An adjunct professor at Texas A&M International University has been fired for publicizing the names of six suspected plagiarizers.

Professor Loye Young’s syllabus declared that he would “promptly and publicly fail and humiliate anyone caught lying, cheating or stealing. That includes academic dishonesty, copyright violations, software piracy, or any other form of dishonesty.” (It is not clear from published reports or Young’s own statements whether the syllabus made any explicit reference to plagiarism, or defined the terms used above in any way.)

When Young found evidence, less than halfway through the semester, that six of his students had plagiarized portions of an assignment, he submitted failing grades in the course for each of them, reported them to the university, and posted their names on his blog.

It appears that Young, who owns a computer business, had never taught before, and that he may not have consulted with anyone in the university’s faculty or administration before publishing the students’ names.

Within two days of his posting the students’ names on his blog, Young was fired for possible violations of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), a federal law that limits the release of students’ educational records.

The students’ cases have been referred to an honors council for review, and the law blog The Volokh Conspiracy has opened a discussion about the due process and academic freedom questions raised by the incident.

In 1969, student protesters destroyed a 2500-year-old Egyptian sarcophagus on display at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montreal.

For the last four decades the pieces of the coffin — eight large fragments and hundreds of smaller shards — have been in storage, but three months ago, conservators began the work of restoring it and the mummy it housed. The sarcophagus will be featured in a museum exhibit that opens in December, and will then be returned to the college, now part of the University of Quebec in Montreal.

Google and scholarly searches have turned up no information about the 1969 protest in which the sarcophagus was damaged, or about how the damage took place.

Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington. It began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston.

It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give 5 and 10 and 20 to the cause.

It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation’s apathy, who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep.

It drew strength from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on doors of perfect strangers, and from the millions of Americans who volunteered and organised and proved that more than two centuries later a government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not perished from the Earth.

This is your victory.

–Barack Obama, November 4, 2008.

The president of the University of Florida’s ”Gators for McCain,” one of the nation’s largest pro-McCain student organizations, is voting for Barack Obama.

In about eighteen hours I’m flying to Ohio, where I’ll be doing campaign work through to the election, and I’ve got a lot to take care of between now and then, so I’m unlikely to post again before Saturday afternoon at the earliest. 

You leave a link to work that you’re doing or work that you’ve heard about in the comments, and I’ll bump the news up to a post of its own when I get back to the keyboard tomorrow.

An effigy of Barack Obama was found hanged from a tree on the campus of the University of Kentucky today. The effigy was discovered and reported by a faculty member early this morning, and an investigation by campus and local police is underway.

In a statement, UK president Lee Todd called the act “despicable.”

This is the second such incident to occur on a college campus this year. In late September, an effigy of Obama was hanged on the campus of George Fox University, a small Christian college in Oregon.

Gallup has a long essay up analyzing the data on youth voting in 2008. In short, they’re expecting youth turnout to rise in line with increased turnout throughout the electorate this year, but say that if the youth vote is particularly high, it could represent a 1-2 point shift in Obama’s favor on election day.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting on Rock the Vote’s efforts to combat voter suppression among college student voters.

There’s a great trove of data on the youth vote past and present at the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.

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!