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April 10 update: This morning at five o’clock New School students occupied a building on campus. Follow that story here.
Spring break ends tomorrow at the New School, a New York City university that has seen ongoing student protest in recent months. Two recent messages from The New School In Exile, the group behind many of the recent demonstrations, suggest that the next few weeks are likely to be lively ones.
That New School In Exile is planning more protest has long been a given. In February they announced that they would shut down the New School if university president Bob Kerrey didn’t resign by April 1.
As of today, Kerrey is still in office with just ten days left on the clock.
In an open letter posted to their website early this morning, NSIE declared that a loose group of thirty to sixty students has been meeting regularly this semester to prepare for April 1. The letter says their grievances can only be “addressed … through the removal of those who have systematically obstructed channels of reform,” and calls the April first deadline “an opportunity for all students to come together and take back their university.”
Just hours before spring break began, an NSIE activist was arrested for allegedly spray-painting “Bye Bob” on the door of Kerrey’s Greenwich Village residence. A message that appeared on the NSIE blog shortly after that arrest declared that “the New School and any other forms of authoritarian structure imposed upon us … will never jeopardize our movement through crack-downs and other inhospitable actions.”
“We will win,” it continued, “because We stand together no matter what befalls us … you can punish us as individuals as much as you like, but you cannot break our collective will!”
Stay tuned.
March 30 update: Still no action, but a new post on their website promises that April 1 will be a day to remember.
In a two-hour conference call last Sunday, activists for the 70% of American college faculty who are not on the tenure track gave their new national organization a name.
“New Faculty Majority: the National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Equity” will, organizers say, be a membership group that advocates for the interests of non-tenured faculty. They are hard at work on a mission statement, a website, and an organizational structure, and they are planning a national day of action for April 30 of this year.
For more information, and updates going forward, see the New Faculty Majority blog.
Spanish police on Wednesday forcibly evicted a hundred Barcelona University students from a campus building they had been occupying for 118 days. The removal, and a student-police clash that followed, are said to have resulted in eighty injuries and the arrest of nineteen students.
The students were protesting the Barcelona Plan, a European Union initiative for the internationalization of higher education that they fear will lead to reduced funding and increased corporate influence over higher education.
Journalists demonstrated outside a regional government building on Friday, saying that police had beaten some thirty photographers covering the disturbances. A government investigation of the police violence has been launched.
One journalist at the Friday protest carried a sign that read “Police don’t beat on me, I’m working.”
The shooting death of a 20-year-old student at Yemen’s Sana’a University has sparked massive protests against the militarization of the campus.
Saleh al Houti, 20, was shot by a soldier acting as a guard at the university gate on Tuesday as he drove onto campus. As word of the shooting spread, student protesters swarmed around the car of a university official, pelting it with shoes and bottles and breaking its windows. Armed kinsmen of the victim blocked all entry and exit from the university until Yemen’s minister of higher education arrived on campus making personal assurances that the shooter had been arrested.
Thousands of students marched on the Yemeni parliament the following day, demanding an end to armed guards on campus grounds.
Ridhwan Masood, the head of the university’s student union, said that students would “continue to organise protests inside the university campus and in front of the cabinet and parliament, using all legal means to kick out these soldiers and intelligence agents who repress our activities and abuse us out of the university … The government should stop militarising the university life. This is an academic institution and not a security compound.”
“Biologists and anthropologists now agree that dividing humanity into different races is fabricated and fraudulent; racial categories are scientific fictions. Yet scientific fictions can become social facts with deadly consequences. Malcolm used to say that racism was like a Cadillac, they make a new model every year. Just as it is impossible to fix a 1990s Cadillac with a 1960s owner’s manual, we will not address the racism of the 1990s and beyond with a 1960s philosophy and approach. Our challenge is to develop a civil rights vision appropriate to our own time, to the challenges presented to us by the injustices inscribed in our everyday lives through racial inequality.”
— George Lipsitz, “Libraries and Memories: Beyond White Privilege 101.”
studentactivism.net 
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