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March 19 Update | Alexandra Wallace released a second apology yesterday, and announced that she’s dropping out of UCLA.

Alexandra Wallace, the UCLA student who filmed herself in an anti-Asian YouTube rant over the weekend, has released a statement of apology to the Daily Bruin student newspaper.

In the video, titled “Asians in the Library,” Wallace mocked UCLA’s “hordes” of Asian students, saying that they bring their “moms and their brothers and their sisters and their grandmas and their grandpas and their cousins and everybody that they know” to campus and talk noisily on their cell phones in the library.

Wallace’s imitation of one such student — “Ohhhh, ching chong ling long ting tong. Ohhhhh” — sparked both outrage and stunned amusement across the web today.

Here’s the apology:

“Clearly the original video posted by me was inappropriate. I cannot explain what possessed me to approach the subject as I did, and if I could undo it, I would. I’d like to offer my apology to the entire UCLA campus. For those who cannot find it within them to accept my apology, I understand.”

More to come.

Tuesday Update | Wallace’s apology came hours after she received “numerous death threats via email and phone,” the Daily Bruin reported this morning. Campus police have advised her to reschedule her final exams for her own safety.

Second Update | University officials are investigating whether Wallace violated the campus code of conduct, but rumors that she has been expelled from UCLA are false, and expulsion is highly unlikely.

Well … probably not. But it’s a weird story anyway.

Joel Klein was chancellor of the New York City public school system for eight and a half years. In that time, he only declared four snow days. And — according to a speech he gave last week — one of them was because Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg’s son had a paper due.

At a swank benefit luncheon for a local charter school organization, Klein said that he promised Caroline’s son Jack — named for his grandfather, President Kennedy — that if Jack’s mom agreed to serve as chief fundraiser for the city’s schools, he’d call a snow day sometime on Jack’s birthday. Caroline took the job (and eventually raised half a billion dollars in donations for the schools).

I’ll let the New York Daily News take the story from here:

“Seven years later,” Klein told the crowd, he hadn’t made good on “my side of the bet,” even though Jack was “reminding me, like, all the time.”

But it would be Jack’s mother who called in the favor. On a day when it was “really snowing bad,” Klein said Caroline phoned him and said, “It’s not [Jack’s] birthday, but he’s got a paper due tomorrow. A snow day would be awfully rich right now.” He added that one of the “snow days I declared was that.”

Now, this was most likely a joke. Caroline Kennedy probably wasn’t serious when she asked for the snow day, and Klein probably wasn’t serious when he said he’d offered it. (Though it’s worth noting that none of the local news outlets that covered the speech identified the story as a joke, and one prominent schools blog went so far as to follow up with Klein about its veracity.)

Joke or not, however, it’s a telling story in a few ways.

First, this is a joke about money and access to power. Recall that Klein this was a speech to, as Klein himself put it, “some of the most fortunate and privileged people in this country,” a speech delivered at a benefit luncheon for charter schools. This isn’t a heartlifting story about the value of giving for giving’s sake. It’s a joke about return on investment, and about the access that wealth, properly deployed, brings the wealthy.

Second, it’s a story about the ways that an economic elite with no connection to the public school system shapes that system. For Kennedy’s son was not, of course, educated in the city’s public schools. (He wanted a snow day because the privates usually follow the public schedule.)

And finally, it’s a story that the vast majority of New York City public school parents wouldn’t find funny at all. For most of us, a snow day means a scramble to figure out childcare. For a lot of us it means taking a day off work — and for too many it means losing a day’s pay. There are hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers for whom a snow day falls somewhere between a pain in the ass and a crisis.

But Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg isn’t one of them. Joel Klein isn’t one of them. And neither were any of the people he regaled with this story last week.

Evening Update | Alexandra Wallace has released an apology.

A white student’s video mocking Asians at UCLA has gone viral since it was posted to YouTube on Friday.

