You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Campus Communities’ category.
The Providence, Rhode Island mayor’s proposal to slap a “student municipal impact fee” on the city’s college students is being introduced as legislation in the RI state legislature.
The student tax, which I discussed here last month, would be an assessment of $150 per semester for all undergraduate and graduate students at the city’s four private universities. It’s intended to help close a multi million dollar municipal budget deficit.
Mayor Cicilline also put forward an alternate funding mechanism — a bill that would allow the city to collect fees directly from its largest tax-exempt institutions (the four universities plus five private hospitals). That bill would permit the assessment of such fees up to twenty-five percent of the taxes that the institutions would pay if they were not exempt.
The National Youth Rights Association of Southeast Florida, who staged a protest on May 1 against West Palm Beach’s weird youth curfew ordinance, have given the city one week to address their complaints before they formally file suit.
In a letter to the city’s attorney, civil rights lawyer Barry Silver, representing NYRASEFL, wrote yesterday that the curfew law is “unconstitutional, and thus unenforceable.” He urged them to rewrite the law or “better yet to scrap the idea altogether,” and said that if NYRASEFL does not hear from the city by Tuesday, May 26, they will initiate legal proceedings.
When I heard about Wolfram Alpha, I was tickled. It didn’t strike me as anything like a Google-killer, but I did think it had the potential to be a powerful research tool. Historians (and activists) often want to get their hands on quantitative data that can be hard to track down, and if Wolfram makes that tracking down easier, that’ll be a big deal.
So I plugged in some obvious search terms for scholars of higher education, along with a few big subjects from the history of student activism, to see what Wolfram Alpha would turn up.
For the most part, it turned up nothing. When I searched…
A former medical student is claiming that he was suspended from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey for describing himself as a “white, African, American.”
Paulo Serodio is of European descent, was born in Mozambique, and is a citizen of the United States, so each of the components of his self-identification is literally accurate, but he says that students and staff at the university objected to it.
Serodio claims that he was harassed and assaulted after making the comments, and his lawyer told the Associated Press that “directly” as a result of the comments he was suspended from the school. Serodio is now suing.
This story is already blowing up in the right-wing blogosphere, for obvious reasons, but as far as I can tell the AP article is the only source on it so far, and I have to say it doesn’t feel complete to me.
We don’t have the whole story on this yet, and I bet you ten bucks that the full version is going to be more interesting than the one we have now.
1 pm update: I’ve found a copy of the complaint. More soon.
Police at Northwestern University will no longer notify federal authorities when they encounter suspected undocumented immigrants except in cases involving felonies or human trafficking.
Student groups had been pressing for a new policy since NU police stopped Ramiro Sanchez-Zepeda on suspicion of DWI on April 26 and turned him over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement when he was unable to produce a driver’s license or visa.
Students had planned a Thursday rally to push for the reform, but NU police chief Bruce Lewis requested a meeting with student leaders on Tuesday and announced the new policy on Wednesday.
The planned protest rally was recast as a celebration of the change in policy and a call to continued activism.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments