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The University of Vermont student activists who occupied their university’s administration building last week have issued a revised list of demands.
When the activists of Students Stand Up occupied the UVM admin building on Wednesday, they presented the president with thirteen demands, each of which related to budgetary and labor issues. In a news release last night, however, they replaced those thirteen demands with just four.
They call those four demands “the core concerns that are the base of our campaign and our new understanding of what is feasible.”
The first two demands on the new list are substantively the same as the first two on the old list: SSU wants UVM to reverse all dismissals and non-reappointments that it has announced, and cancel all plans for new layoffs. The third new demand is in essence the same as the eleventh from the original list — SSU wants “a democratic process by which students, staff, and faculty have decisive roles in decisions regarding the budget.”
(We’ll get back to that third demand in a subsequent post. It’s a big one, and an important one.)
The fourth demand is a revised version of the eighth demand on the old list — SSU is calling for administrative compensation at UVM to be cut, in order to “save as many positions as possible.” Instead of firing faculty and staff, in other words, make administrators take a pay cut.
There’s a fifth demand in their new statement, though it’s not included in the numbered list. They want UVM President Daniel Fogel to resign. By calling in police to arrest demonstrators last Wednesday instead of talking with them in good faith, they say, Fogel acted in a “disturbing and callous” way. Because of that lack of respect for dialogue and university community, they say, “we are issuing a call for his immediate resignation.”
For updates on Students Stand Up’s next moves, check out their Twitter feed. Also very much worth reading is this SSU member’s dissection of a budget memo released by UVM’s vice president on Friday.
In an article on the weekend’s student rioting at Kent State, the Associated Press makes the following claim:
“It was the first clash between Kent State students and police since 1970, when four students were killed by Ohio National Guard troops during a campus protest of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia.”
Ouch. That’s really really not true.
First, as Kent State’s student newspaper reported in the fifth paragraph of its article on the weekend riots, 81 Kent students were arrested when Halloween parties in and around the campus got out of hand last year. That’s less than six months ago.
Also, as the AP itself notes, the 1970 “clash” wasn’t between students and police, since National Guard troops aren’t cops. Finally, there have been lots of student protests where students clashed with cops at Kent State since 1970 — a two-minute Google turned up this page about a series of 1977 protests on campus that led to about two hundred arrests.
Student protest and student rowdiness are both common on American campuses — they were common before the sixties, and they’ve been common since. An AP reporter really shouldn’t have to be told this.
Update: Dear Volokh Conspiracy, if you’re going to make the title of a blog post a question, you really should enable comments.
Student parties turned into riots at two American colleges last night.
At the University of Minnesota, an off-campus student party associated with the campus’s Spring Jam got rowdy when a fire was built in the middle of a street. Bottles and rocks were reportedly thrown at police, who retaliated with tear gas, pepper spray, and “foam rounds.”
Here’s commenter Sun from the Minnesota Daily website with a first-hand perspective:
“I wouldn’t call this a riot as much as a large get-together that was slightly out of hand. People were not hurting each other or raiding houses. There was a strong communal understanding of respect, however, there was some bottle smashing and fire starting. If you were there you know what I’m trying to get at … the majority of the activity was allotted to mere standing and conversing with occasional sing-a-longs.”
Standing and conversing with occasional sing-a-longs, bottle smashing, and fire starting. Got it.
Only four people were arrested in the UM incident, but KentNewsNet is reporting that police made 125 arrests in the course of an off-campus confrontation at Kent State. There, participants suggest that the party turned into a riot because of police action.
May 9 update: Police search teams have found a corpse a little over a mile from where George Zinkhan’s Jeep was abandoned after the April 25th shootings discussed below. The Atlanta Journal Constitution is reporting that the body has been tentatively identified as Zinkhan’s.
Earlier today, three people were shot to death in Athens, Georgia, and UGA marketing professor George M. Zinkhan III has been identified as the alleged shooter.
The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s website has a mostly straightforward article up on the incident, linking to local media coverage and noting the steps that the university has taken to inform the campus community.
At the bottom of the piece, however, the Chronicle added an eyebrow-raising passage. After noting that students had been quoted in the UGA student newspaper the Red and Black saying that the news of the shooting was “hard to believe” and that Zinkhan was a “nice guy,” the article concluded with this:
“His ratings on the Rate My Professors Web site, however, were mixed. One commenter described him as ‘brilliant and really funny,’ but others said he was ‘cold hearted’ and a ‘creep.’ “
I’m a big proponent of student evaluation of faculty, but this strikes me as wildly inappropriate.
8:30 pm update: Via Womanist Musings, a reminder that the obligatory “nice guy” quote in articles about white middle-class men accused of murder is problematic too.
10:45 am update: Comments at the Chronicle are running heavily against the decision to include the Rate My Professor quotes in the article, and many of them are based on the premise that RMP is inherently worthless as a source.
I just posted this over there:
“If commenters at Rate My Professor had posted that Zinkhan had been violent or bizarrely aggressive toward them, that would have been something to at least consider mentioning in this article. Such comments would have been relevant to what he is accused of now, and might have raised the question of whether there were warning signs in Zinkhan’s relationship with students that UGA should have been aware of.
“But the comments posted weren’t those kinds of comments — they barely rose above the level of generic insults. Even if one believes, as I do, that RMP ratings can provide real information about a professor, these particular comments did not, and they should not have been quoted here.”
1:00 pm update: Huh. The Chronicle has now eliminated the references to RateMyProfessor from the article, and deleted all eighteen of the reader comments that criticized their decision to include the quotes. No note, no explanation, no other changes to the article.
9:00 pm update: The Chronicle has now posted an explanation of their decision to excise the Rate My Professor quotes and conducted another purge of the comments to the article, removing about half a dozen new comments critical of their original decision. They’ve also closed comments on the article, so that nobody can post criticizing their decision to censor the comments thread a second time.
Lordy.
11:00 pm update: It just keeps getting more and more ridiculous. The Chronicle has disabled comments on its follow-up article on the Zinkhan case, apparently because people were using that comment thread to air their grievances about the previous thread. As of this writing, the sole comment on the Chronicle’s article on another recent campus shooting, from commenter “Bing,” reads as follows:
“I am disgusted that all comments critical of the Chronicle’s decision to use anonymous RateMyProfessor screeds in reporting of the Georgia shooting have been taken down and that commenting has been disabled. It’s sad that I have to let the Chronicle know how disappointed I am through another posting. I have no doubt that this one will disappear too, thereby making it perfectly relevant to the article. The irony.”
As long as they keep doing this, I’ll keep updating this post, I guess.
11:20 pm update: And now that newest comment has been taken down too.
“Gratuitous affection between adults is to my mind something you do not make fun of. The one thing you do not make fun of.”
–Padget Powell, Edisto
studentactivism.net 
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