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The Iowa Daily published a front-page article yesterday on the arrest records of the members of the University of Iowa Student Government.
The article, which was based on public records searches, reported that ten UISG members “have criminal charges other than traffic violations,” mostly citations for underage drinking or public intoxication.
The article names four of the ten offenders, providing details of the records of each:
- The SGUI vice president, who picked up a public intoxication charge last year.
- A senator who has seven infractions on his record, five of them for public intoxication.
- A senator with six infractions, including two charges for using false ID to obtain alcohol.
- A senator with two underage drinking charges and one for theft.
Not all of these charges have resulted in convictions or pleas — the article notes that at least one case is currently pending.
The article suggests that this information raises a “question for UI officials — along with current and former UISG members” as to “how much those tickets affect representatives’ credibility and ability to lead the students.”
A former medical student is claiming that he was suspended from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey for describing himself as a “white, African, American.”
Paulo Serodio is of European descent, was born in Mozambique, and is a citizen of the United States, so each of the components of his self-identification is literally accurate, but he says that students and staff at the university objected to it.
Serodio claims that he was harassed and assaulted after making the comments, and his lawyer told the Associated Press that “directly” as a result of the comments he was suspended from the school. Serodio is now suing.
This story is already blowing up in the right-wing blogosphere, for obvious reasons, but as far as I can tell the AP article is the only source on it so far, and I have to say it doesn’t feel complete to me.
We don’t have the whole story on this yet, and I bet you ten bucks that the full version is going to be more interesting than the one we have now.
1 pm update: I’ve found a copy of the complaint. More soon.
Police at Northwestern University will no longer notify federal authorities when they encounter suspected undocumented immigrants except in cases involving felonies or human trafficking.
Student groups had been pressing for a new policy since NU police stopped Ramiro Sanchez-Zepeda on suspicion of DWI on April 26 and turned him over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement when he was unable to produce a driver’s license or visa.
Students had planned a Thursday rally to push for the reform, but NU police chief Bruce Lewis requested a meeting with student leaders on Tuesday and announced the new policy on Wednesday.
The planned protest rally was recast as a celebration of the change in policy and a call to continued activism.
A thousand students from Trisakti University marched on Indonesia’s presidential palace yesterday to demand an investigation of the murder of four student activists ten years ago.
On May 12, 1998, four students at Triskati University were shot and killed by snipers during a demonstration against the country’s Suharto government. The US State Department later concluded that government agents had committed the murders.
The killings sparked a wave of riots that grew in intensity as time went on. Military and political forces are widely believed to have been active in the rioting, in which thousands of people were killed and raped. The riots led to the resignation of President Suharto on May 21.
Before he was a movie critic, Roger Ebert was a student journalist. He wrote for the University of Illinois Daily Illini as an undergraduate, serving as the paper’s editor in his senior year.
Ebert also served a term as president of the United States Student Press Association, a national association of student newspaper editors affiliated with the National Student Association that supported campus media and advocated for student press freedom. As president of the USSPA, Ebert was invited to the White House reception at which the above photograph was taken.
March 18 update | Hello, Roger Ebert twitter-followers! To answer Roger’s questions, I found the above photo, I found it in the US National Student Association archives in Madison, Wisconsin, and I discovered it in the course of researching my dissertation on the Association. I’m heading off to teach right now, but I’ll post more details later. In the meantime, feel free to poke around. (If you want an update when I post more, you can follow me on Twitter at @studentactivism.)
March 19 update | I can’t seem to put my hands on the original of the photo right now, but it comes from a USNSA newsletter of some kind, probably the NSA News. The National Student Association was a generally liberal confederation of student governments that served as one of the incubators of sixties radicalism — many of the early leaders of Students for a Democratic Society met each other at NSA conferences, for instance, and NSA gave crucial early funding and support to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. (Until 1967 NSA itself received gobs of secret cash from the CIA, which made extensive and varied use of its international operations.)
One thing I love about the photo is how perfectly it situates Roger in the history of student organizing. It, like Ebert’s work as an advocate for student press freedoms, is emphatically of the sixties — what with him being flanked by LBJ’s wife and daughter and all. But its buttoned-up, stilted formality isn’t remotely of The Sixties. That Sixties, the Sixties of popular myth, lasted maybe four or five years, but it grew out of an earlier, murkier era — the era of Mad Men and the Free Speech Movement and Freedom Summer, an era in which a student activist who clambered up onto a police car to make a speech would take his shoes off first, to avoid doing any damage. It’s a historical moment that I’m fascinated by and more than a little smitten with, and it’s a moment that this photo captures beautifully.
Oh, yeah — I do have one more piece of trivia about Roger and the NSA. As he himself wrote in a blog post a couple of months ago, it was at the Association’s 1964 summer Congress, just five months after this photo was taken, that Roger Ebert “experienced the joy of intercourse with a female undergraduate for the first time.”
Go read that post, by the way. It’s a lovely one.
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