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Ari Melber of The Nation has put together a sharp overview of the flap over Condoleeza Rice’srecent comments on torture, and his piece does a better job than any other I’ve read of highlighting what a student power moment this is.
Three Stanford students — one with a video camera, the other two just asking questions — buttonholed Rice at a dorm event, and changed the direction of America’s debate on Bush-era torture policy. There was none of the preening or shouting that the talk show pundits wallow in, just good, solid questions and deeply inadequate answers. (At least one of the questioners didn’t even know he was on camera — he was just engaging with Rice in the moment.)
And the three students who made it happen? Sammy Abusrur, is a sports reporter for the Stanford Daily. Jeremy Cohn is a public policy major and an alto saxophonist in the Stanford marching band. Reyna Garcia, who taped the exchange and uploaded it to YouTube, is a sophomore.
The New School Free Press has published a full transcript of an interview it conducted with New School president Bob Kerrey last month. In it, Kerrey talks about how officials monitor Twitter during protests, says that someone getting “knocked to the ground” isn’t police brutality, and appears to promise that a student will be seated on the New School board of trustees before long.
Kerrey has been the subject of intense criticism from students and faculty alike during his tenure at the New School, and the NSFP interview took place just twelve days after a student occupation of a campus building that was aimed — in part — at forcing his resignation. That occupation, the second at the New School in the last six months, ended in nearly two dozen arrests.
Extended excerpts follow…
May 9 update: Police search teams have found a corpse a little over a mile from where George Zinkhan’s Jeep was abandoned after the April 25th shootings discussed below. The Atlanta Journal Constitution is reporting that the body has been tentatively identified as Zinkhan’s.
Earlier today, three people were shot to death in Athens, Georgia, and UGA marketing professor George M. Zinkhan III has been identified as the alleged shooter.
The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s website has a mostly straightforward article up on the incident, linking to local media coverage and noting the steps that the university has taken to inform the campus community.
At the bottom of the piece, however, the Chronicle added an eyebrow-raising passage. After noting that students had been quoted in the UGA student newspaper the Red and Black saying that the news of the shooting was “hard to believe” and that Zinkhan was a “nice guy,” the article concluded with this:
“His ratings on the Rate My Professors Web site, however, were mixed. One commenter described him as ‘brilliant and really funny,’ but others said he was ‘cold hearted’ and a ‘creep.’ “
I’m a big proponent of student evaluation of faculty, but this strikes me as wildly inappropriate.
8:30 pm update: Via Womanist Musings, a reminder that the obligatory “nice guy” quote in articles about white middle-class men accused of murder is problematic too.
10:45 am update: Comments at the Chronicle are running heavily against the decision to include the Rate My Professor quotes in the article, and many of them are based on the premise that RMP is inherently worthless as a source.
I just posted this over there:
“If commenters at Rate My Professor had posted that Zinkhan had been violent or bizarrely aggressive toward them, that would have been something to at least consider mentioning in this article. Such comments would have been relevant to what he is accused of now, and might have raised the question of whether there were warning signs in Zinkhan’s relationship with students that UGA should have been aware of.
“But the comments posted weren’t those kinds of comments — they barely rose above the level of generic insults. Even if one believes, as I do, that RMP ratings can provide real information about a professor, these particular comments did not, and they should not have been quoted here.”
1:00 pm update: Huh. The Chronicle has now eliminated the references to RateMyProfessor from the article, and deleted all eighteen of the reader comments that criticized their decision to include the quotes. No note, no explanation, no other changes to the article.
9:00 pm update: The Chronicle has now posted an explanation of their decision to excise the Rate My Professor quotes and conducted another purge of the comments to the article, removing about half a dozen new comments critical of their original decision. They’ve also closed comments on the article, so that nobody can post criticizing their decision to censor the comments thread a second time.
Lordy.
11:00 pm update: It just keeps getting more and more ridiculous. The Chronicle has disabled comments on its follow-up article on the Zinkhan case, apparently because people were using that comment thread to air their grievances about the previous thread. As of this writing, the sole comment on the Chronicle’s article on another recent campus shooting, from commenter “Bing,” reads as follows:
“I am disgusted that all comments critical of the Chronicle’s decision to use anonymous RateMyProfessor screeds in reporting of the Georgia shooting have been taken down and that commenting has been disabled. It’s sad that I have to let the Chronicle know how disappointed I am through another posting. I have no doubt that this one will disappear too, thereby making it perfectly relevant to the article. The irony.”
As long as they keep doing this, I’ll keep updating this post, I guess.
11:20 pm update: And now that newest comment has been taken down too.
Here are the thirteen demands put forward by the students who sat in at the University of Vermont yesterday:
1. REVOKE all DISMISSALS and non-reappointments thus far issued.
2. TERMINATE all plans for more layoffs and non-reappointments of staff and faculty.
3. Return positions that have been reduced to part-time back to FULL-TIME status.
4. Issue a statement of NEUTRALITY respecting the right of staff and faculty to ORGANIZE.
5. DISCLOSE all budget reconciliation options that were reviewed and considered prior to the decision to initiate layoffs.
6. DISCLOSE all information related to administrative compensation and bonuses.
7. Return ALL administrative BONUSES from FY `08 and FY `09 to the UVM general fund.
8. Return administrative salary pool to the 2002 levels.
9. Pursue all legal options to utilize the university’s ENDOWMENT to close the FY `10 operating budget gap.
10. CAP rate of TUITION and room and board fee increase at corresponding year rate of inflation.
11. Establish with us a democratic process by which students, staff, and faculty have a decisive role in decisions regarding the budget.
12. CAP student body population at Fall 2009 levels.
13. REINSTATE the varsity Softball and Baseball teams.
Thirty-one student supporters of local activist group Students Stand Up (Twitter feed) were arrested during protests against budget cuts at the University of Vermont yesterday.
At three o’clock yesterday a group of about a hundred UVM students staged a sit-in at the offices of university president Dan Fogel. Seven of those students sat in inside Fogel’s suite, and were arrested in the afternoon, while the rest of the students, protesting immediately outside the presidential offices, were allowed to remain for a time.
According to the Burlington Free Press, the students’ list of thirteen demands included “revoking recent reductions in faculty, capping tuition increases at the rate of inflation and recovering all the bonuses paid to administrators in 2008 and 2009.”
At 9:30 in the evening the university shut the building to incoming students. It was announced that the building would close at ten o’clock, and that students who remained after closing would be subject to arrest. About half the sixty students then occupying the building left before arrests began, but at least twenty-five — including at least one who had been arrested earlier in the day — were booked on trespassing charges.
By the time police began making arrests, several hundred students had gathered outside the building in support of the sit-in. All but one of the protesters were released immediately after being booked.
A rally at the university’s library is planned for noon today. I’ll update this post as news comes in.
April 24 morning update: About a hundred students attended the noon rally, where students called for UVM president Dan Fogel’s resignation. Plans for more actions are in the works. Also, Students Stand Up has a Facebook group.
studentactivism.net 
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