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New School president Bob Kerrey has been under fire from students and faculty for months, but at a meeting yesterday a representative of student activist group New School in Exile upped the ante.
Reading from a prepared statement, she said that if Kerrey and vice president James Murtha don’t resign by April 1, “we will shut down the functions of the university. We will bring it to a halt. We will make it stop.”
“Through our civil disobedience,” she continued, “we will reclaim the university as a center of academic and political action … we will continue to struggle until we have restored the legacy and integrity of the New School!”
A gay first-year student at Jacksonville State University in Alabama claims that he was rejected by the Pi Kappa Phi fraternity because of rumors about his sexual orientation. On one level, this is an unsurprising story. But on another, as Pam Spaulding notes, it’s very interesting indeed.
Steele Jackson says Pi Kappa Phi blackballed him when rumors that he was gay began to circulate, but chapter president Chris Stokes denies it, saying the frat doesn’t “discriminate based on … any kind of orientation.” In that, Stokes is following the mandates of the fraternity’s national body, which bars discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
So Jackson, a gay student at an Alabama state college, was willing to say so publicly. The president of the local chapter of the fraternity he pledged denied explicitly that the frat discriminates against gay pledges. And they both made their statements in an article in their campus newspaper.
As Spaulding says, “this particular story has a lot to offer in terms of observations about life in Red State America and the changes that are under way.”
The University of Wisconsin at Madison announced on Thursday that it was cutting its ties to Russell Athetic, the clothing manufacturer. RA has been accused of closing a factory in Honduras in retaliation for union organizing there.
In November the Worker Rights Consortium released a report finding “substantial credible evidence” of such retaliation, and in late January the Fair Labor Association found that RA had engaged in “inappropriate and unacceptable actions” in response to labor organizing.
In a statement, a UW representative said that RA had not “has not met our expectations” regarding workers’ rights.
May 1 Update: FIFTY-SEVEN campuses to date. Wow!
According to the London School of Economics Gaza protest blog, two new British university occupations in response to Israeli policy began on Wednesday, at the University of Strathclyde and Manchester University.
This brings to at least seventeen the number of such occupations since mid-January, all of which — with the exception of Manchester University — have ended. (Other sources say there have been as many as 22 actions.)
The activist group Stop the War is hosting a meeting of protest organizers from around Britain tomorrow in London.
Juicy Campus, the internet gossip site, went dark this morning.
Founder Matt Ivester said yesterday that the site’s “growth outpaced our ability to muster the resources needed to survive this economic downturn,” and that in recent weeks both ad revenue and venture capital had dried up. He posted a FAQ on the shutdown on the JC blog in which he left open the possibility of re-launching in the future.
We covered controversies surrounding the site here and here last semester. Inside Higher Ed has a good overview here.
studentactivism.net 
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