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An adjunct professor at Texas A&M International University has been fired for publicizing the names of six suspected plagiarizers.
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!
I’m going to be giving a keynote address at the fall conference of the Minnesota State College Student Association this weekend, and one of the things I’ll be talking about is the effect of voting rights on the history of American student activism.
Until the passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment in 1971, the voting age in the US was 21, which means that throughout the huge waves of campus activism of the 1930s and 1960s, the vast majority of American college students were denied the vote on the basis of their age.
The effect of this disfranchisement on the course of student activism has received little attention in most histories of American student protest, and the effect of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment on the course of later activism still less. It’s a topic I devote a bit of attention to in my dissertation, and one I’m looking forward to discussing with the folks in Minneapolis.
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.
Via the blog Bitch PhD comes a link to an online Student Voting Rights Guide from the Brennan Center for Justice.
It’s an interactive guide — you specify whether you’re voting on campus or from your pre-college hometown, and it shows you the regulations on registration, residency, identification, and absentee voting for all fifty states. The rules show up as a color-coded map, and you can click through for specific information.
It’s a great resource for activists planning GOTV campaigns. Spread the word!
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.
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…
The student government of York University in Toronto has voted to deny recognition to pro-life clubs and organizations.
According to an article in the National Post, at least four other colleges — Capilano College, the University of British Columbia Okanagan, Lakehead University, and Carleton University — have taken similar action in recent months.
The Post also reports that the Canadian Federation of Students has passed a statement resolving that “member locals that refuse to allow anti-choice organizations access to their resources and space be supported.”
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.
The Secular Student Alliance has announced its annual awards for the best atheist clubs at North American colleges and universities. The awards are granted in the categories Best Service Project, Best Media Appearance, Best New Affiliate, Best Website, and Best Overall Affiliate, and come with cash prizes of $300 to $500.
This year’s honorees include the Atheists, Agnostics, and Freethinkers of the University of Illinois, who conducted a joint relief-work trip to New Orleans with members of that college’s Campus Crusade for Christ.
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.)
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.
The National Student News Service has posted a roundup of materials relating to youth and student voting in this week’s Oregon Democratic primary.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
As we noted last week, the US Supreme Court recently upheld Indiana’s strict voter ID law, raising concerns about the disfranchisement of out-of-state college students. Reports from yesterday’s primary voting suggest that those concerns were at least partially warranted.
College students often vote in their college communities but maintain driver’s licenses from their states of origin. Under Indiana law, out-of-state licenses are not valid ID for voting.
Public university students with out-of-state licenses were able to vote without incident yesterday, as their college ID cards are regarded as “state-issued” identification for the purposes of the law. Student PIRG poll-watchers did, however, report a number of incidents in which private-college students were turned away. One PIRG representative further noted that news of the stringent ID requirements likely kept some students away from the polls altogether.
A major police operation on the San Diego State University campus led to the arrest of 75 students on drug charges yesterday. Fifty pounds of marijuana and four pounds of cocaine were seized in the sting, which involved seven SDSU fraternities.
The arrests were the culmination of six months of undercover work in SDSU’s frats, initiated after a 19-year-old student died of a cocaine and alcohol overdose last year. All of those arrested were men, and approximately twenty were charged with drug sales rather than possession.
On Tuesday SDSU suspended six fraternities — Lambda Chi Alpha, Phi Kappa Psi, Phi Kappa Theta, Theta Chi, Sigma Alpha Epsilon and Sigma Alpha Mu — that were implicated in the case. All of the arrested students have been suspended, and those who lived in campus housing are being evicted.
Richard Peltz, a professor at the University of Arkansas Bowen School of Law, has filed a lawsuit against two students who called him a racist.
The lawsuit names Valerie Nation and Chrishuana Clark, both third-year law students who have been involved with the school’s Black Law Students Association, along with Eric Spencer Buchanan, president of the W. Harold Flowers Law Society. The organizations are also named in the suit.
In the fall of 2005, Peltz gave a lecture in his constitutional law class that March 2007 letter circulated by the Black Law Students Association later described as a “hateful and inciting speech … used to attack and demean the black students in his class.” In light of this and other incidents, the BLSA asked that Peltz be reprimanded by the law school, barred from teaching required courses “where Black students would be required to have him as a professor,” and made to attend diversity training.
In his lawsuit, Peltz contends that these and other “false accusations of racism damaged plaintiff’s reputation, character and integrity in the Arkansas legal community.”
Last Thursday an attorney for Clark filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, contending that “an accusation by a plaintiff that a defendant has called him a racist, in the context of public discourse at a law school,” will not “support a claim for defamation.” The motion contends that Peltz “has embarked on a personal vendetta against two black law students and two predominantly black organizations based on what he perceives as their opposition to him or to his political views and legal theories.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
A bill passed by a committee of the Arizona state legislature would prohibit groups “based in whole or in part on race-based criteria” from operating at the the state’s public colleges and universities. The bill would also ban courses and “school sponsored activities” that, taken “as a whole,” serve to “denigrate, disparage, or overtly encourage dissent from the values of American democracy and western civilization,” and would be binding on high schools as well as colleges.
“This bill basically says, ‘You’re here. Adopt American values,’” one state legislator told a reporter. “If you want a different culture, then fine, go back to that culture.”
The text of the bill is online here.
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.
According to the ACLU, Harvard University’s campus police department has been conducting plainclothes surveillance of campus protests. They say undercover campus cops photographed participants in a March demonstration, and they’ve filed a Freedom of Information Act request to uncover whether the university is passing surveillance information to government agencies.
A student who was at the protest says “it’s a little unnerving to find Harvard undercover police spying and taking pictures of Harvard students on public property.”
(via Cambridge Common)
