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On Saturday night two campus cops were sent to the dorm room of Graham Gaddis, a first-year student at the University of Kentucky, responding to a report that he’d been seen pouring liquor out of the room’s window. While the cops waited, Gaddis set up a video camera, turned it on, and pointed it at the door.
In the video that follows, Gaddis can be seen denying the allegations against him, then refusing the cops entry, then refusing to move his foot so that they can go around him and into the room. He says they need a warrant, they say they have “administrative rights.”
“Do you want to be kicked out of this university?” one asks. “Because I can pave that road.”
“You have braces,” Gaddis replies. “Nice.”
That’s about when the cursing starts. “Fuck you guys,” Gaddis says. “You guys suck dick. You can’t find shit.” That’s right after he makes a weird, mocking “nee nee nee nee nee” sound at them.
After that, they start debating procedure. “Have you ever read the student code of conduct?” a cop asks. “Multiple times.” “Okay, cool. Then you should know well…”
Gaddis interrupts. “So the student code of conduct — if a cop comes to your door you have to let him in? Nah. Your fucking dorm is exactly the same as your house. You have the exact same privacy rights. You cannot come in my room without consent.” The cop says that’s right, but that administrative representatives, not cops, have the right to enter. When Gaddis asks why his RA isn’t conducting the search, then, the cop says “your belligerence.”
“I’m belligerent, dude? Are you fucking stupid?”
After that they just all hang out for a while, debating the Fourth Amendment, until Gaddis interrupts one too many times.
“No no no! Shut up!” a cop yells. “I’m talking! Okay? I am talking! I am in charge here! This is what’s going to happen. We’re just going to leave your ass alone. And we’re going to write up a Student Contact, and we’re going to the dean of students, and we’re going to kick your ass out of this university. Where you’re going is home. Don’t even bother paying your tuition next semester. Because you’re going.”
Then they apparently walk away, and as they do, Gaddis calls after them. “Good point, guys, good point. Sorry I kicked you out of my room. I just owned you guys. Fuck you guys. You can’t come in my room.”
That’s when the cop comes back, shoves him, and bursts into the room: “I can come in your room, because I’m a university administrator, stud.”
They proceed to search the room while the student continues to mock them.
As of yesterday morning, the video had been watched more than a hundred thousand times on YouTube.
Yesterday afternoon the cop was fired.
Representatives of the Darfur Student Association say that 140 students were arrested and 180 injured in protests at the Omdurman Islamic University on Tuesday when government agents and ruling party supporters attacked activists and burned dormitory buildings. Dozens of students are reportedly still missing.
As I reported on Tuesday, that day’s clashes followed an incident last week in which four Darfuri students were found dead at Al-Gazira University after participating in a sit-in against the university’s refusal to waive their tuition fees as mandated by peace agreements in effect in Sudan since 2006. Their bodies were found in a local canal where witnesses say protesters were chased by supporters of the regime.
The Darfur Student Association says that 450 dorm rooms were destroyed in Tuesday’s attack and that hundreds of laptops and mobile phones were looted. They say that police, troops, and supporters of the ruling National Congress Party delayed fire trucks and ambulances’ attempts to gain access to the campus, and that harassment of Darfuri students continued on Wednesday.
Students were also reportedly beaten and tear-gassed in simultaneous protests in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum.
Amnesty International on Wednesday said that “Sudanese security services have clearly used excessive force since the first peaceful murmurings of dissent at last week’s student sit-in,” demanding that the government “respect the right to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression.”
A US representative echoed Amnesty’s statements, calling the students’ deaths “shocking.” Given the government’s failure to live up to its obligations, Ambassador Dane Smith said on Wednesday, “it’s quite reasonable, it seems to me, that Darfuri students are protesting.” The United States has been, he said, “very unhappy about the excessive force used against Darfuri students demonstrating for their rights under the agreement.”
Felix Salmon wrote a really worthwhile piece during the Free Cooper Union occupation discussing — among other things — exactly how Cooper Union’s academic reputation and since-forever no-tuition policy are intertwined:
Cooper has a lot of adjuncts and a very small tenured faculty, and if you ask anybody associated with the school how it keeps its quality high, they’ll tell you that it’s a function of the enormous pool of applicants. The idea is that Cooper is extremely good at identifying America’s most talented teenagers, and can basically get its pick of the crop thanks to its free-tuition policy.
It doesn’t really matter whether that’s empirically true or not; what’s certain is that Cooper’s exceptionalism is an article of faith among both students and faculty, and that it is deeply rooted in the school being free.
