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The nine members of the American River College student government who voted to endorse California’s anti- same-sex marriage Proposition 8 have survived the recall vote that attempted to remove them from office.
The vote in the recall election was nearly seven times as high as the vote that brought the student government to office — 3,531 votes, as opposed to about five hundred — but still amounted to only nine percent of the ARC student body. Each of the student government members received about 53-54% of the vote in the recall.
With the presidential election shaping up as an Obama blowout in California this year, the biggest issue on the November ballot there is Proposition 8, a measure that would overturn the state court’s recent ruling in favor of same-sex marriage.
Polls show California voters equally divided on Prop 8, and the campaign is dividing the students at American River College (ARC), a Sacramento-area community college, as well.
On September 30, the ARC student government voted 8-3 to endorse Proposition 8, and anti-8 students immediately set to work gathering signatures for a recall election to remove the pro-8 representatives from office. The recall election was held earlier this week, and votes are still being counted.
The recall highlights low voter turnout in student government elections. According to one source, only 300 students voted in the last election at ARC, a college of over 37,000 students.
Five of the representatives facing recall are Christian students from the former Soviet Union, and controversy has arisen over dual-language flyers distributed during the recall effort on behalf of those students.
One blogger had the Russian text of a flyer translated, and found that where the English-language side of the handout asked “Does responding to Student requests by passing a resolution endorsing Prop 8 (Marriage Protection Amendment) make them ‘incompetent’ or unqualified for Office?”, the Russian-language side bore this message:
Stop homosexuals! They want to silence the voices of the believers and the Slavs in our college and they want to take the light from everyone who supports marriages!
If Bill Ayers’ name is brought up in tonight’s presidential debate, don’t be too surprised if someone mentions another radical opponent of the war in Vietnam, David Ifshin.
Ifshin, a campus protest leader who was elected student government president at Syracuse University in 1969-70 and the president of the National Student Association in 1970-71, visited North Vietnam in December of 1970 to promote a “People’s Peace Treaty” calling for an end to the war.
While he was there, he recorded a speech attacking the war, saying that the US was not fighting “for democracy or to defend the right of the people, but … to murder the people of Vietnam in order to make South Vietnam into one large US military base.” That speech was later broadcast as propaganda directed at American troops, including POW John McCain.
So why would anyone mention Ifshin tonight? Well, it’s a long and strange story, but the short version is that Ifshin came to regret giving that speech, and eventually became active in Democratic party politics. He and McCain met in the mid-1980s — at an AIPAC conference, of all places — and became friends. Ifshin died of cancer in 1996, and McCain delivered a eulogy at his funeral, saying that Ifshin had “always felt passionate about his country,” and “always tried to do justice to others.”
David Ifshin and John McCain forged a friendship that was grounded in a belief in redemption and forgiveness. John McCain may very well draw a distinction between Ifshin and Ayers tonight, and if he doesn’t, it’s just possible that Barack Obama will draw a parallel between the two.
Back in May, we reported on an online survey that Mother Jones magazine was conducting on contemporary student activism. (At the time, we noted that the survey’s title, “Are Today’s Student Activists Lazy?”, seemed oddly hostile to student organizing.)
Well, it’s back-to-school time, and the survey results have been posted, along with a cartoon guide to the varieties of present-day campus activists and a handful of other sidebars.
We’ll be posting an annotation of their “Student Activism Firsts” timeline later this week, and we’re interested in hearing your thoughts on that and the rest of the feature — feel free to post them here, or in the comments section over there.
Many American college campuses are ghost towns in June, July, and August, as administrators well know. As a result, summer tends to be a busy time for the implementation of decisions that would likely meet with student protest if announced during the school year.
So officials at the University of Washington must have been surprised when more than a dozen banner-toting students appeared in the university president’s office last Thursday to protest UW’s just-concluded deal to extend its contract with Nike to provide the school’s athletic equipment and uniforms.
“President Emmert has a clear choice,” UW senior Ashley Edens, a spokeswoman for the protesters, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “He can repudiate his commitment to workers rights and sign a contract with Nike that would guarantee that UW apparel is produced in sweatshop conditions of the next 10 years. Or he can listen to concerned students and their allies, and recommit to a comprehensive set of labor stands that would ensure that UW’s Nike apparel would be produced under fair conditions.”
Students expect the contract to be presented to the UW Board of Regents next month, and we’ll be following this story as it develops.
(Thanks to Rod Palmquist of United Students Against Sweatshops for the heads-up.)
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.
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…
Eighty activists marched on a Toronto courthouse Tuesday, urging prosecutors to drop charges against the fourteen people who were arrested in a March demonstration at the University of Toronto.
“We are rallying to show our support and to demand that the criminal charges be dropped, and the academic investigation against the students be dropped as well,” said Ahmina Hanif, a protest spokesperson.
The charges, which include forcible confinement mischief, stemmed from a March 20 demonstration against hikes in student fees.
Once a thriving country, Zimbabwe has tumbled into political and economic crisis in the last several years. Every aspect of national life has been affected by the collapse, and Zimbabwe’s universities have been no exception.
Ceaser Sitiya, pictured at right, is the vice-chair of the Students’ Representative Assembly of the University of Zimbabwe. In the summer of 2007, Sitiya (some news sources spell his name “Caesar Sitiya”) was a leader in protests against conditions at the university. According to Amnesty International, Sitiya was pulled from classes on July 7 of that year, arrested, and held for more than two weeks. Amnesty reports that he was tortured, starved, and denied access to a lawyer during his time in custody.
Last week Sitiya was informed that he has been suspended from the university for a period of two years for his role in the protests. Even after he becomes eligibile for re-admission, he will be barred from participating in student union activities and from living in the university’s dorms.
Other Zimbabwean student leaders face similar punishment from the university’s disciplinary committee.
ZINASU, the Zimbabwean national student union, has a website here. Their report on the events of July 2007 can be found here.
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.)
A fascinating article from the Daily Star of Bangladesh on the history of student protest in that country.
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.)
Finding that “the claimed interruption and disorder was really much the usual background noise of a middle and high school,” a Florida judge has overturned a school district’s ban on students wearing clothes that bear pro-gay messages.
Students at Ponce de Leon High School started sporting the messages after a lesbian student claimed the school’s principal told her that homosexuality was wrong and directed her not to discuss her sexual orientation with other students. When a rumor spread that a school assembly would feature an anti-gay speaker, students began planning a walkout.
Eight students were eventually suspended for activities relating to the protests and the walkout discussions.
From the Washington Post comes an article about Hillary Clinton’s role in the radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, her links to left-wing student activists of the era, and charges that her criticism of Barack Obama’s ties to Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers are tainted by hypocrisy.
Update: More, from Tom Hayden:
Hillary is blind to her own roots in the Sixties. In one college speech she spoke of ecstatic transcendence; in another, she said, “our social indictment has broadened. Where once we exposed the quality of life in the world of the South and the ghettos, now we condemn the quality of work in factories and corporations. Where once we assaulted the exploitation of man, now we decry the destruction of nature as well. How much long can we let corporations run us?” She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike against an “unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged.” She was involved in the New Haven defense of Bobby Seale during his murder trial in 1970, as the lead scheduler of student monitors.
Last week we reported about Anna Minkinow, a Tulane student who brought a complaint against a fellow student for raping her in a dorm and then mounted a campus protest when he was found guilty of sexual misconduct, but neither expelled nor suspended.
This afternoon an anonymous commenter passed along word that Minkinow has started a blog. Here’s how she describes her project:
MY NAME IS ANNA, AND, AS OF JULY 2007, I BECAME A SEXUAL ASSAULT SURVIVOR. AFTER MY ATTACKER BEAT THE UNIVERSITY JUDICIAL SYSTEM AND A WHIRLWIND OF AGONIES, POLITICS, AND LOSSES FOLLOWED, I BECAME A NEW TYPE OF SURVIVOR. THIS IS THE PROCESS BY WHICH I AM BECOMING A DIFFERENT TYPE OF SURVIVOR THAN I WAS FOR THE NINE MONTHS IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING THE ATTACK. THESE THOUGHTS, ACTIVISM PROJECTS, AND MOLTEN ENERGIES ARE HOW I WILL ENSURE THAT THERE WILL BE AN UNPRECEDENTED CHANGE NONE CAN IGNORE.
We’ll be following Anna’s blog, and we thank the commenter for passing along the link.
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.
“A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.” –Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals
(via Cambridge Common)
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.
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.
About two dozen students at Ohio’s Ashland University have staged an overnight sit-in to protest a decision to bar students from take Ancient Greek to fulfill their foreign language requirement.
