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A former student has filed a lawsuit against Eastern Michigan University claiming that she was dismissed from a graduate program in counseling for refusing to “affirm or validate homosexual behavior within the context of a counseling relationship.”
At the start of this year, when she was nearing the end of her coursework at EMU, Julea Ward was engaged in a Counseling Practicum. Ward has religious objections to homosexuality, and when she discovered that one of her assigned clients was gay, she asked her professor whether she should see the client or have him reassigned. That question, she contends, set in motion a chain of events that ultimately led to disciplinary proceedings and her removal from the program.
The university has declined to comment publicly on the case, but in a March 12 letter the chair of her disciplinary committee said that Ward had “by clear and convincing evidence” violated ethical standards requiring that counselors “avoid imposing values that are inconsistent with counseling goals” or engage in discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
A copy of Ward’s complaint, with various documents relating to the disciplinary charges, can be found in PDF form here.
Update: We analyze Ward’s suit and the conservative blogosphere’s response.
French students escalated ongoing protests in advance of the Easter holiday this week, occupying offices on two campuses and barricading a Paris street.
Early in the week student protesters held university administrators in Orleans, Rennes, and Strasbourg hostage for a brief time. In Rennes, the president was forced to flee his office and call for help from a stairway, and in Strasbourg more than a hundred students forced their way into a room where thirty administrators were meeting, blocking their way out for a time.
On Wednesday protesters in Paris turned the Boulevard Saint-Michel into an impromptu beach, dumping sand into the road and blocking traffic. The beach was a nod to a slogan from the May 1968 protests that shook French society: “sous les pavés, la plage” — under the cobblestones, the beach. (For a discussion of the various shades of meaning behind this slogan, click here.)
Protests against changes to French higher education policy have been going on for two months, and administrators now say that if the disruption does not end after Easter, the spring semester may be lost entirely. Click here for a Reuters article from the newspaper Le Monde on the recent demonstrations, or here for Google’s English translation.
This post was updated on April 10 with new details on the Rennes and Strasbourg protests.
Before dawn on July 18, 1992, members of a Peruvian government death squad entered the dorms of Enrique Guzmán y Valle National Education University, known as La Cantuta. They rousted the students from their beds, abducting nine of them.
La Cantuta had a long history of radical Maoist politics, and the nine students were suspected of involvement in a recent car bombing.
The death squad members took the students, and a professor who they abducted from his home, to an off-campus location. There the ten were tortured and killed. The corpses of four of those killed were discovered in an unmarked grave a year later; the other six bodies have never been accounted for.
Yesterday a Peruvian court convicted Peru’s former president, Alberto Fujimori, of having ordered the La Cantuta killings, as well as a massacre the previous year in which fifteen people were killed. Fujimori served as Peru’s president from 1990 to 2000.
Fujimori’s daughter, Keiko Fujimori, a 34-year-old member of the Peruvian national congress, will be a candidate in Peru’s presidential elections next year. If elected, she has pledged to grant her father a full pardon.
“The employers will love this generation. They are not going to press many grievances. There won’t be much trouble. They are going to be easy to handle. There aren’t going to be riots. There aren’t going to be revolutions.”
–Clark Kerr, Chancellor of the University of California, 1959.
A new study of teen eating habits found that young vegetarians tend to eat healthier than meat-eaters, consuming fewer calories from fat. It found that young vegetarians are less likely to be overweight than their peers who eat meat, and that the vast majority of young vegetarians have ho history of binging, purging, or other forms of disordered eating.
But here’s how Time magazine framed their story on the report:
“Is Vegetarianism a Teen Eating Disorder?”
Yup. Despite the evidence that most teen vegetarians make healthy choices in eating from both a nutritional and a behavioral perspective, Time chose to raise alarms that vegetarianism is itself an eating disorder.
What’s the basis for this claim? Well, it turns out that teen vegetarians aged 15-18, particularly those who don’t stick with vegetarianism over the long term, report higher incidences of certain eating disorders than those who have never tried a vegetarian diet. In one study of Minnesota teens, for instance, 25% of vegetarians said they’d taken weight pills or diuretics or vomited to lose weight in the past, as opposed to 10% of meat eaters.
This is an interesting finding, and if it’s backed up by other research it may suggest that a small — but significant — minority of teen vegetarians are at higher risk for eating disorders than their non-vegetarian peers.
But some or all of the effect may be explained by other factors. For instance, Time itself notes that vegetarians may be more sensitive to unhealthy eating habits, and thus more likely to report them to researchers. Perhaps some teens choose vegetarianism as a result of having become more conscious of their food choices after overcoming an eating disorder.
And since girls are more likely to (1) be vegetarians and (2) have eating disorders than boys, one would expect to find higher rates of eating disorders among vegetarians just because of gender, whether there was any correlation between the two issues or not. (One article suggests that in Britain girls are ten times as likely to be vegetarian as boys.)
Time‘s conclusions, in other words, are mostly without basis — even if one accepts the findings of the studies it relies on.
And the article doesn’t just mangle the science on vegetarianism, either. It takes gratuitous shots at non-vegetarian young people as well. It refers to vegetarianism as a “common teen fad,” for instance, and likens it to “experimenting with foolish things like dyeing your hair purple.”
Another “foolish thing” teens do, according to Time? “Going door-to-door for a political party.”
Sheesh.
studentactivism.net 
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