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This is without a doubt the coolest zombie Whitney Houston lip-sync video I’ve ever seen on YouTube.

A judge has ruled that Quinnipiac University in Connecticut can’t replace its women’s volleyball team with a cheerleading squad under federal laws governing gender balance in college sports.

Quinnipiac had axed volleyball as a budget-cutting measure, hoping to save some $5000 per student per year by replacing it with cheerleading. But the anti-discrimination law known as Title IX requires gender equity in varsity sports, and the volleyball team sued, saying cheerleading didn’t qualify.

In a decision handed down this week, federal judge Stefan Underhill declared that cheerleading is “too underdeveloped and disorganized to be treated as offering genuine varsity athletic participation opportunities for students.”

Quinnipiac says they now plan to create a women’s rugby team.

The UCLA Daily Bruin ran two pieces on last week’s USSA Congress — an overview/intro story and a piece on the Association’s plans for the coming year.

USSA gave the Los Angeles Free Press a Congress preview here.

My own coverage included two posts about the Association’s elections, a liveblog of its plenaries, and an overview of the biggest developments there, including a discussion of the group’s four major campaigns for 2010-11.

I also posted updates on Twitter, and on the Student Activism Facebook page.

For more, check out the USSA website and the #NSC10 Twitter hashtag. You can also follow more than thirty Congress participants on Twitter here.

If you’ve got other links, post them in comments and I’ll add them to this post.

Saturday Update | New links: A USSA intern and a young workers’ rights advocate blog about their impressions of the Congress.

Lesbian high schooler Constance McMillen has won her lawsuit against the Mississippi school district that refused to let her attend prom with her girlfriend.

The school agreed to have a judgment entered against them in the case on Monday. They will establish what the ACLU — who brought the suit on McMillen’s behalf — called a “comprehensive nondiscrimination and nonharassment policy that covers sexual orientation and gender identity and expression.”

And they’ll pay her an additional $35,000 in damages. Plus court costs.

The ACLU’s suit charged that the district violated McMillen’s freedom of speech — in addition to forbidding her to attend with her girlfriend, they also banned her from wearing a tuxedo to the event. When the story broke in the media the school arranged for her to attend a rescheduled alternative prom, but that turned out, bizarrely, to be a fake.

The United States Student Association conducted its plenaries yesterday in sessions that began at 10:30 am and continued until nearly two o’clock the following morning. Along the way, the Association addressed more than forty items of business.

Tensions ran high before the plenaries over two resolutions — a proposal to create a “straight male caucus” within the Association and a call to overturn the board of directors’ opposition to Arizona’s SB 1070 law. But though emotions remained raw throughout the discussion of both bills, debate itself was civil and courteous on both sides.

The resolutions cast a spotlight on USSA’s long-running battles over constituency representation and the scope of its activities. With both being resoundingly defeated on the plenary floor, the short-term result in each case was to affirm the membership’s commitment to its traditional course. Conversations throughout the Congress in recent days, however, demonstrated that students from across the organization’s political spectrum are actively seeking out new ways to resolve the disputes.

Although most of the day was taken up by votes on administrative resolutions — a number of which will have real significance for USSA going forward — the real meat of the plenary was the consideration of what are known as “action agenda” items.

USSA’s action agenda items constitute its core organizing campaigns for the year. This year, two such items — a student vote campaign and the Association’s work on the federal budget and appropriations — were locked in as organizational mandates. That left the plenary to decide which of seven other proposals it would direct the organization to work on.

Two of the seven were withdrawn during the course of the plenaries, folded into administrative resolutions that the Association would engage on a smaller scale. Another three — on campus sexual assault prevention, university admissions reform, and support for free and universally accessible education at the community college level — were either tabled or voted down. In each case, a significant portion of the plenary expressed strong support for the proposals themselves, but argued that they were either too ambitious or not yet fully enough developed for the Association to take on as full-fledged organizing campaigns.

That left two campaigns that USSA did embrace, and will be taking on.

First, there’s the DREAM Act, one of the Association’s biggest projects in the year just ending. Stalled just short of the finish line in Congress, the Act would provide undocumented youth who were brought to the United States as children with a path to citizenship through college education.

Second, there’s a new Economic and Education Recovery Campaign, whose centerpiece is lobbying for the Local Jobs for America Act in coalition with USSA’s longtime partner Jobs With Justice. As the proposal for the campaign put it, this action item seeks to bring together “USSA member campuses, student labor organizations, [and] local community and civil rights organizations” to help the Association “build its organizing capacity and recruit new members.”

Those are the highlights of the session, but there was obviously a lot more. Congress attendees, feel free to pipe up with your own perspectives!