You are currently browsing Angus Johnston’s articles.
We’ve recently reported on two sexual assault scandals at Tulane University — the school’s failure to investigate allegations of drugging and rape at fraternity parties, and the mild punishment meted out by the campus judiciary to a student it found guilty of committing sexual assault in a dorm.
Today, via SAFER Campus, we have word of two other incidents that took place at Tulane this year.
In October, a male student was allegedly sexually assaulted by a Tulane campus police officer. The officer in question was dismissed from his job, but the administration has made no public statement on the incident or on whether any further steps have been taken. As SAFER Campus notes, federal law mandates that colleges inform the student body when such crimes occur.
In April, a student wrote in the campus newspaper of being assaulted on his way home from a party by assailants who called him a “fag.” The campus police, he says, did not conduct a criminal investigation of the assault, and the university administration failed to offer him any outreach or counseling in the wake of the crime.
SAFER Campus has on these stories — and the other Tulane events we’ve been following — here.
On the heels of the news that Tulane ignored allegations of druggings and possible sexual assaults at a frat party, another disturbing story.
Last July, Tulane student Anna Minkinow brought a complaint against a fellow student for raping her in a Tulane dorm. She chose to pursue the complaint through the university judicial system, which did not hold a hearing for nine months.
When the hearing was finally held in April of this year, Minkinow says, the panel behaved inappropriately and offensively. They found Minkinow’s attacker guilty of sexual misconduct, but rejected her request that he be expelled from the university. Instead they banned him from having contact with her, barred him from entering the dorms, and mandated that he seek counseling.
One day later, she says, he approached her at a campus event. He didn’t speak to her, but he stood in close proximity to her for fifteen minutes.
Not long after that incident Minkinow and a friend staged an impromptu campus protest in which they bound and gagged themselves to symbolize the silencing of rape victims. She has since met with the university’s vice president for student affairs to pursue measures to strengthen the campus’s code of student conduct.
One reform that Minkinow has not yet won support for is a minimum punishment for students found guilty of sexual offenses. Presently, the university provides minimum sentences for only three forms of misconduct: alcohol violation, drug violations and pulling a fire alarm.
Update: More on sexual assaults at Tulane here.
Late Update: We have learned that Minkinow has started a blog.
Morehouse College in Atlanta is the only all-male historically black college in the United States. This spring, for the first time in its 141-year history, its valedictorian is a white man.
MSNBC has the story, and the blog Stereohyped has some thoughts. (Both links via Racialicious.)
The national organizations of the Young Democrats of America and College Democrats of America will each send two superdelegates to the Democratic National Convention this summer.
Until now, all four of those superdelegates have remained uncommitted, but today YDA’s Crystal Strait announced for Obama.
<b>Correction, May 19:</b> YDA has three superdelegates. Two of the three have endorsed — Strait chose Obama, as noted above, and Francisco Domenech endorsed Clinton in January. YDA president David Hardt has announced that he will make no endorsement before the end of the primaries.
A couple of weeks ago we reported that a “task force” appointed by a vice president of Wichita State University would be reviewing the operational and editorial practices of the WSU student newspaper, the Sunflower. It was announced that the paper’s student government funding for the upcoming fiscal year would not be disbursed until that review was complete.
That task force has now been appointed, and several other developments have taken place.
The task force will be made up of two students, two administrators, two faculty members, and the university’s general counsel.
Outgoing editor Todd Vogts attended the first task force meeting last week and said afterward that the faculty members seemed to be taking a stand in support of the newspaper’s first amendment rights.
In a potentially significant development, the university’s president has pledged that Sunflower funding will be disbursed as originally scheduled, and will not be contingent on the task force’s findings as originally announced.
The task force will meet again in the fall.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments