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A new addition to the blogroll: Black On Campus.

It’s a great blog, with all sorts of material on black students, black faculty, and other issues relating to African-American higher education past and present. Just a really rich resource. I’ve already spent a chunk of the morning over there, and it’s going to be a regular read for me from now on.

The student government of Carelton University in Ottawa, Canada has withdrawn from a national cystic fibrosis fundraising campaign on the grounds that the disease’s sufferers are too white and too male.

In a resolution, the student government declared that cystic fibrosis “has been recently revealed to only affect white people, and primarily men.” (A representative of the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation says both of these claims are false.)

Public comment on the decision was swift and harsh, with one columnist at the conservative National Post calling the resolution “a new low … even by the loopy standards of student governments.”

Students at Carelton have launched a drive to impeach the president of the student government, as well as a faculty adviser to the group the student government member who drafted the resolution.

December 3 Update: The Carelton student government has apologized for the resolution, and pledged to increase fundraising for cystic fibrosis. See our followup story here.

A hundred students and faculty sat in silence outside last Thursday’s meeting of the College of DuPage board of trustees — some with black tape covering their mouths — to protest the far-reaching changes in university governance the board has proposed. 

Glenn Hansen, president of the College of DuPage Faculty Association, said the proposals “usurp” the legitimate powers of other campus constituencies, and threaten the college’s accreditation.

The board of trustees of The College of DuPage, an Illinois Community College, have released a 230-point proposal for changes in college policy that students and faculty say violates established principles of university governance and academic freedom, and perhaps state and federal law as well.

The proposal, which the president of the DuPage faculty association calls “an attempt by the board to gain complete control over everything,” would give the board power to set specific policies on subjects ranging from curriculum to faculty salaries, grant them authority to veto speakers brought to campus, and place the student newspaper under the control of the college president. 

The board’s action casts an already troubled college into further disarray. In May the president of DuPage was abruptly removed from office for reasons that were never made public, and just last month the chair of the board of trustees brought a defamation suit against three former board members who had complained that he had groped them and made suggestive comments to them during their tenure on the board.

The Volokh Conspiracy comment thread about the adjunct prof fired for publicly identifying suspected plagiarizers seems to be dying down, but it saw a really interesting series of exchanges about campus honor codes yesterday. (I also weighed in on the ethics of the prof’s actions over there, if you’re interested.)

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StudentActivism.net is the work of Angus Johnston, a historian and advocate of American student organizing.

To contact Angus, click here. For more about him, check out AngusJohnston.com.