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The United States Supreme Court will hear arguments next month in the case of a 13-year-old eighth grader who was strip-searched in 2003 by school officials who were searching her for ibuprofen.
An appeals court ruled last year that the search violated Savana Redding’s constitutional rights, as well as “any known principle of human dignity,” but the ruling was a split decision. The Supreme Court will also be faced with the question of whether Redding has the right to sue the assistant principal who ordered the search.
Redding is now an undergraduate at Eastern Arizona College, majoring in psychology.
The sixth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War was marked on Saturday by a 5000-person Washington march, smaller by an order of magnitude than the last antiwar march on DC two years ago.
Calling the protest “a congregation of the radical Left,” The Sitch examines the splintered state of antiwar organizing today, and explores the decision by liberal groups to sit this march out.
“Autonomy is hard for some people to understand. It is only possible to understand when you don’t have it.”
–Anonymous UC Berkeley student, circa 1969. (Quoted in Right On: A Documentary of Student Protest, by Maryl Levine and John Naisbitt.)
Students at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur pelted the home of the Institute’s director with stones and overturned his car yesterday after the death of a student who had been seen at the Institute’s hospital.
The student, Rohit Kumar, went to the B C Roy Hospital on campus complaining of a headache, and was given pain pills and released. On his way back to the hostel he lived in, he collapsed. According to one report, the hospital then took two hours to arrange for an ambulance to transfer him to a better-equipped facility, and did not provide a medical professional to accompany him on the trip. Kumar deteriorated in transit, and was pronounced dead on arrival at Midnapore General Hospital.
The B C Roy Hospital has long been criticized as inadequate by members of the IIT Kharagpur community, and as news of Kumar’s death spread on campus, more than a thousand students gathered at the home of Institute director Damodar Acharya to express their anger. The crowd vandalized Acharya’s house and overturned his car before forcing him to sign a letter of resignation from the university.
The university announced on Monday that it would be authorizing an external inquiry into Kumar’s death. Updates on the story are being posted to Twitter with the hashtag #iitdeath.
The last few months have seen a wave of campus organizing in Britain, with students at more than two dozen colleges and universities staging protests and sit-ins. Now student organizers are calling for a national meeting of campus activists to discuss where the new movement goes next.
Here’s a write-up of the meeting plans from the group’s Facebook page:
After the wave of occupations against Israel’s war on Gaza and the national demonstration against fees; as Vice Chancellors and the government declare their intention to double fees; as cuts and redundancies rip through our campuses; and as the NUS fails to relate to any of these issues or give leadership to students – it’s clear that the student movement is at a turning point.
The thousands of students who are being drawn into campaigns need to co-ordinate our actions nationally: we need a national, fighting student movement!
A group of activists from the university occupations, student union officers and activists from a range of groups including Education Not for Sale have called a national meeting on the 18th of April to discuss the way forward and co-ordinate our actions.
We will hear speakers from the student movements in Europe and a speaker from the UK workers’ movement – but this meeting won’t be about listening to endless top table speakers: we want an open discussion from the floor, between student activists, to decide on what to do next and hopefully create a permanent co-ordination, network or federation of fighting student unions and activists.
We want the organising process to be open and transparent – all are welcome to take part! Get in touch
at studentcoordination@gmail.com studentcoordination@googlegroups.com
Watch this space for updates; and check the blog: http://studentcoordination.wordpress.com/
studentactivism.net 
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