If Cooper Union’s reputation comes from its students, then, and its ability to draw students derives from its tuition policy, then there’s not much reason to expect that a tuition-charging Cooper Union would maintain the quality or the prestige it has today. And once you go down that road, you can’t turn back.
Salmon’s argument is specific to Cooper Union, of course — there is literally no other American college of its prominence that has a similar tuition policy. But it implies a more broadly applicable set of principles that receive too little attention.
Put simply, a college’s tuition policy affects its student body. This is true on the level of who applies, of course — if students know for sure that you’re affordable, they’ll be more interested — but it extends beyond that as well.
As we’ve seen over and over in recent years, the more dependent a college is on tuition revenue, the more its admissions decisions are shaped by that dependency. For public colleges that means enrolling ever-more out of state students, abandoning your mission to provide accessible education for the students of your state. For privates it often means need-conscious admissions — turning away the poor or middle-class applicant in favor of someone dumber but richer.
This process is already at work at Cooper Union, where a proposal has been mooted to shrink undergraduate enrollment by as much as thirty percent to make room for a new revenue-generating graduate program. And of course those grad students won’t be up to the college’s historical standards — they can’t be. They’re not supposed to be. That’s not why they’ll be invited, and it’s not how they’ll be chosen.
And this, ultimately, is yet another reason why Cooper Union matters, and yet another reason why the students’ struggle is so important. Because tuition policy gets at the heart of an institution’s character, and because, for well over a century, Cooper Union has been shining proof that tuition-free higher education works.
Student protest has been swelling in Sudan since the Friday discovery of the bodies of four student activists from Darfur, with reports now saying that one university’s dorms have been burned to the ground today.
The four students were reportedly found dead in a canal after their participation in a sit-in protesting Al-Gazira University’s refusal to waive their tuition fees as mandated by peace agreements signed in 2006 and 2010.
Eleven students were arrested in the anti-tuition protests on December 2, but the demonstrations continued. Witnesses say that when police broke up a sit-in on December 5, they pushed protesters toward the canal where the four students’ bodies were later found. Administrators say the students drowned, but authorities have refused to release medical examiners’ reports, arresting one student’s lawyer when he requested it.
Police say 47 students were arrested in protests on Sunday, and on Monday the administration of Al-Gazira University announced that it was suspending classes indefinitely.
Protests have continued, however, and today reports charge that supporters of Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party (NCP) have burned the dormitories of Omdurman Islamic University.
10:45 am Eastern Time Update | Twitterer @SuperMojok is on the ground at Omdurman Islamic University (OIU). He reports that the dormitory fire was blazing for an hour before fire crews arrived, but that many students likely got out safely because they had been driven from the buildings by tear gas before the fires began. He reports that students say the number of arrests today is “very very high,” and that in the last hour police have left the scene, replaced by representatives of the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS).
12:30 pm ET | Reuters reports that police have used teargas today on student protesters in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital. They also quote a student leader as saying that demonstrators at OIU were driven to the dorms by police and NCP agents using teargas and batons before the fires at the dorms broke out. Meanwhile, a representative of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights yesterday described Sudanese government attacks on students as “a worrying trend,” and called for an independent investigation of last week’s murders.
This weekend Nick Kristof wrote a column called “Profiting from a Child’s Illiteracy” in which he suggested — without evidence — that a significant portion of American children who are receiving Social Security disability are doing so because their parents find it “easier” to collect government checks than to find and keep gainful employment. Describing their disabilities as “fuzzier” and “less clear-cut” than those of past generations, Kristof claimed that it is SSI, and the “huge stake in their failing” that it gives their parents, which “condemn[s]” them “to a life of poverty on the dole.”
Thirteen facts on those children, courtesy of the Social Security Administration:
- Fewer than thirty percent live with both parents.
- Half live in a household with at least one other person with a disability.
- Almost seventy percent saw a doctor three or more times in the last year.
- Nearly half visited an emergency room at least once in the last year.
- More than half have a disability described as “severe.”
- Forty-three percent have a physical disability.
- Eight percent are described as mentally retarded.
- Seventeen percent have had surgery in the last year.
- Among teenagers, nineteen percent are unable to bathe themselves.
- Thirty-six percent of those requiring mental health care are not receiving it.
- Seventy-four percent of guardians reporting a need for respite care are not receiving it.
- A quarter of those needing disability-specific transportation assistance are not receiving it.
- Their average total family income from all sources is $1,818 a month.
Update | Here are some more welcome facts on SSI, and on Kristof’s wrongheaded attacks on the program.
studentactivism.net 
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