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Oakland University, a public research university of 18,000 students located just north of Detroit, has been shut down by a faculty strike on the first day of the fall semester.
The campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors has been in contract talks with OU since mid-May, but the two sides remain divided on issues of pay, workload, and health benefits. Negotiations are continuing with the assistance of a state-appointed mediator.
In a statement announcing the closing, the university suggested that its “difficult economic circumstances” limited its ability to meet the AAUP’s contract demands. The union, however, claims that while the state’s “economic crisis is real, Oakland’s is not.”
Some three hundred faculty and students rallied at the campus this afternoon in support of the strikers, and negotiations are expected to continue through the holiday weekend.
Update: The Detroit News says OU student government president Kristin Dayag supports the strike.
In a Delhi meeting Monday, Indian education minister Kapil Sibal told Australia’s deputy prime minister that the Australian government needs to do far more to protect the rights and safety of the one hundred thousand Indians studying in that country.
As the two leaders met, thousands of students marched in Australia’s largest cities, condemning government inaction against violence and exploitation targeting their community. “After a decade of neglect,” Australian National Union of Students president David Barrow proclaimed, “local and international students rally together to demand justice.”
The treatment of Indian students in Australia has provoked a diplomatic crisis between the two nations in recent months. Two vicious assaults this spring drew attention to an epidemic of bias crime against Indian students, and prompted a major protest march in downtown Melbourne that blocked a busy intersection for hours. The assaults and the protest, organized by the Federation of Indian Students in Australia, made the ongoing violence front-page news in both countries.
Indian students’ tuition payments represent a major revenue stream for Australian higher education, and the bias scandal has led to a new scrutiny for educational practices as well. Three private training colleges have shut their doors in recent months, amid charges that the for-profit institutions were offering substandard education and defrauding learners.
Update: I’d meant to include these first-person accounts of bias violence, but the link fell through the cracks while I was writing.
Trigger warning: The following post quotes a repulsive racist joke that features the N-word.
The Oxford University Conservative Association, one of Britain’s largest and most influential campus political organizations, has been stripped of its university recognition after members of its top leadership told racist jokes at an organization dinner — jokes that were met with applause, laughter, and cheers from the students in attendance.
OUCA is Oxford’s student affiliate of the right-wing Conservative Party. Many of the Conservatives’ top leaders are alumni of the OUCA, which has more than six hundred members. (Americans can think of the group as a vague equivalent of the Harvard Young Republicans, but much bigger and more influential.)
At a “hustings” dinner in June, candidates for the OUCA presidency were asked to repeat the most inappropriate joke they knew. One told a joke about lynching, while another, expatriate American Nick Gallagher, is said to have offered this: “What do you say when you see a television moving around in the dark? ‘Drop it nigger, or I’ll shoot you!’ ”
As I said at the top, reports suggest that there was no objection to either of these jokes from the crowd in attendance.
Gallagher and another student were suspended from OUCA after news of the jokes broke in the British press, and this week Oxford announced that it will no longer allow the group to use the university’s name or participate in the annual organizational fair for new students.
The most impressive part of the whole story was the defenses of Gallagher’s joke. Gallagher himself is said to have claimed that it was from a Chris Rock routine (um, no), while an unnamed friend offered this response:
“To suggest Nick is racist is just ridiculous. This has been blown out of all proportion and everyone just needs to lighten up.”
A few weeks back we ran a link to a piece about why student newspapers need to be online, adding a few thoughts of our own to the mix.
Well, we’ve just noticed that the Center for Innovation in College Media blog has been running a series of posts on the various updates and expansions that college papers have been undertaking this summer, and if you’re interested in online student media, it’s stuff that’s well worth checking out.
(Another recent CICM post that’s worth mentioning here is this one on college papers’ H1N1 flu coverage. The blog notes that more than a dozen campus papers have written about the flu, and that none of the articles it found include links to the CDC’s flu.gov site or other external sources of information. This fits with what we’ve seen of college papers’ work — they tend not to provide external links, even when doing to would add a lot of value to their stories.)
September 2 Update: Well, this sucks. A Slate investigation has concluded that Roxanne Shante’s story of her life after hip hop is pretty much all fake. Literally almost all of it. It’s mind-boggling.
Whoever drew up Roxanne Shante’s contract at Warner Music in 1984 probably figured he’d earned his bonus.
Shante, a 14-year-old MC from Queens, had a big hit that fall with “Roxanne’s Revenge,” an early hip-hop smash. But though the song sold hundreds of thousands of copies and Shante went on to make two albums for Warner, she never saw much in the way of royalties.
The one upside of her contract, from Shante’s perspective, was a clause committing Warner to pay all of her educational expenses … for life.
Warner most likely assumed that there wasn’t much chance they’d have to pay out much under that clause — Shante was a kid from the projects, and a single mom at 14. And when she did decide to go to college five years later, Warner gave her the run-around.
But Shante found an administrator at Marymount Manhattan College who was willing to give her a hand. Marguerita Grecco, Marymount’s dean, helped Shante to press Warner to make good, and let her take classes for free while she negotiated.
Warner eventually blinked after Shante threatened to go public, and the label wound up paying not only for her undergraduate schooling but also for the Cornell doctorate in Psychology that Shante earned in 2001. (All in all, they wound up paying out $217,000 for her educational expenses.)
Today Shante has a therapy practice serving the black community, owns an ice cream parlor in Queens, and funds a $5000 annual college scholarship for female rappers.
(Hat tips to PostBourgie and Hoyden About Town.)
studentactivism.net 
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