You are currently browsing the monthly archive for March 2009.
A selection of student activist news from fifty years ago this month, courtesy of the archives of the New York Times.
March 1, 1959: High school students in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil begin a strike against increases in private school tuition. By five days later of all the city’s students are participating in the strike. Meanwhile, two hundred students at England’s Cambridge University march in opposition to the appearance of an “ugly” new building on their campus.
March 2, 1959: Crowds in La Paz burn an American flag and stone the US embassy in response to reports that an American diplomat has called for the country of Bolivia to be broken up. One student is shot and killed by police in the demonstrations.
March 3, 1959: Nearly two hundred students are arrested in Bogota, Colombia during the course of mass protests against increases in bus fares.
March 4, 1959: Professors and college administrators attending the National Conference on Higher Education in Chicago pass a resolution calling for the repeal of a law that requires college students to sign an oath of loyalty to the United States before receiving federal financial aid.
March 5, 1959: Police in Goiania, Brazil kill one student and injure 160 more when they break up a demonstration against tuition hikes. Students riot in protest of the violence the following day, setting fire to two buildings.
March 7, 1959: Tens of thousands of Catholic students march in Vienna, Austria to protest plans to stage a communist World Youth Festival in that city in July.
March 14, 1959: A three-day conference of campus newspaper editors, sponsored by the United States National Student Association, opens in New York City. More than one hundred student editors from around the United States are in attendance at the conference, which will become an annual event.
March 16, 1959: Forty Yale undergraduates are arrested and the entire undergraduate student body is placed on probation after two snowball fights, one at the New Haven St. Patrick’s Day parade, turned into riots.
March 18, 1959: The twenty-one black students in Virginia’s Warren County High School enter their second month as the school’s only attendees. The federal government ordered the school opened on an integrated basis in February, and since then none of the school’s one thousand white students have attended class.
March 27, 1959: Marching bands from two black high schools drop out of a ceremony honoring Richmond, Virginia’s minor league baseball team to protest segregated seating at the event.
March 28, 1959: Six hundred students stage a rally against nuclear weapons in New York City’s Bryant Park. Speakers include AJ Muste, Bayard Rustin, and Norman Thomas. Seventy-five of the students march overnight to the rally site from outside the city; some are detained by police en route.
March 30, 1959: Fifteen thousand anti-nuclear protesters march in London, England, demanding that Britain unilaterally give up its atomic weapons and that the United States close its British military bases. The march includes a substantial student contingent.
A big victory for students’ rights: a federal judge has blocked a Pennsylvania prosecutor’s plans to file child pornography charges against three teenage girls who stored suggestive photos of themselves on their cell phones.
Two of the three were wearing opaque bras in the photographs at issue, and the third was topless. None was engaging in sexual activity. The three were among twenty students in Pennsylvania’s Tunkhannock School District who were contacted by the prosecutor after school officials confiscated their cell phones, searched them, and found nude or revealing photos on them.
The prosecutor told the twenty students that they had a choice — they could sign up for an ongoing educational program on “what it means to be a girl in today’s society” and mandatory drug tests, or they could be charged with possession and distribution of child pornography, a felony.
Seventeen of the students signed up for the program. The other three sued. And yesterday a federal judge took their side.
The prosecutor, reached for comment yesterday, refused to say whether he would appeal the judge’s decision.
A student who prosecutors say hacked into his university’s computer network last fall, raising students’ grades and cutting their tuition charges, has been found guilty of five federal charges.
The government says that Marcus Barrington, then a student at Florida A&M University, conspired with a group of other students to alter fellow students’ grades and change residency records from out-of-state to in-state. The university is said to have lost more than $100,000 in out-of-state tuition revenue as a result.
Barrington’s two co-defendants, Lawrence Secrease and Christopher Jacquette, filed guilty pleas. Both testified against him in his trial, which ended Friday. The jury took just two hours to find Barrington guilty on all charges.
Barrington’s attorney made a statement after the verdict. “It’s sad to see these young people get in trouble especially on this kind of conduct,” he said. “In my day, it would have been a cheating incident and today it’s a federal crime. I just don’t understand what the difference is.”
Barrington faces a possible prison term of nearly thirty years when he is sentenced in June.
(via UWire)
Here’s another great resource — the National Coalition Against Censorship.
We’ve linked to their blog in our sidebar, but feel free to poke around their main site, too.They’ve got lots of stuff going on, including various projects run through their Youth Free Expression Network.
It was announced over the weekend that administrators at Boston College had vetoed a planned campus appearance by former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers. The student sponsors of the engagement, who included the BC chapter of the College Democrats, were said to be seeking an off-campus venue to move the speech to.
Now comes word that the event will take place on campus as originally planned, though without Ayers in attendance. Ayers will remain in Chicago, where he lives, and speak via satellite hookup to the audience at the college’s Devlin Hall.
His speech, at 6 o’clock this evening, will be open to BC students, faculty, and staff only.
Postscript: A separate Ayers speech in an educational venue has just been cancelled outright. He had been scheduled to give a talk at Naperville North High School in Illinois next week, but his invitation has been withdrawn. A statement from the school district’s superintendent cited “the level of emotion and outrage” that had greeted news of the speech as the reason for the cancellation.
Update: The BC administration nixed the video link, too. Here’s the chief of the campus police, Robert Morse: “It is canceled, there is no telecast. It’s virtually the same thing, it would be viewed by the community as the same thing.” The speech organizers held a forum on academic freedom instead.
Second Update: BC cancelled Ayers’ speech because of alleged links between the Weather Underground and the notorious 1970 murder of Boston police officer Walter Schroeder. But Schroeder was killed in the course of a bank robbery that was intended to fund the Black Panthers, not the Weather Underground, and there is apparently no evidence of any Weather connection to the crime.
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