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10:20 pm: Students at the University of Vermont (UVM) are sitting in at the university president’s office, protesting budget cuts. Some arrests were made earlier today, more possible at any time.
I’m still getting up to speed with this story, and following it primarily on Twitter. Check out the @studentactivism feed for updates.
10:50 pm update: Multiple reports on Twitter suggest mass arrests going on at the sit-in. I’m not going to try to cover this minute-by-minute, since info is so sketchy right now. I’ll post again tonight if I get anything major and unambiguous, though, and I’ll have a full write-up in the morning.
Midnight update: The building has been cleared, with about 30 students arrested. One report says all but one were processed and released. Hundreds of students were outside the building supporting the arrested protesters as they were let go. A rally is planned at the university library tomorrow at noon.
10:00 am update: The morning follow-up post is up.
The week since the New School occupation has seen a lot of action. There was a protest on Friday night, a roving anarchist happening on Sunday afternoon, an emergency campus assembly on Monday, a courtyard sit-in on Wednesday, and another major street protest on Thursday.
The protesters released a statement on Monday, by the way, and both the New School In Exile website and the occupiers’ blog have been active all week. (Both sites carry the text of a wide variety of statements on the occupation from bodies inside and outside the New School, along with their other coverage.)
And this afternoon some very interesting news came in via Twitter.
The New School provost has announced that all students suspended in last week’s occupation will be allowed “to complete their academic work this semester.” His statement calls this a “modification” of their suspensions, but unless there’s some hidden catch, it sounds very much as if their suspensions have in fact been lifted.
Disciplinary actions against the students are ongoing, and this announcement isn’t an amnesty, by any stretch. But given recent history of the New School’s attitudes toward the occupiers — president Bob Kerrey told the New York Post a week ago that he did not “consider them students” — this is a major shift.
Update: A kind reader has passed along the entire text of the announcement from the provost on the “modification” of the suspensions. (It’s the first comment on this post.) Thanks!
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.
The campus concealed-carry debate is heating up in several state legislatures right now, and I’m trying to get up to speed, so I’ve just started reading “Pretend ‘Gun-Free’ School Zones: A Deadly Legal Fiction” — an article by David Kopel that argues that laws prohibiting faculty and adult students from carrying guns on school campuses are “irrational and deadly.” (I found the article through the National Review‘s Phi Beta Cons blog, here.)
Kopel says that for most of America’s history “it was not uncommon for students to bring guns to school.” He cites a column in which John Lane reminisces about his youth in the 1940s and 1950s, and says that he “attempted to find a ‘school shooting’ from that era,” but “came up empty.” On the following page Kopel goes further, passing on the claim that “before the 1990 [Gun-Free School Zone Act], there had been only seven shootings at an American school in the previous 214 years,” and that “in the 17 years following the GFSZA, there were 78 such incidents.”
Each of these claims — that one might search for school shootings in the 1940s and 1950s and find no examples, and that there were only seven shootings at American schools before 1990 — struck me as unlikely, so I decided to check them out.
I fired up the search engine for the archives of the New York Times, looking for articles published between January 1, 1940 and December 31, 1959 that included the words “shot” and “school.”
The search returned 4,940 results.
Nobody has lived at 610 North Buchanan Boulevard in Durham, North Carolina since March 2006, when police began investigating charges that members of the Duke University lacrosse team had raped a woman there.
Three years later, the criminal charges against the players have long since been dropped, but the house remains padlocked and vacant. Duke owns the building, and wants to tear it down, but lawyers for members of the team are insisting that it be preserved as evidence in a possible lawsuit.
The Duke Chronicle, the university’s student newspaper, has the story.
studentactivism.net 
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