Ashland does not offer Ancient Greek, but students have the option of taking courses in the language at nearby Ashland Theological Seminary. In mid-April, the college’s faculty senate voted 19-15 that such students will have to take a modern language as well. The question is still under review by Ashland administrators.
Senior Bobby DeSeyn, a protest leader, said in a statement that the faculty senate vote reflected a “blatant de-evolution of academics” and a “disregard for student opinion.”
The sit-in was held at Ashland’s foreign language faculty offices.
An anti-abortion group at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point put up a display of four thousand white crosses on a campus lawn last week, symbolizing the four thousand fetuses that they say are aborted each day. Stevens Point student Roderick King objected to the installation, saying that because abortion is a constitutional right, “you don’t have the right to challenge it. … Do not put this in front of all of us. This is not your right.” He then pulled several hundred of the crosses out of the ground before being convinced to leave peacefully.
This was by all accounts a minor event. Leaders in “Pointers for Life,” the group that put up the crosses, told the Wausau Daily Herald that their displays are often targeted by vandals. But the incident has received wide coverage among conservative blogs and media outlets, in part because King is one of nineteen members of the UWSP student senate.
The prominent conservative legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy described King as a student government official in their story on the incident. Michelle Malkin identified him as a student government senator. Many other sites called him a student government leader or simply a student leader. The group that put up the crosses has called on King to resign or be removed from his student government office.
King has written a letter to the Stevens Point Journal rejecting the calls for his resignation, and saying that he was “not acting in the name of UWSP Student Government Association, but as an individual who believes one person’s right to freedom of speech stops when it infringes on another person’s right to a secular education.”
Twenty international students at the University of Sussex in England have been banned from taking final exams because they have fallen behind in their tuition payments.
More than 150 Sussex students staged a protest against the decision late last week. The president of the university’s student union described the proposed payment schedules and the timing of the university’s action as unreasonable.
The protest follows a successful Facebook campaign on behalf of one of the students, Luqman Onikosi of Nigeria. When Onikosi’s sponsor in England died, he was unable to raise the money to pay the fees himself.
The university recently agreed to allow Onikosi to take his exams and put off payment until September.
Update: A follow-up protest is planned for this Friday, May 9.
A protester wounded in the Kent State shootings, which took place 38 years ago yesterday, remembers that afternoon.
We have received word from a commenter that there have been arrests in the UNC anti-sweatshop sit-ins. The UPI reports that five students were arrested today after they moved their protest from the building’s rotunda to the chancellor’s office.
Neither source provides details on the charges filed. As of 5:30 pm Eastern time the UNC sit-in blog had not been updated with news of the arrests.
Update: Minutes after the above was posted, the sit-in blog was updated with a detailed report on this morning’s events.
May 5 Update: The link I provided earlier has been taken down, but a fuller report and other materials have been posted. Check the sit-in blog’s main page for updates.
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.
This month is the 40th anniversary of the Paris uprisings of 1968, launched by students and quickly joined by workers and others. Here’s a pretty good short introduction to those events, and to their place in cultural history.
Two hundred students at Mississippi’s Delta State University walked out of classes yesterday morning to rally against planned budget cuts at the state’s small public colleges. Among those protesting were DSU’s Statesman and “Fighting Okra“ mascots, both in full costume.
Mississippi’s public higher education trustees have announced plans to divert funding from several smaller institutions to the flagship University of Mississippi. Ole Miss will receive nearly $2 million in additional funding next year, while DSU stands to lose $175,000. “They are taking money away from a school that produces teachers and nurses,” undergraduate Samantha Styers said, “and giving it a school that produces lawyers and engineers.”
The incoming chair of the state’s College Board said the entire system is “grossly underfunded, and that’s making us have to make very painful choices.”
Nathan Duff, editor of DSU’s Daily Statesman and an organizer of the walkout, said that the protests were not over: “we’re going to keep the pressure on.”
The College Board is slated to consider tuition increases at its next meeting in May.
Eight students were arrested last month when an anti-war protest at New York’s Binghamton University ended in an off-campus confrontation with police.
The protest, which began on the BU campus, culminated in a march on an army recruiting center in a nearby strip mall. Police claim that the march was the cause of two accidents on a nearby roadway, and that one protester jumped in front of a moving patrol car.
When the first arrest was made, other marchers began yelling. Officers contend that there was shoving as well. Police used pepper spray, and ultimately arrested nine protesters, including eight students.
Protesters and members of Binghamton’s undergraduate and graduate student governments met with university administrators last week and received pledges that none of the students will face campus judiciary action as a result of the incident. Criminal charges, including obstructing governmental administration in the second degree, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct, are still pending.
The 31 protesters arrested in the Penn State admin building sit-in earlier this month will be charged with “defiant criminal trespass,” police announced Friday. The charge is a third-degree misdemeanor, and carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison and a $2,500 fine.
Penn State United Students Against Sweatshops plans a rally for the arrested students at 2 pm this Thursday, May 1.
An online petition in support of the students and contact information for the president of PSU can be found here.
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 administration of Evergreen State College has suspended that school’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society.
In February, students and others clashed with campus police after a Dead Prez concert in the university gym, overturning and vandalizing a police car. After that incident, the university declared a moratorium on on-campus concerts. In March, SDS held an anti-war folk music performance in defiance of the ban.
The chapter has been suspended for the remainder of the academic year and placed on probation until January 2009. According to an SDS press release, “the suspension means that SDS has lost its budget and office, can no longer hold meetings, book events, or use school facilities and equipment.”
An interview with two members of the suspended SDS chapter has been posted at the Dissident Voice.
The anti-sweatshop sit-in at the University of North Carolina that began last Thursday is now in its sixth day. About a dozen students spent Monday night outside the university chancellor’s office, and the university has so far made no move to expel them from the building.
Protest organizers have set up a blog where they are providing regular updates on the protest as it develops. That site also includes information on the sit-in’s demands, links to press coverage of the action, a roster of individuals and groups who have endorsed the Designated Suppliers Program campaign, and a series of short profiles of the members of the “occupying force.”
It also features a YouTube video of the university chancellor dancing to the protesters’ chants.
Police seized the cell phones of the nine students arrested in last week’s anti-sweatshop sit-in at the U of Montana, and have yet to return them.
According to the chief of the UM office of public safety, the phones are evidence — he says “students were using the cell phones, some to take pictures within the building, some to communicate with the rally outside, helping them and facilitating the crime of disorderly conduct.”
Protesters claim that the seizures were intended to disrupt future protests. Ella Torti, a UM sophomore and one of the nine arrestees, told the local newspaper that she believes that the police are ”trying to hinder our ability to organize.”
I find this YouTube video of a “Freeze” action at the University of Vermont last Friday interesting for a couple of reasons.
First, I’m fascinated by the connections between contemporary Improv Everywhere style “actions” and pre-internet campus pranks and playfulness, and this blends those traditions in a compelling way.
Second, the freeze commemorated a 1988 administration building takeover — that a protest from that era is what’s being memorialized gives us yet another reminder that today’s activists have far more on their minds than the sixties.
As I noted yesterday, three anti-sweatshop sit-ins have ended in arrests in the last week, but the Chancellor of UNC, where the most recent protest is still ongoing, is taking a different tack, at least for now. When he left his office yesterday evening, he went so far as to clap along with the chanting protesters, and wish them a “nice weekend.”
The Charlotte Observer has made an interesting response to the UNC protest — on Friday it posted an extended excerpt from the US Supreme Court’s 1969 Tinker v. Des Moines decision on its website. Tinker overturned a local school district’s ban on the wearing of black armbands to protest the Vietnam War, and is, as the paper notes, one of the court’s most important students’ rights rulings.
Here’s a quote from the Tinker ruling, snipped from the excerpt posted at the Charlotte Observer site:
In our system, state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism. School officials do not possess absolute authority over their students. Students in school as well as out of school are “persons” under our Constitution. They are possessed of fundamental rights which the State must respect, just as they themselves must respect their obligations to the State. In our system, students may not be regarded as closed-circuit recipients of only that which the State chooses to communicate. They may not be confined to the expression of those sentiments that are officially approved.
The full text of the Tinker decision and an audio file of the oral argument in the case can be found here.
In the wake of a series of campus protests, the administration of the University of Ottawa is circulating a draft code of student conduct that defines a new class of “non-academic” infractions. The last two years have seen an unusual upsurge of activism at Ottawa, with students organizing around issues ranging from “high tuition fees to language rights and campus safety. The most recent protests have concerned the corporatization of the campus and the elimination of ”a controversial course on social activism” taught by a physics professor.
The vice president of the Ottawa student government is described as concerned that the university is “trying to push through the code of conduct while students are preoccupied with exams and anticipating the summer break.”
May 24 Update: A follow-up report on the code struggle appears here.
