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Here’s the latest on the strike at Toronto’s York University, which has largely shuttered the campus since November 6:
The striking union rejected the university’s latest offer last night, and negotiations are set to resume today. Some university community members have called on the Ontario legislature to force the strikers back to work, but the legislature is currently in recess, and will be for another month.
And here are some local resources on the strike:
A student blog that describes itself as “a neutral atmosphere for discussions about the strike.”
The website and facebook group of a group calling for binding arbitration to resolve the dispute — a position the university endorses and the union opposes.
The official websites of York University and the striking union local, and the union’s strike blog.
To keep tabs on our ongoing coverage of the York strike, check out our Labor category archives, or just bookmark our main page.
For two months, a strike by Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 3903 has shut down Toronto’s York University.
The strike, by teaching assistants and other employees, has left the university’s 50,000 students unable to return to class, and some of them are beginning to take matters into their own hands:
- On Sunday, a group of several dozen students launched a sit-in outside the university president’s office, demanding that he hold a public forum to answer students’ questions about the strike. (The sit-in is a continuation of a four-day protest that was held before the Christmas break.)
- On Tuesday, the university’s student government presented administrators and union officials with a 4000-signature petition urging both sides to reach an agreement that addresses students’ needs.
- Today, the student government is holding a board meeting to discuss the creation of an emergency relief fund to provide financial assistance to students experiencing hardship as a result of the strike.
After weeks away from the table, university and union officials began negotiating over the weekend. Talks continue, but there has been no breakthrough so far.
January 11 Update: If you arrived at this post directly from a search, click through to (or bookmark) the blog’s main page to see all posts on this subject.
Take a look at College Freedom, a blog from John K. Wilson, the author of Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and its Enemies and The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education.
Links from the student protest at the New School:
The website and blog of “The New School In Exile,” organizers/participants in the recently ended sit-in and associated actions.
A roundup of media coverage of the protests.
The text of the agreement between the protesters and university president Bob Kerrey.
An essay by one of the protesters on the lessons he learned in the sit-in.
A clip from Brian Lehrer’s talk show on New York public radio, in which he talks with one of the protesters’ media liaisons.
A Flickr slideshow of the protest, and another set of photos. (Several other photosets are up at NYC Indymedia.)
New School president Bob Kerrey’s new blog.
I’ll be keeping an eye out for more resources and links. Feel free to pass additional ones along in comments.
About a week ago, this story made the rounds.
A professor at the University of Michigan answered an ad on craigslist for sexual services placed by a woman who turned out to be a U of M law student. In the course of the encounter that followed, he hit her with a belt and slapped her face. She went to the cops, he claimed it was all consensual. The cops refused to charge him with assault, instead charging them both with misdemeanor offenses relating to the transaction itself, and one local (non-campus) cop made an extremely offensive public comment ridiculing the woman who had been beaten for going to the police.
I didn’t post about the story at the time because I didn’t have much of an angle on it, and because it’s often hard to know what to make of a crime story when it first breaks. It wasn’t clear what action the university was taking, or planning to take, for instance.
But now the law student has spoken out, and her statement is very much worth reading. Here it is.
studentactivism.net 
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