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The folks behind the Take Back NYU protests have come in for a lot of abuse in the last week, and though some of it has been on-target, quite a bit has fallen wide of the mark. I’ll be posting my own take on the occupation itself soon, but before I do that I want to explore a few of the critics’ more telling errors and misstatements.
Last semester, Brenda Councillor was a student senator at Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas, and a vocal critic of university president Linda Sue Warner.
This semester she’s an alumna.
And she’s still not quite sure how it happened.
Councillor had one required course left to take as the fall semester ended. She was enrolled for the spring, and settled into her dorm room. But over the holidays, the registrar called her to congratulate her on her graduation.
The university was waiving her final required course and refunding her spring tuition and fees. They were also locking her out of her dorm room, shutting down her student email account, and mailing her a (misspelled) diploma.
When Councillor, who had circulated a petition in the fall demanding President Warner’s removal, wrote to the university’s vice president for academic affairs to ask why she had been involuntarily graduated, he blew her off.
“My priority is working with current Haskell Indian Nations University students,” he wrote. “Your concerns as a recent graduate of Haskell Indian Nations University in American Indian Studies will not be considered at this time.”
Ouch.
11:40 am Update: Linda Sue Warner, the president of Haskell Indian Nations University, has been summoned to Washington DC for a meeting with her university’s regents and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
In an effort to cut costs without reducing programs, colleges around the nation are cutting back to four-day class schedules.
Plans for four-day weeks have been announced at colleges in New York, Missouri, Georgia, and other states. The idea is even being considered at a few high schools.
The shift is expected to reduce heating and maintenance costs, and reduce commuting expenses for students, faculty, and staff.
On colleges with large on-campus student populations, a four-day week could make it easier to schedule student events and meetings. On commuter campuses, it could have the reverse effect.
In the next few weeks, I’m going to be cleaning out my bookmark folders from 2008 and passing along some of the news and links that I didn’t get around to posting last year. Starting with this…
Back in December, I mentioned an organization called Choose Responsibility in passing, calling it “a drinking-age reform group that arose out of college administrators’ frustration with the status quo.”
In August, Choose Responsibility unveiled a statement on the drinking age that declared that “Twenty-one is not working.” The statement was signed by more than a hundred college and university presidents, a list that at this writing has grown to 134.
See the full text of the statement after the jump, or click through to The Amethyst Initiative to learn more.
Earlier this fall, Tennessee State University became the first public university to block students’ access to the gossip website Juicy Campus.
Now comes word that Juicy Campus has reached out to the Tennessee chapter of the ACLU for assistance in bringing a lawsuit against TSU. The headline of this article notwithstanding, it does not appear that JC has yet filed suit. But we’re following this story, and we’ll pass on more news as we get it.
In other Juicy Campus news, the student government of Western Illinois University has passed a resolution calling on WIU’s administration to enact its own JC ban, with student government president Robert Dulski organizing for statewide action at a meeting of Illinois state student governments in February.
Meanwhile, in Ohio, Miami University’s panhellenic organization asked the state attorney general to take action against JC, while the Miami student newspaper editorialized against such a move.
studentactivism.net 
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