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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!
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.
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.”
From The New York Times comes word that small private colleges, anxious to increase enrollments and tuition revenue, are launching women’s wrestling teams to attract female students.
Women’s wrestling got a boost with the inclusion of the sport in the 2004 olympics, but today only five colleges in the United States field teams. Most of those teams are newly-formed, and three more will be starting up this fall.
Five thousand girls wrestled for high school teams in the US in 2006-07, and one college’s coach says her team brings in “20 to 25 extra students who normally wouldn’t have looked at Jamestown College” each year.
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.
Elon University senior Andrew Bennett has pledged to donate fifty thousand dollars to his school’s “Safe Rides” program, a service that provides students with free rides home from parties and bars on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights.
“Safe Rides” is a student-operated service that currently gives rides to about a hundred students a night. The program currently operates two cars, and Bennett’s donation will allow them to increase staffing and publicity. In the wake of the gift, the university announced that it would be donating a van to Safe Rides to allow it to extend its reach still further.
Story via SAFER Campus, which also covers the possible shutdown of a similar service at Coastal Carolina University. One distinction between the two programs that SAFER Campus doesn’t mention — Elon’s is student-run, while CCU’s is an administration-sponsored project.
There’s a new addition to the “Resources” section of our blogroll this morning — SAFER Campus.
SAFER Campus is a non-profit organization that supports student campaigns to improve sexual assault prevention and response on their campuses. Founded at Columbia University in 1999 and incorporated the following year, SAFER Campus provides organizing trainings, mentoring, and publications to student activists throughout the United States.
On top of everything else, they’ve got a great blog. Check ‘em out.
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.
Morehouse College in Atlanta is the only all-male historically black college in the United States. This spring, for the first time in its 141-year history, its valedictorian is a white man.
MSNBC has the story, and the blog Stereohyped has some thoughts. (Both links via Racialicious.)
At this writing, Melissa Bruen’s article on the sexual assault she suffered during the U Conn Spring Weekend has received close to fifty comments on the Daily Campus website. (Free registration required.)
Of those comments, more than a dozen are flames. Some are critical of Bruen’s journalistic integrity. Others suggest that she invented the story of the assault. Several commenters insult Bruen’s appearance, or the clothes she wore in the photograph that accompanied the article.
It should be stressed that Bruen is characterized in third-party reporting as having been bruised in the attack. She describes the attack as having taken place in front of a large number of witnesses, and herself as having run from her attackers barefoot and screaming. She reported the assault to campus police while she was still on the scene.
And yet she is accused by commenters of having made up the incident as a “cry for fame.” Her account is described as having troubling “loose ends.” One commenter who appears to believe her story refers to the assaults as “minor shenanigans.”
And then there are the insults. One commenter calls her a “fat ho,” another a “stupid BITCH.” The shirt she wears in the photograph is described as being “in very poor taste,” and her facial expression as “rediculous” (sic).
Most of the comments to the article are supportive, and many challenge the critics with cogent arguments. But the fact that Bruen was attacked so harshly serves as a reminder of the abuse that women who speak publicly about sexual violence face, and underscores Bruen’s courage in coming forward.
Ten days ago Melissa Bruen, editor in chief of the University of Connecticut Daily Campus, was sexually assaulted by two men on a campus walking path while others cheered. Last Friday she described the assault in a powerful front-page story in her own newspaper.
Bruen was grabbed on a well-lit campus path late on the night of April 25, during the U Conn Spring Weekend. She managed to get loose and knock her assailant to the ground, but as she punched him, a crowd of men gathered. Several of them restrained her, allowing him to escape.
When she told them that he had assaulted her, a man in the crowd asked “you think that was assault?” and pulled down her top. Other men then cheered as he grabbed her breasts. When she fought back again, she was quickly surrounded. Bruised and screaming, she was eventually able to break away a second time, and to find a friend who helped her notify police.
The assault on Bruen was one of three acts of sexual violence reported on the U Conn campus that weekend. Fifty-one arrests were made during Spring Weekend this year, but none of her assailants were among them. Bruen was able to give police descriptions of the attackers, but due to the large number of students on the walk at the time, the police were unable to identify them.
Bruen, a senior, will graduate from U Conn this Sunday.
Update: I have revised the above post to provide more detail on the two assaults. The Hartford Courant has run a story on the incident, which can be found here. Police are asking that any witnesses to the assaults contact them at (860) 429-6024.
Later Update: I have written a follow-up post on this subject, addressing the abuse to which Bruen has been subjected in web comments to her Daily Campus piece.
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.
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 University of Georgia has been buffeted by sexual harassment scandals in the last year. One professor has resigned, another was placed on administrative leave, and the women’s golf coach left under a cloud.
In response, the university has initiated a massive restructuring of its sexual harassment investigation procedures, a restructuring that has attracted criticism and is still ongoing.
Given this context, the administration’s decision to invite Clarence Thomas to be the undergraduate commencement speaker this spring has proven predictably controversial.
Two years ago an undergrad at the University of Portland, a private Catholic college, asked a male friend to walk her back to her dorm after a party. He claims they had consensual sex when they got there. She says he raped her.
Some time later, she reported the incident to the campus police, but the university brought no charges against the alleged assailant. When she criticized them and asked why no action had been taken, she received a letter from the university’s judicial coordinator that read as follows:
Based upon my findings in my investigation, I am unable to determine if a sexual assault occurred. I have reason to believe that intercourse occurred, but both parties admit to drinking and therefore, consent—or lack of consent—is difficult to determine. Given these facts, there are possible violations for which you could be charged.
Students at the university are now pressing for new campus judiciary policies to ensure that students who come forward with charges of sexual assault are not themselves targeted by campus judiciary authorities. “The school owes it to the students to do everything they can to make sure rapes are reported,” says junior Devon Goss.
The university reported no instances of sexual assault for the year in which the incident took place, although the federal Violence Against Women Act requires that campuses disclose all such allegations, no matter what their disposition.
(Via Feministing.)
I’ve just stumbled across a guide to running feminist campaigns for student government offices, published by feministcampus.org.
It’s short, but it’s packed with practical information, and each section concludes with a series of questions to ask yourself about how to proceed. Well worth a look for anyone thinking about running an activist campaign for a student government position.
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.)
