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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!
I’m in Minneapolis right now, participating in the fall leadership conference of the Minnesota State College Student Association. The MSCSA graciously invited me out to conduct a workshop, give an address, and take some questions, and they’ve been wonderful hosts. I’ll be hanging out here until tomorrow, seeing some more of the conference and continuing the conversation informally.
Thanks to everyone in MSCSA for giving me such a warm, thoughtful welcome!
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.)
The United States Student Association Congress is underway this afternoon in Madison, Wisconsin. I’ll be arriving there late tonight, and staying through until the bitter end. If any of my readers are going to be there and would like to meet up, keep an eye out, or have one of the USSA staff point me out.
I’m hoping to get a chance to post on the Congress from the scene. If I don’t, look for a wrapup after I return, and increased posting frequency thereafter.
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.
In the last couple of weeks we’ve linked to three articles from WireTap magazine — a discussion of student organizing around sustainable food practices on campus, an overview of today’s student anti-nuclear organizing, and yesterday an interview with youth vote expert Michael Connery. Each of our three posts were quick heads-ups, but the articles we linked to were strong, smart, and detailed.
WireTap describes itself as a “news and culture magazine by and for young people interested in social change, and a place to “hear from young activists as they articulate their vision and describe their work that turns individual hopes into collective, political possibilities.”
They’re a great resource, and a great read. We’ve just added them to our 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.
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 United States Student Association writes with the following news:
On Thursday, the House passed the Veterans Educational Assistance Act by a vote of 256-166. The bill will provide benefits up to the level of tuition at the most expensive public in-state colleges and universities, a housing allowance based on the cost of living for the area, and a $1,000 a year textbook stipend. The bill would be paid for with a .5% tax increase on the wealthy (individuals making more than 500,000 a year or couples making more than $1M a year). To find out how your representative voted on the new G.I. bill find out here.
The Senate is expected to take up the bill next week as part of their War Supplemental. It has 57 co-sponsors in the Senate. A list of co-sponsors can be found here.
The President has indicated that he will veto any increased spending beyond his request for War Supplemental funding, stating that it is expensive and will make it harder to retain forces in time of war. However, it remains to be seen if he will carry out a veto on this bill which many veterans groups have been in support of.
We will keep you updated as Congress moves on the G.I. bill. If you have questions or would like to help take action contact the USSA office at (202) 640-6570 or at USSA@usstudents.org.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 anti-sweatshop sit-in at UNC is heading into its second weekend, with no end in sight.
Last weekend the UNC administration closed the administration building down over the weekend — they allowed students who were sitting in to stay, and they allowed students to leave at any time, but they refused entry to new students from Friday afternoon until Monday morning.
This week protest organizers have a new strategy to bulk up the weekend sit-in contingent — they’re throwing a dance party in the admin building rotunda on Friday night. Here’s the latest entry from their blog:
HEY ALL.
So tomorrow (Friday) we are throwing a slammin’ dance party at our new pad… South Building. At 6pm. But you must get there early! Before 5pm.
Our house is PERFECT for it… it’s got a rotunda-esque dance floor and great acoustics.
YOU WON’T WANT TO MISS THIS.
So here’s the deal… there is going to be really tight security at our place. We are hiring police to patrol the area. But don’t feel threatened. This is only a precautionary measure to ensure everyone’s safety. Also, we are expecting HUGE attendance, so security will help keep track of numbers.
THIS IS IMPORTANT…. EVERYONE WHO WANTS TO ATTEND THIS AWESOME PARTY HAS TO BE IN SOUTH BUILDING BEFORE 5PM ON FRIDAY. We are going to close down the place after 5, and no one else will be let in. So you better get here early, because it’s going to get crowded fast.
THE DANCE PARTY WILL BEGIN EXACTLY AT 6. It will end… never?
Heck. Stay the entire weekend if you like. We have plenty of floor space for you to crash with your friends. But if you want to leave early, you can. Although, we will feel sad.
SPREAD THE WORD. Join the facebook event for it. Much love. Buh bye.
(remember to get here before 5pm… Friday the 25th)
As of Friday morning, thirty people had confirmed for the dance party on Facebook, with another four hundred yet to respond to the invitation.
The students’ union at England’s University of Manchester held a “Reclaim the University” march yesterday to protest the growing corporatization of university administration. Tom Skinnner, the union’s general secretary, said that
The university should be run for students and research and education and nothing else. It is now run like a business. Businesses are always asking themselves two questions: how much cheaper can we do things without losing customers and how much can we charge without losing customers? Some students are on courses where 20 years ago they would have got 200 hours a year — but now that’s down to 86.
The union has created a Reclaim the Uni Facebook group which at this writing has more than seven hundred members.
Shakesville reports on an event at The College of New Jersey in which men literally walked a mile in women’s shoes to raise awareness of rape and to emphasize male responsibility to fight sexual violence.
Shakes’ favorite part? The article that alerted her to the event was titled “OMG Shoes.”
(Good discussion in comments about the slightly iffy aspects of this action, too.)
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.
Ten thousand people participated in Colorado University’s annual marijuana smoke-out on the campus quad yesterday, twice as many as toked up one year ago. In the past, campus cops have photographed offenders or turned on the sprinkler system, but yesterday, outnumbered 500-to-1, they simply gave up.
Because of the scale of the event, it became a magnet for students promoting other causes. CU junior Max Lichtenstein handed out more than a hundred Rice Krispies treats attached to flyers asking students to call the White House to protest the genocide in Darfur … “Tomorrow, when you’re sober.”
Men were invited to march alongside women for the entirety of Columbia University and Barnard College’s joint Take Back the Night march for the first time this year. (In the past, men have been permitted to join the march en route.)
A representative of Columbia Men Against Violence said that the inclusion of men for the full march was “an experiment.” A march organizer said that there would be a women-only section at the head of the march, and that the decision was made in part because “we recognize that men are survivors of sexual assault.”
An estimated five hundred students participated in Thursday night’s march.
A blog on the University of Montana anti-sweatshop sit-in. The most recent entry, from Friday, is a recap of the sit-in and the issues behind it.
We reported yesterday on an anti-sweatshop sit-in at the University of Montana. Now comes word of a similar sit-in on Tuesday at Penn State that ended with 31 arrests, another at Appalachian State University last week, and a fourth underway yesterday at the University of North Carolina. All of the protests are directed at convincing the universities to adopt the Designated Supplier Program for university licensed apparel.
Update: The UNC sit-in continued overnight, and an article in the campus’s Daily Tar Heel quotes university Chancellor James Moeser as saying the protesters “are probably not going to be arrested.” The protest, he said, is “part of our tradition of free speech.”
Further Update: The University of Montana sit-in was reportedly the first on that campus since the Vietnam War. In related news, Washington State University averted protests this week by agreeing to sign on to the Designated Suppliers Program.
Yet Another Update: A detailed rundown of the Appalachian State sit-in can be found here. That blog, wataugawatch, is continuing to follow the story in the aftermath of the arrests.
Nine student protesters at the University of Montana were handcuffed and arrested Wednesday evening, ending a sit-in in the university president’s office that had begun at noon that day. According to the Missoulian newspaper:
The nine people arrested are members of Students for Social and Economic Justice, a group that wants the university to adopt the “Designated Suppliers Program” promoted by the Workers Rights Consortium, a nonprofit labor rights group that monitors and investigates working conditions around the world. The DSP identifies manufacturing companies and factories that provide good working conditions.
The protesters were charged with misdemeanor counts of criminal trespassing and disorderly conduct and released.
A student protest at West Virginia’s Concord University has convinced the college’s board of directors to seek a 3.7% hike in tuition and fees for next year, instead of the 6.7% increase that had originally been announced. Student government vice president Curtis Kearns says the change will save students $300,000.
