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A federal court has found that a student who erased her tuition bills by filing bankruptcy has a right to force her alma mater to provide her with transcripts.
Stefanie Kim Kuehn earned a Master’s degree from Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee, but she graduated owing $6000 in tuition and fees. She later declared bankruptcy, discharging that debt, but the university refused to give her her transcripts.
A judge ruled that the university, having allowed Kuehn to graduate, could not now withhold transcripts in the face of a bankruptcy filing. That ruling was upheld at the federal circuit court level in 2007, and at the appellate level yesterday.
The court’s ruling provides little comfort for other broke students, though — the judges ruled that CSU would have been within their rights to delay granting Kuehn’s degree until she paid her bills.
July 2010 Update: A federal judge has ruled in EMU’s favor, upholding Julea Ward’s expulsion.
The story of Julea Ward, a former counseling student who is suing Eastern Michigan University over her expulsion from their graduate program, is burning up the right-wing blogosphere.
Conservative commenters on the case generally argue that Ward, a Christian, was removed from the program because she refused to “advocate for homosexual behavior” — or, as National Review‘s David French puts it, “vocally support same-sex sexual conduct.”
But Ward’s attorneys have posted various documents relating to her dismissal up online, and those documents tell a different story.
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.
“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.
In a two-hour conference call last Sunday, activists for the 70% of American college faculty who are not on the tenure track gave their new national organization a name.
“New Faculty Majority: the National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Equity” will, organizers say, be a membership group that advocates for the interests of non-tenured faculty. They are hard at work on a mission statement, a website, and an organizational structure, and they are planning a national day of action for April 30 of this year.
For more information, and updates going forward, see the New Faculty Majority blog.
studentactivism.net 
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