There’s a Facebook group, a bunch of response videos (some funny-but-unfortunately-sexist, some just gross, and some totally righteous), a tut-tutting statement from the university, a Y U NO meme, and on and on and on.

The inevitable AutoTune remix is really catchy, by the way. Be warned.

The full transcript can be found at Angry Asian Man, but here are some excerpts for those in a rush to fill out their bingo cards.

• So we know that I’m not the most politically correct person so don’t take this offensively.
• I don’t mean it toward any of my friends. I mean it toward random people that I don’t even know in the library.
• The problem is these hordes of Asian people that UCLA accepts into our school every single year.
• Their moms and their brothers and their sisters and their grandmas and their grandpas and their cousins and everybody that they know that they’ve brought along from Asia with them.
• You will always see old Asian people running around this apartment complex every weekend. That’s what they do.
• Hi, in America we do not talk on our cell phones in the library.
• Ohhhh, ching chong ling long ting tong. Ohhhhh.
• I swear they’re going through their whole families, just checking on everybody from the tsunami thing.
• Even if you’re not Asian you really shouldn’t be on your cell phone in the library but I’ve just never seen that happen before.
• So thank you for listening and have a nice day.

That’s going to leave a mark. More to come, I assume.

Well, this is wacky.

Aaron Porter, president of Britain’s National Union of Students, announced a few weeks back that he would not be running for a second term at the head of NUS, as is customary. Porter’s announcement came after months of criticism of his timid leadership of the organization.

With student fees at British universities skyrocketing, UK students have risen up in a dramatic series of protests and occupations, but Porter has distanced himself from the most aggressive tactics, and his criticisms of direct action have at times overshadowed his defenses of students’ rights.

The National Union of Students is a large and influential body in Britain, but it has long been charged with excessive coziness with the country’s Labour Party. Porter’s critics, in fact, have regularly accused him of tailoring his presidency to suit his political ambitions.

But it’s unlikely that anyone really expected this.

British media are reporting today that Porter, just 26 years old, plans to run for an open Labor seat in Parliament. This May. Five weeks before his term as NUS president ends.

Like I say. Wacky.

Update | Huh. Porter says, via Twitter, that “despite some nice calls from members of the Leicester Labour party, I have not & will not be putting my hat in the ring!” The filing deadline is tomorrow, so we’ll know for sure soon, but apparently the UK media got it wrong — or he got talked out of it.

Students in at least twenty states staged walkouts on Friday, supporting teachers (and teachers’ unions) in Wisconsin and throughout the country. The actions garnered a lot of attention at the grass roots — my blogpost on the walkouts is already this site’s eleventh most-read of all time — but virtually none in the national media.

Local media outlets, however, have been covering the story, and though most of the walkouts didn’t get any ink, quite a few have. Here are reports from news outlets and local bloggers on some three dozen walkouts in ten states, with more to come

• New Hampshire high schooler suspended for ten-minute walkout. (More here.)
• Sixty walk out in Amherst, Massachusetts.
• One hundred and fifty walk out and rally in Portland, Oregon.
• Students from two local high schools join rally at University of Illinois.
• Wisconsin students walk out in Beaver Dam, Stevens Point, Superior, Sheboygan, Eau Claire,
• Six hundred walk out in York, Illinois.
• High schoolers walk out in Teaneck, New Jersey.
• Roving walkout attracts students from three schools in Ithaca, New York.
• Two hundred walk out in Eugene, Oregon.
• Wooster, Ohio high school walkout targets local anti-union law.
• Hundreds walk out in Mankato, Minnesota.
• Charter school students walk out in Greenfield, Massachusetts.
• Most Idahoans staged their walkouts Thursday — students in at least eight communities participated.
• Some two hundred students walked out of a high school in Post Falls, Idaho on Friday.
• Photos and writeup on a walkout at the Brooklyn Free School, New York, NY.

If you’ve got more links, share them in comments and I’ll add them to the post.