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Administrators at a California community college removed the elected student body president from office earlier this year over charges that students and faculty claim were concocted in an effort to silence his criticisms of college fiscal policy.
Officials at Moorpark College say that campus cops caught 33-year-old Jon Foote drunk on campus on one occasion and “inciting [his] fellow students into becoming a mob.” A professor who was doing calculus with Foote immediately prior to the first incident says he was not inebriated, and students present at the second say he was assisting them in dealing with over-aggressive canvassers.
In reality, his supporters argue, administrators were gunning for Foote because of the light he shone on excessive campus spending at a time when classes and professors were getting the axe. The administration’s unilateral decision to remove him from office in the middle of his term was preposterous, they say.
Another incident that took place around the same time seems to lend credence to their story. Accused of plagiarizing the homework of a study partner, Foote was barred from a physics class he was taking. When he refused to stop attending, administrators sent campus police to remove him from the classroom.
The kicker? The plagiarism charges were later dropped.
Foote remains on campus, progressing toward his degree. He’s concerned that the disciplinary charges could hurt his chances of transfer to a four-year school, but he has no plans to drop out in the meantime.
And he’s thinking about running for student government president again next year.
Earlier today I read your “Open Letter to Khalil from Gaza,” the one in which you conjured up an imaginary Palestinian, someone like yourself — a loving husband and father, trying to do right by his family — and informed him that tonight his seven-year-old daughter would die.
“You’ll wake up in the middle of the night,” you wrote, “to a deafening explosion. Your whole house will tremble. Parts of the ceiling will fall on you. You’ll run to your daughter’s bedroom, and find the northern wall gone, your daughter lying on the broken floor, a charred husk.”
You went on to explain that although it will be your government, the Israeli government, that fires the missile that perpetrates that atrocity, Khalil mustn’t be mad at them, or you, because it will be Hamas, not Israel, who will have placed his daughter in danger, Hamas who will have condemned her to death.
And so I have a question for you, Boaz. My question is this.
Even if I accept your fictional narrative of the murder of Khalil’s child, and the moral calculus you impose on it, what about the other Palestinian children?
What about the children killed by your country’s wayward missiles, and its jumpy border guards? What about Hamid Younis Abu Daqqa, shot down earlier this month by a stray Israeli bullet fired by a soldier who never knew he existed?
Is there no room in your response to such tragedies for ambivalence, for doubt, for taking up the moral burdens of your own country’s actions?
Can you honestly imagine no other way to reach out to a Palestinian who has just lost his daughter than to chastise him? To chide him? To lecture him? Is that where your moral imagination, your capacity for humanity, ends?
Is this actually what you would want to say to a person whose child your government’s army was about to murder? To a person, an innocent, whose life was about to be destroyed as the side-effect of an attempt to keep your family whole?
Is that it? Is that really it?
And if it is — if you were speaking from the heart in your open letter, if it represents the truest and best of who you are — then tell me this, please: Why on earth should he not hate you?
Why on earth should I not hate you?
Students have held demonstrations in connection with the Israeli assault on Gaza at more than a dozen campuses — some in support of the Palestinians, some in support of Israel. What follows is a list of the demonstrations I’ve been able to learn of through the media. Presumably many more have occurred that haven’t received press coverage.
Monday
- Cornell
- Florida State
- Purdue
- University of California Davis
- University of Massachusetts
- University of North Carolina
- University of Oklahoma
- University of South Florida
Friday
- University of Alabama at Birmingham
- University of Miami
- University of Minnesota
- University of Southern California
- University of Wisconsin Madison
Thursday
Several dozen students briefly occupied Dutton Hall, an administration building on the University of California Davis campus, yesterday afternoon in protest against Israeli attacks on Gaza. The protest came one day after the first anniversary of last year’s notorious pepper-spraying of UC Davis activists by campus police.
According to the California Aggie, the UC Davis student newspaper, tempers flared between protesters and pro-Israel students at the occupation in two separate incidents.
The paper says that when demonstrators saw one student recording the action on her camera phone they approached her and “two neighboring Israeli students, yelling ‘Death to Israel’ and ‘Fuck Israel’ until they left.” Later, the paper reported, a demonstrator “grabbed [another student] by the shirt collar and raised a fist” after he “vocalized disagreement with one of the signs in the room.”
It’s not clear whether Aggie reporters witnessed either of the two incidents. The paper’s tweets from the scene mentioned only “heated … talk,” not intimidation or physical confrontation.
Update | Aggie editor and article author Janelle Bitker says she and another Aggie staffer witnessed both incidents.
There’s been a lot of cheering today for the news that Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick plans to direct public colleges in the state to allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition, but a peek at the fine print shows that the policy shift isn’t anywhere near what it could be.
The policy covers undocumented Massachusetts residents eligible for temporary immunity from deportation under the Obama administration’s new DREAM-Act-like policy, but there’s a catch. Actually two.
First, in order to qualify for in-state tuition, you have to have made your way through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) hoops and been granted the reprieve from deportation it provides. That means that if you’ve got qualms about coming forward, or you’re having trouble proving eligibility, or are stuck in the bureaucracy for some other reason, you’re out of luck.
Second, and more importantly, the program only covers DACA-eligible students. So if you’re over thirty, you don’t qualify — even if you’ve lived in Massachusetts for twenty years. If you came to the US after your 18th birthday, or you’ve got the wrong kind of criminal record, or you don’t have (or can’t prove) the uninterrupted presence in the country that DACA requires, you’ll continue be treated as an out-of-state student for tuition purposes.
And it’s important to note that there’s no reason for Massachusetts to be limiting in-state tuition this way. A number of other states have taken the more reasonable approach of applying residency rules to all students equally, no matter what their immigration status. Just this month, in fact, Maryland took that step by statewide referendum.
If you’ve been in state long enough to obtain residency, you’ve been a state resident long enough to get in-state tuition. That’s a simple, straightforward principle, and it should be the one that pertains in Massachusetts.
It’s a shame Deval Patrick doesn’t see it that way.
studentactivism.net 
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