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According to the LA Times, more and more community colleges, responding to contracting opportunities at four-year institutions and growth in international student enrollment, are building dorms. And though the Times doesn’t speculate, this development may in turn help foster student organizing at community colleges.
Anyone who has tried to organize students on a commuter campus knows how hard it can be to get things going and keep them going. The proportion of American college students living on campus is much lower now than it was a few decades ago, and this shift is one of the factors that has made student organizing more challenging. From that perspective, a movetoward dorms at community colleges may provide a boost for student activists at those campuses.
And the benefits of dorms to organizers go beyond the students who live in them. Dorms create a 24/7 community on campus, and make it easier to schedule events outside of peak class hours — if people know that students living in the dorms will be coming out for an event, they’ll be more likely to schlep to campus to attend.
Community college student organizing has been growing in recent years. Dorms may give it an additional push.
Before dawn on July 18, 1992, members of a Peruvian government death squad entered the dorms of Enrique Guzmán y Valle National Education University, known as La Cantuta. They rousted the students from their beds, abducting nine of them.
La Cantuta had a long history of radical Maoist politics, and the nine students were suspected of involvement in a recent car bombing.
The death squad members took the students, and a professor who they abducted from his home, to an off-campus location. There the ten were tortured and killed. The corpses of four of those killed were discovered in an unmarked grave a year later; the other six bodies have never been accounted for.
Yesterday a Peruvian court convicted Peru’s former president, Alberto Fujimori, of having ordered the La Cantuta killings, as well as a massacre the previous year in which fifteen people were killed. Fujimori served as Peru’s president from 1990 to 2000.
Fujimori’s daughter, Keiko Fujimori, a 34-year-old member of the Peruvian national congress, will be a candidate in Peru’s presidential elections next year. If elected, she has pledged to grant her father a full pardon.
Feminists are sounding alarms online about the return to cyberspace of a male blogger who sexually assaulted a fellow college student in early 2007.
Kyle Payne, a self-described male feminist and anti-pornography activist, was an undergraduate at Iowa’s Buena Vista University, working as a resident advisor in BVU’s dorms, when he undressed and videotaped an unconscious, intoxicated student under his care.
Months after the assault, while his crime was still unknown, Payne began blogging on pornography, sexual violence, and other issues from a pro-feminist perspective. He continued to do so, without acknowledging his wrongdoing, even after he was arrested for, and pled guilty to, the assault. It was not until he was on the brink of incarceration that publicity forced him to admit his crime on his blog.
Both the fact of Payne’s crime and the manner in which he chose to discuss it generated tremendous outrage among feminist bloggers, and that outrage was revived and intensified last month when Payne, released from a six-month jail term, began blogging again.
Payne’s earliest post-incarceration posts made no mention of his crime or his punishment, although they did include reprints of pro-feminist essays he had written before the scandal broke — including several relating specifically to campus rape prevention. In response to subsequent criticism, he added a disclaimer referring to the sexual assault to his earlier pro-feminist and anti-rape posts, though no mention of his crime appears on the front page of his blog or in his new posts. (He discloses it at the very end of his “Blogger Bio” page, in a one-sentence statement that refers to the assault as a “non-violent sexual offense.”)
For a sampling of response to Payne’s return to blogging, see Renegade Evolution, Natalia Antonova, and Hugo Schwyzer.
An interesting article from the Kansas City Star on what colleges tell (and don’t tell) families about students’ underage drinking violations.
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) limits what universities can do with information about students, but it gives campuses broad discretion in some areas. The Star explores the question of what universities do, and should, tell students’ families when a student violates drinking rules.
Last April we passed on word that a student at the University of Portland had been threatened by administrators with disciplinary action after reporting a sexual assault. She and a male student had been drinking at a party in violation of university policy. She told the university he raped her in her dorm room. The university took no action.
A year later, after the student went to the campus newspaper with her story, she got a letter from the university’s judicial co-ordinator saying that the two students’ drinking had made “consent—or lack of consent … difficult to determine,” and that “there are possible violations for which [the complainant] could be charged.”
Today comes word that the university’s sexual assault reporting policies have been revised. The new policy reads as follows:
“To foster the safety and security of the entire community, the University of Portland encourages reporting of all instances of sexual assault. … To remove barriers to reporting, the University will not pursue potential policy violations of the survivor which occurred in the context of the sexual assault. Likewise, the University will not pursue potential policy violations of a person who comes forward to report sexual assault.”
This change brings Portland’s policies in line with Catholic colleges like Gonzaga, Santa Clara and Notre Dame. According to a university administrator, it brings the university’s written policies in line with “the University’s values and practices regarding sexual assault that have been in place for many years.”
Thanks to Inside Higher Ed for the heads-up. New visitors are welcome to follow us on Twitter.
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