You are currently browsing Angus Johnston’s articles.
In a letter to the campus community released yesterday, University of Arizona president Robert N. Shelton declares that the passage of SB 1070, Arizona’s new immigration enforcement law, raises “troubling questions about how SB 1070 will affect the University’s international community.”
“The health and safety of our international students, faculty and professional staff are priorities of the highest order for us,” Shelton says, “and … we intend to put in place whatever procedures are necessary to ensure their safety and free movement on campus and in our community.” He further pledges to “do everything possible to ensure that these students continue to feel welcomed and respected, despite the unmistakably negative message that this bill sends to many of them.”
Shelton says he has already received word that several out-of-state students — every one of them an honors student — will be transferring to other universities as a result of the bill’s passage. “This should,” he says, “sadden anyone who cares about attracting the best and brightest students to Arizona.”
The University of Arizona police department will, he says, “be receiving extensive training” on SB 1070, and will be instructed “that individuals may not be stopped solely on the basis of race, color or national origin.” But while he is, he says, “completely confident that no one need fear the way that UAPD will approach the application of this law, I nevertheless appreciate the anxiety that friends and colleagues are feeling. It is a concern and fear that no one should have to harbor.”
He closes the letter by saying that the state Board of Regents “will be discussing the implications of SB1070” at its meeting this week.
The ACLU of Northern California is harshly criticizing UC Santa Cruz’s treatment of students accused of participating in the occupation of UCSC’s Kerr Hall last November. Citing UCSC’s “failure to provide notice of specific factual allegations” and “its imposition of significant financial restitution payments without a hearing,” the chapter declared its belief that the students constitutional rights have been violated.
In a seven-page letter to the university’s chancellor and the chair of its academic senate, the chapter detailed the improprieties and inadequacies of the disciplinary process currently in effect, and urged UCSC to take immediate steps to remedy the legal and constitutional deficiencies of its current approach.
The chapter sent a letter to Berkeley’s administration earlier this month alleging similar deficiencies in that university’s treatment of student protesters. About a week ago, more than a hundred Berkeley faculty signed a petition echoing those charges.
The letter to UCSC has not yet been made available online. When it is, I’ll update this post with a link and a more detailed discussion of its contents.
The saga of the UC Berkeley student government’s Israel divestment resolution continues this evening, in the final student senate meeting of the academic year.
Meanwhile, students at the University of California San Diego, inspired by the Berkeley example, will be bringing a vote on a similar resolution to their own student government for the first time tonight.
Neither of the two resolutions call for divestment from Israeli businesses. Instead, each urges divestment from General Electric and United Technologies, companies that have contracts with the Israeli military.
4 am California time | The UCSD resolution was referred to committee several hours ago in a 13-10 vote. Debate at Berkeley, which began at 10:30 last night, is still going on. You can follow the discussion at the #ucbdivest hashtag, or at supporters’ new @ucbdivest Twitter account.
4:15 am | The Berkeley fell one vote short of overriding the veto a few minutes ago. Tonight was the last meeting of the semester.
Saying that “current disciplinary procedures are so badly flawed that they should be abandoned at this time,” more than a hundred Berkeley professors have signed a petition asking administrators to suspend disciplinary proceedings against students who participated in campus protests on November 20 and December 11, 2009.
Citing specific inadequacies in the campus code of conduct and “flagrant instances of bad judgment on the part of those conducting the inquiries,” the petitioners argue that “no just outcome can emerge from these procedures in their current form.” In closing, they ask the university to re-affirm its commitment
to rights of free speech, which include rights to peaceful protest. If these rights are arbitrarily suspended or abandoned without reflection or if they are restricted without clear justification and communication, we will have dishonored the tradition of free and open expression that has distinguished this campus for decades. Let us not accept a situation where arbitrary power makes a mockery of those fundamental and enduring rights that we are surely bound to honor and protect.
Signatories to the petition include numerous senior and distinguished faculty.
Tens of thousands of New Jersey high school students walked out of classes yesterday in what the New York Times called “one of the largest grass-roots demonstrations to hit New Jersey in years.” The protests were a response to school funding cuts by New Jersey’s new governor, and to the rejection of school funding measures in ballot initiatives across the state last week.
The walkouts were the result of a Facebook call-to-arms posted weeks ago by Michelle Ryan Lauto, an 18-year-old college first-year and 2009 graduate of Northern Valley Regional High School in Old Tappan.
Governor Christopher Christie belittled the protests in a statement, expressing the “firm hope that the students were motivated by youthful rebellion or spring fever and not by encouragement from any one-sided view of the current budget crisis in New Jersey.”
Lauto’s first student activism came in seventh grade, when she organized a (failed) protest against a new school dress code.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments