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A former student has filed a lawsuit against Eastern Michigan University claiming that she was dismissed from a graduate program in counseling for refusing to “affirm or validate homosexual behavior within the context of a counseling relationship.”
At the start of this year, when she was nearing the end of her coursework at EMU, Julea Ward was engaged in a Counseling Practicum. Ward has religious objections to homosexuality, and when she discovered that one of her assigned clients was gay, she asked her professor whether she should see the client or have him reassigned. That question, she contends, set in motion a chain of events that ultimately led to disciplinary proceedings and her removal from the program.
The university has declined to comment publicly on the case, but in a March 12 letter the chair of her disciplinary committee said that Ward had “by clear and convincing evidence” violated ethical standards requiring that counselors “avoid imposing values that are inconsistent with counseling goals” or engage in discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
A copy of Ward’s complaint, with various documents relating to the disciplinary charges, can be found in PDF form here.
Update: We analyze Ward’s suit and the conservative blogosphere’s response.
At the end of last year The New School In Exile was the most famous single-campus student activist group in the country. Waging a confrontational campaign against former Senator Bob Kerrey, the New School’s deeply unpopular president, they won concessions from administrators — and major media coverage — by staging an audacious 32-hour occupation of a university building.
As the spring semester got underway, the wind seemed to be at NSIE’s back. In an emergency meeting in February, New School faculty unanimously declared their “strong and continuing … sentiment of no confidence” in Kerrey’s administration. Later that month, NSIE members participated in an NYU sit-in modeled on their own. New York magazine ran a damning portrait of Kerrey as an administrator at sea in the face of an extraordinary student and faculty “insurrection,” and in mid-March an NSIE activist was arrested as he spray-painted “Bye Bob” on the door of Kerrey’s residence.
The spring’s grandest gesture came in the course of the February emergency meeting, when graduate student Geeti Das read a statement from NSIE. The group was calling on Kerrey to resign by April first, she said. “If on that date he has not resigned, we will shut down the functions of the university. We will bring it to a halt.”
Her ultimatum was was reported by the New York Times, as was the applause it received.
April first was yesterday. Kerrey is still in place, and the New School is still functioning. According to the NSIE itself, yesterday passed “more or less without incident.” The group held a few small events yesterday (about which more below), but they engaged in no direct action, and haven’t announced any follow-up.
So what happened?
(This is part one of a four-part series. Part two is here and part three is here.)
“If you want to try for those young voters, first of all, you’ve got to stand for something, because one of the things that stands out with a young voter is originality.”
That was South Carolina governor Mark Sanford right after the 2008 presidential election. Today, in a move that is widely seen as positioning himself for a run at the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, he’s saying he’ll turn down $700 million dollars in federal education funding for his state.
Sanford says the government should be paying down debt, not running up new bills, but his refusal of the stimulus money only makes sense as a symbolic gesture … and it’s an odd one. The stimulus money has been allocated. It’s not going back into the general fund. If South Carolina doesn’t accept its share, it’ll go somewhere else — California’s Governor Schwarzenegger has already said he’ll be happy to take it.
And as Senator Lindsay Graham — a South Carolina Republican, and no fan of the stimulus — has noted, South Carolinians will footing their share of the bill for this expenditure, whether any of it returns to the state or not.
So Sanford’s approach is definitely original. He’s the only governor planning to refuse the education money. It’s an approach that’s getting a lot of attention among conservative activists. But his position is costing him support at home — his favorability rating in South Carolina now stands at 40%, nine points below President Obama. And it’s hard to see it doing him much good with young voters in 2012 — in the primary or the general election.
More than a thousand teachers and students marched on the South Carolina state house yesterday, with a simple message: “Take the money.”
Sanford has until midnight tomorrow to listen.
I don’t know if the Education Times site is new, or just new to me, but I’m going to be making it a regular stop from now on.
It’s a straightforward site — links to news articles on K-12 and higher education, with brief summaries — but it’s got a lot of stuff, and it’s easy to navigate. Because they emphasize quantity over depth, they cover a lot more ground than Inside Higher Ed or the Chronicle. If it’s the kind of thing you’re interested in, you’ll be interested.
And they (like us) are on Twitter, too.
A professor at the University of East London has been suspended from his position for predicting that there may “be real bankers hanging from lampposts” at Wednesday’s protests against the G20 economic summit.
Chris Knight, a professor of anthropology, is an organizer of G20 protests in London this week. He told the BBC that if bankers and government ministers don’t “surrender their power, obviously it’s going to get us even more wound up and things could get nasty.”
Knight’s G20 Meltdown is just one of many groups planning actions in London this week, but Knight’s eagerness to make incendiary statements to the media has made him the most quoted figure in the movement right now.
The UEL’s decision to suspend him has confirmed that position.
studentactivism.net 
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