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Student activists at the University of Puerto Rico, who have shut down UPR for two months in a massive strike, are declaring victory today.
The university’s board of trustees approved a settlement agreement a little before 10 pm last night.
The agreement reportedly extends tuition waivers, cancels a major new fee, and abandons a list of university privatization initiatives.
Thursday afternoon update | The Daily Sun, an English-language Puerto Rican newspaper, is reporting that the issue of university retaliation against the strikers was the last sticking point in negotiations with the trustees, and that the students prevailed on their primary demands in that area after a former president of the university intervened on their behalf in a “heated debate.”
The trustees did not agree to a blanket amnesty, and the students appear not to have asked for one. Instead, they secured a variety of procedural safeguards — no summary suspensions, speedy appeals of administrative rulings, protection of academic standing during the disciplinary process. A lawyer for the students said the agreed-upon process is one “that guarantees fairness, impartiality and legality, far beyond the current dispositions of the UPR student rules.”
The agreement was the result of a court-ordered mediation that began last Saturday, and must be approved by the students of each of UPR’s eleven campuses at mass meetings to be held within five days.
Strikers won important substantive victories as well, as discussed in the Daily Sun article. More on those in an upcoming post.
Saturday morning update | Commenter Maritza Stanchich, a professor of English at UPR, has provided links to coverage of the strike’s conclusion in news outlets ranging from the New York Times and the Miami Herald to the Huffington Post and Democracy Now!
More soon…
Embattled University of California president Mark Yudof yesterday posted, then deleted, the following tweet:
“Sitting down to a discussion with the Committee on the Status of Women. Plenty to discuss, yet the most pressing issue: Lakers or Celtics?”
Ouch.
The administration of the University of California at Irvine has moved to suspend the university’s Muslim Student Union for a period of one year as punishment for the disruption of a speech by an Israeli official this spring.
In a 14-page letter written last month — but only made public in redacted form yesterday — a university official declared that the disruption of the speech was “planned, orchestrated, and coordinated in advance” by the MSU, and found the group to have violated four provisions of the campus code of conduct. The MSU has appealed the decision, which is slated to take effect on September 1.
The Los Angeles Times called the ruling, which was issued by the university’s Senior Executive Director of Student Housing, “the first in recent memory at UC recommending the ban of a student group for something other than hazing or alcohol abuse.” In a statement, incoming MSU president Asaad Traina said the suspension would “deprive Muslim students — both current and incoming — of a place where they can develop a sense of community with one another and with the broader UCI campus community.”
The Associated Students of UCI, Irvine’s student government, has not yet made any public comment on the matter, though Victor Sanchez, president of the system-wide University of California Student Association, yesterday called it an effort to “silence dissent.”
Irvine’s move to suspend the MSU raises important questions of university governance, student government autonomy, and due process. I’ll be reporting more on this story in the days to come, and discussing it on Twitter this Wednesday at 8:30 PM Eastern Time (5:30 Pacific) as part of the weekly #sgachat.
Every once in a while I post about the latest high-profile bad scholarship on youth and students. There’s all sorts of crap social science writing out there, but in this particular field what makes a splash is research that reinforces prejudices about young people — that they’re narcissists, that they’re overly entitled, that they drink too much, that they’re having too much sex too soon.
That last one is a biggie. Ask any middle-aged person about young people’s sexuality, and chances are they’ll bend your ear about how young people are having sex earlier, more casually, and more recklessly than ever before. You’ll hear all about “the hook-up culture,” and rainbow parties, and so on and on.
But there’s no evidence of any such shift, and in fact all the data we have points in the other direction.
Here’s a great write-up of what we know about heterosexual teen sexual activity. Compared to twenty years ago, teen girls aged 15-19 are 20% more likely to report being virgins, and boys the same age are more than 25% more likely. Three-quarters of girls who have had sex say they were in a serious relationship when they lost their virginity.
This is all self-reported, of course, but it’s backed up by hard data. Teen pregnancy rates have plummeted since the mid-1990s, after holding steady for the previous two decades. Today’s teenagers are just half as likely to get pregnant before their eighteenth birthday as their parents’ generation was, and as a result both teen abortion rates and teen motherhood have dropped dramatically.
Other studies demonstrate that media reports about an epidemic of casual, predatory oral sex among young teens are similarly unfounded. Most teenagers who report having had oral sex say they’ve also had intercourse, and that they started both activities at about the same time. And the vast majority of teens of either gender who say they’ve given oral sex say they’ve received it as well. (These numbers are from 2002. Data from a 2006-08 survey should be available soon, and I’ll pass those stats on when I get them.)
Oh, and the percent of teens aged 15-19 who report having used contraception the last time they had intercourse has risen from 84.2% in 1988 to 93.3% in 2006-08, with condom use soaring from 53.3% to 78.8%. In the same time period, the number of teens reporting that they used condoms and the pill more than doubled, to 35.3%.
So, to sum up: Today’s teens are having intercourse later than their parents’ generation, and taking safer sex precautions far more consistently. They’re getting pregnant less and having fewer abortions. They’re having intercourse and oral sex mostly in the context of committed relationships, and the vast majority of them are reporting that their sexual experiences have been reciprocal.
But don’t look for any of this info on the nightly news.
For real this time. All sorts of great stuff in the pipeline.
studentactivism.net 
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