics department sought to reassure her by detailing her son’s course schedule for the semester, the son filed a complaint with the university for violating the privacy of his academic records.
The professor has been reprimanded by the university, and told that any further improper disclosures of student data will be referred to the university’s personnel department for possible action.
Washington University in St. Louis conferred an honorary degree on anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly today, as a significant portion of the university’s 2800 graduates turned their backs.
The move to honor Schlafly was met with protest and outrage from the start. WU chancellor Mark Wrighton apologized on Wednesday for the “the anguish this decision has caused,” but refused to reverse it.
A website created by opponents of the honor calls Schlafly “someone who has spent 40 years advocating for censorship of literature and art, railing against the teaching of evolution in schools, and thwarting equal rights for women, gays, and lesbians.”
Schlafly has described the protesters as “bitter,” “tacky,” and “a bunch of losers.”
Update: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch says about a third of the graduates turned their backs on Schlafly. A Feministing correspondent estimated that 75% did.
We’ve recently reported on two sexual assault scandals at Tulane University — the school’s failure to investigate allegations of drugging and rape at fraternity parties, and the mild punishment meted out by the campus judiciary to a student it found guilty of committing sexual assault in a dorm.
Today, via SAFER Campus, we have word of two other incidents that took place at Tulane this year.
In October, a male student was allegedly sexually assaulted by a Tulane campus police officer. The officer in question was dismissed from his job, but the administration has made no public statement on the incident or on whether any further steps have been taken. As SAFER Campus notes, federal law mandates that colleges inform the student body when such crimes occur.
In April, a student wrote in the campus newspaper of being assaulted on his way home from a party by assailants who called him a “fag.” The campus police, he says, did not conduct a criminal investigation of the assault, and the university administration failed to offer him any outreach or counseling in the wake of the crime.
SAFER Campus has on these stories — and the other Tulane events we’ve been following — here.
On the heels of the news that Tulane ignored allegations of druggings and possible sexual assaults at a frat party, another disturbing story.
Last July, Tulane student Anna Minkinow brought a complaint against a fellow student for raping her in a Tulane dorm. She chose to pursue the complaint through the university judicial system, which did not hold a hearing for nine months.
When the hearing was finally held in April of this year, Minkinow says, the panel behaved inappropriately and offensively. They found Minkinow’s attacker guilty of sexual misconduct, but rejected her request that he be expelled from the university. Instead they banned him from having contact with her, barred him from entering the dorms, and mandated that he seek counseling.
One day later, she says, he approached her at a campus event. He didn’t speak to her, but he stood in close proximity to her for fifteen minutes.
Not long after that incident Minkinow and a friend staged an impromptu campus protest in which they bound and gagged themselves to symbolize the silencing of rape victims. She has since met with the university’s vice president for student affairs to pursue measures to strengthen the campus’s code of student conduct.
One reform that Minkinow has not yet won support for is a minimum punishment for students found guilty of sexual offenses. Presently, the university provides minimum sentences for only three forms of misconduct: alcohol violation, drug violations and pulling a fire alarm.
Update: More on sexual assaults at Tulane here.
Late Update: We have learned that Minkinow has started a blog.
A couple of weeks ago we reported that a “task force” appointed by a vice president of Wichita State University would be reviewing the operational and editorial practices of the WSU student newspaper, the Sunflower. It was announced that the paper’s student government funding for the upcoming fiscal year would not be disbursed until that review was complete.
That task force has now been appointed, and several other developments have taken place.
The task force will be made up of two students, two administrators, two faculty members, and the university’s general counsel.
Outgoing editor Todd Vogts attended the first task force meeting last week and said afterward that the faculty members seemed to be taking a stand in support of the newspaper’s first amendment rights.
In a potentially significant development, the university’s president has pledged that Sunflower funding will be disbursed as originally scheduled, and will not be contingent on the task force’s findings as originally announced.
The task force will meet again in the fall.
Administrators at the University of New Hampshire at Manchester have suspended the school’s Student Government Association without notice, locking student government officers out of their offices and cancelling elections planned for this week.
The administration claims that the SGA was allowing students to run for office in violation of eligibility requirements, and that its chartering documents may not have been properly filed sixteen years ago. UNH-M dean Kristin Woolever was also quoted as saying that she “wasn’t comfortable” with proposed revisions to the SGA constitution.
SGA leaders say that the student government has recently moved from an emphasis on “event planning” to advocacy for students. They also contend that the administration is seeking to assert control over SGA’s activity fee, which was raised by $65 per student per semester — from $10 to $75 — earlier this year.
We’ll be following this story as it develops.
Ten members of Tulane University’s Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity were arrested this week, and the fraternity was suspended, after a brutal hazing incident that sent two pledges to the hospital. In a statement, the university declared that it has “zero tolerance for any type of … incident which can potentially endanger the well-being of any student.”
But the Tulane student government urged the university to investigate Pi Kappa Alpha, known as PIKE, for drugging female attendees at its parties more than two years ago, and its complaint was ignored.
In March 2006 the undergraduate student government at Tulane sent a five-paragraph letter to the university administration raising concerns about Pi Kappa Alpha, stating that there was “legitimate reason to believe” that the frat had “served drugged beverages to unsuspecting guests” at a party the previous month.
According to the letter, such allegations had been made “every year” in “recent memory” by female guests at Pi Kappa Alpha parties, with attendees “suspect[ing] that they may have been date raped” while drugged.
The letter also charged that “numerous people were taken to the hospital or injured” as a result of incidents at Pi Kappa Alpha parties, and that the university had responded with “minor punishments and slaps on the wrist.” The fraternity was engaged in “egregious and continuous abuse of the students and the rules,” the letter said, and “the situation gets worse every year.”
In a statement this week, the Tulane administration said that there had “apparently” been “no response from Tulane to this letter.”
On April 26 of this year two Pi Kappa Alpha pledges were hospitalized with second- and third-degree burns after a five-hour hazing ordeal in which fraternity members poured boiling water, crab-boil, and cayenne pepper sauce on pledges’ bodies. Police learned of the incident this past weekend, and filed charges against ten fraternity members on Tuesday.
Tulane suspended the fraternity the same day.
The editor in chief of the Quinnipiac University Chronicle and all of the paper’s other returning editors have submitted their resignations, and all of the candidates for editorships for next year have withdrawn their applications. The paper’s staff intends to launch a new, web-only independent campus paper.
The mass defection followed a university decision to place the selection of next year’s Chronicle editors in the hands of the university’s dean of students.
The Chronicle and the Quinnipiac adminstration have clashed repeatedly in the last year, and the new selection process was designed as a “trial structure” while the possibility of making the Chronicle independent of the university was explored. When the process was announced, editor Jason Braff, who had intended to stay on next year, withdrew his name from consideration, and all other editors and applicants followed suit.
The Chronicle has published its final issue for the spring semester. The university hopes to have a full slate of editors in place for the start of classes in the fall, but Braff and outgoing campus news editor Jaclyn Hirsch say they believe no applications have yet been submitted for any of the editorial positions.
On Tuesday of this week, in a 17-0 vote, the Quinnipiac faculty senate urged the administration to place the restructuring proposal on hold for one year. On Wednesday the Chronicle staff met to begin planning for the new web-based paper.
The anti-sweatshop sit-in at the University of North Carolina is now in day 16. Here’s what’s happened since our last update:
• UNC chancellor James Moeser traveled to Washington DC for a State Department conference on education and global development, and United Students Against Sweatshops made sure the jaunt was no vacation. A group of DC-area activists held a demonstration as delegates arrived at the conference, chanting and leafleting as Moeser walked in.
• Wireless internet access to the building the demonstrators are occupying mysteriously went down about a week ago. A unversity IT person checked on the network a few days ago, and claimed he could find nothing wrong. For now, the folks sitting in are sharing a single ethernet connection.
• In the early days of the sit-in, UNC administration took a relaxed attitude toward the demonstrators hanging signs inside and outside the building. In the wake of an Obama rally on campus, and with commencement fast approaching, that lenience may be ending.
• The sit-in has spread to Second Life.
USA Today has a front-page story today questioning whether tuition increases lead to better education. The article cites a new study from the Delta Cost Project that found that tuition hikes were not correlated with increased spending on instruction.
Not long after midnight on January 16 of this year, twelve pledges of Yale’s Zeta Psi gathered at the entrance of the campus women’s center. They shouted “Dick! Dick! Dick! Dick!” and held up a sign that said “We Love Yale Sluts.”
Their act was part of a pledging “scavanger hunt,” and a photo of the group holding the sign was soon posted on Facebook.
Interference with the women’s center is an annual ritual during fraternity initiations at Yale. Last year an unidentified group gathered outside the center and chanted “No means yes, yes means anal!”
Under Yale’s code of student conduct, behavior that “has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s work or academic performance or creating an intimidating or hostile academic or work environment” constitutes sexual harassment. This year women’s center members, arguing that the chants and the sign had the effect of interfering with women’s access to the center, filed charges of intimidation and harassment against the members of Zeta Psi.
The members of the fraternity were found not guilty of the charges nearly a month ago, but the committee’s decision did not become publicly known until this week, when news leaked to the Yale Daily News. Executive committee disciplinary proceedings are confidential, and no formal statement on the charges or their outcome has been made.
Story via Feministing, who have the best ongoing coverage of campus issues of any major political blog I know.
Update: In the course of filing the charges, the women’s center submitted a 26-page report on fraternity culture, university policies on frats and on sexual harassment, and the status of the women’s center on the Yale campus. That report is now available online.
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.
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 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.
