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As we’ve noted before, the New School In Exile, a student activist group at New York City’s New School university, has pledged to shut the school down on April 1 if university president Bob Kerrey doesn’t resign. With that deadline now just five days away and Kerrey still ensconced in the president’s office, NSIE is preparing for a showdown.
The group has held several events this week, including a co-sponsored student-faculty forum at NYU, a staged reading of a short satirical play about Kerrey (now online), and a party late yesterday night.
They’ve scheduled a “student gathering and planning meeting” for six o’clock Sunday evening, though they’re tight-lipped about just what it is that’s being planned — their calendar for next Wednesday reads as follows: “[insert your action here], lots of fun, anarchy and playfulness. Don’t miss it.”
Two campus police officers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been suspended without pay after they were caught dumping several hundred copies of the MIT student newspaper.
The March 17 issue of The Tech carried a front-page article reporting on the arrest of an MIT campus cop on charges of trafficking prescription painkillers. That officer, Joseph D’Amelio, had been arrested three days earlier in possession of nearly a thousand OxyContin Roxicodone tablets.
On March 18 two MIT police officers came forward to admit that they had been removed three hundred copies of the previous day’s edition of The Tech from stands in the university’s student center, depositing them in a recycling bin outside the building.
The two officers have each been working at MIT for more than a decade, and the Executive Editor of The Tech has been quoted as saying that he does not wish to see them fired over the incident.
April 4 update: The Tech reports that one of the two officers has been fired, and the other remains under suspension. MIT refused to comment on the reason for the difference in punishment, and has not released either officer’s name.
Quick hit, via Inside Higher Ed:
“A new research study … has found that ending the [SAT] requirement would lead to demonstrable gains in the percentages of black and Latino students, and working class or economically disadvantaged students, who are admitted.”
“You can be as well versed in anti-oppression theory as you like, but it won’t stop you being an asshole.”
–From the blogpost “A note to McGill student activists” by Sita Balani.
Kristen Juras, the University of Montana law professor who has been campaigning to force the UM Kaimin to dump its sex advice column, appeared at a campus forum with the Kaimin‘s editor last night.
Juras called student activity fee support for the paper “government” funding, and described that funding as “a privilege.” She has in the past threatened to intervene with the university’s trustees or even the Montana state legislature to attempt to get that privilege withdrawn.
At last night’s forum, Juras said that any Kaimin sex column should be written by a “sexologist,” though she acknowledged, when pressed, that other student columns — such as those on religion — do not require such “expertise.”
Kaimin editor Bill Oram defended the column’s lackadaisical tone. “We’ll stop talking casually about sex when students stop having sex casually,” he said. “We’ll stop talking about sex in a fun way when sex stops being fun.”
Juras took a less lighthearted stance. “I’m not opposed to sex,” she said at one point. “I’m happily married and it’s an important part of our relationship.”
studentactivism.net 
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