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The parents of Tyler Clementi, the gay Rutgers first-year who killed himself last fall, say they want their son’s roommate prosecuted, but they don’t want him to receive too harsh a punishment.
Dharun Ravi is accused of streaming one of Clementi’s dorm-room hookups over the internet and attempting to broadcast another. Ravi used Twitter to brag about the invasion of privacy to friends and acquaintances.
Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge days later, shortly after complaining to dorm staff about Ravi. Ravi and a fellow student, Molly Wei, who is alleged to have participated in the prank, withdrew from Rutgers not long after Clementi’s suicide.
Ravi and Wei have been charged with two counts each of invasion of privacy, and prosecutors are believed to be considering hate crimes charges as well. Neither case has yet been brought to a grand jury. A prosecutor this week told a local newspaper that “the investigation is continuing.”
Students at the University of Arizona have installed a mock border fence, topped with barbed wire, in the middle of the campus.
The fence, which is seven feet tall and four hundred feet long, was installed by a coalition led by the UA chapter of No More Deaths, a humanitarian organization whose mission, according to the group, “is to end death and suffering on the U.S./Mexico border through civil initiative.”
The coalition that built the fence intend it as a protest not only of the wall at the US-Mexico border, but also of the wall separating Israel from the West Bank.
Students planned the project over a period of eight months, obtaining all necessary permits and permissions. The fence will be up on campus for ten days.
Old media, new media, whatever — nothing moves ad space like the curiously creepy blend of titillation and censure that is the “why are our daughters such skanks?” essay. The Wall Street Journal has the latest example of the genre, Jennifer Moses’ straightforwardly-named “Why Do We Let Them Dress Like That?”
Never mind that teen sex is actually down these days. Never mind that Moses offers no evidence to support any of her tangled theses. She’s got a lede that salivates over twelve-year-olds in minidresses and a dozen paragraphs of hand-wringing to follow it with, and that’s all she needs. It’s time to sell some wine! (And, since this is the WSJ, a hospital!)
Mary Elizabeth Williams has already dissected Moses’ silliness admirably, and I won’t rehash her points. (Go read.) But I do want to highlight the piece’s final paragraph, which is a real doozy:
But it’s easy for parents to slip into denial. We wouldn’t dream of dropping our daughters off at college and saying: “Study hard and floss every night, honey—and for heaven’s sake, get laid!” But that’s essentially what we’re saying by allowing them to dress the way they do while they’re still living under our own roofs.
Yes, that’s what all the short hemlines and dangly earrings and inexpertly-applied blush are leading up to. Our daughters are going to have sex. In college.
Sex. In college. What will they think of next?
This weekend is the Legislative Conference of the United States Student Association, the nation’s oldest and largest annual student organizing and lobbying event. It kicked off Friday night with a summit of state student association leaders, continued yesterday with a USSA board meeting and dinner speeches from activist and former White House official Van Jones and Stephanie Bloomingdale of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO, and continues through Tuesday’s National Student Lobby Day.
USSA is one of the nation’s indispensable student organizations, and Leg Con is — along with the group’s annual student Congress — one of the true high points of the USSA calendar. You can follow all the news and gossip this year by checking out the #LegCon11 hashtag on Twitter.
This will be my last Alexandra Wallace post, I promise.
On Friday Wallace’s family released a second statement to the Daily Bruin in which she apologized again for her anti-Asian video, and announced that she’s withdrawing from UCLA because of concern for her safety. Earlier that day, UCLA announced that Wallace would not be subject to campus judicial sanctions because of the video.
Here’s the text of Wallace’s second apology:
In an attempt to produce a humorous YouTube video, I have offended the UCLA community and the entire Asian culture. I am truly sorry for the hurtful words I said and the pain it caused to anyone who watched the video. Especially in the wake of the ongoing disaster in Japan, I would do anything to take back my insensitive words. I could write apology letters all day and night, but I know they wouldn’t erase the video from your memory, nor would they act to reverse my inappropriate action.
I made a mistake. My mistake, however, has lead to the harassment of my family, the publishing of my personal information, death threats, and being ostracized from an entire community. Accordingly, for personal safety reasons, I have chosen to no longer attend classes at UCLA.
This seems like an appropriate time to revisit some advice I offered in the wake of the Tyler Clementi incident last fall: Don’t be a jackass. It could ruin your life.
studentactivism.net 
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