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Last week the Cal State Northridge Daily Sundial ran an article on student drinking habits that claimed that American first-year students “spend more time drinking than studying.” Their source for this claim was a deeply flawed report produced by a company that markets anti-alcohol programs to college campuses.
As we reported last month, the study in question was little more than a marketing handout for Outside the Classroom, a for-profit company that produces anti-drinking programming for use by student affairs administrators.
The study received quite a lot of attention on its release, in large part because it was presented at the annual meeting of NASPA, a professional association for professionals in the student affairs field. What received much less attention was the fact that Outside the Classroom is a major corporate sponsor of NASPA, and paid for time at the group’s annual meeting.
And the problems with the study don’t end with its sponsorship. Its methodology is questionable and its most often repeated conclusions are not supported by the evidence it offers.
In short, the Outside the Classroom “study” is shoddy, anti-student research from a company with a financial interest in portraying students as problem drinkers. Disseminating it doesn’t bring us any closer to actually understanding student drinking habits, healthy or unhealthy.
This morning the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of an eighth-grade girl who was strip-searched at school over suspicions that she was hiding prescription-strength Advil somewhere on her body.
The transcript of the arguments will be released later — and I’ll update this post when I have them — but reporters who were present describe the two sides’ attorneys staking out extremely different interpretations of the constitutional issues at stake.
Adam B. Wolf, representing the student, Savana Redding, said that schools must have “location specific” information to search inside a student’s underwear. Even if a student is suspected of hiding weapons or heroin, he said, a school has no right to conduct such a search without evidence that contraband is hidden on the student’s body.
The attorney for the school, on the other hand, said that the school would have been legally justified in conducting a body cavity search on Redding, if they considered it appropriate.
The Court’s ruling in the case is likely to come sometime in June.
4:15 pm update: The transcripts of the oral arguments have been posted (PDF). I’ll read and comment when I get the chance.
6:15 pm update: Reading the transcripts now. The Baltimore Sun badly misrepresented the school attorney’s response to the cavity search question. More later.
The United States Supreme Court will hear arguments a week from today in the case of a 13-year-old who was strip-searched by school officials who suspected she had brought ibuprofen to school.
Savana Redding was an eighth grader in Safford, Arizona in the fall of 2003. On October 8 of that year, an administrator discovered that one of Redding’s classmates had high-strength ibuprofen pills in her possession. (Ibuprofen is the active ingredient in the headache medicine Advil.) Under questioning, that student said she had gotten the pills from Redding.
Redding had no history of disciplinary problems, but school officials made no attempt to confirm the classmate’s story. Instead, they pulled Redding from class, and after a search of her bookbag turned up no pills, she was taken to the school nurse’s office. There she was told to strip to her underwear and pull her bra and underpants out from her body, exposing her breasts and pubic area.
No ibuprofen was found.
An appeals court ruled last year that this search violated Redding’s constitutional rights, as well as “any known principle of human dignity.” The Supreme Court will rule on that question, as well as the issue of whether Redding has the right to sue the assistant principal who ordered the search.
Redding is now an undergraduate at Eastern Arizona College, majoring in psychology.
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.
The students of the University of Arkansas voted this week to urge the U of A to adopt “sanctions for the possession and use of marijuana … no greater than those imposed by the University for the possession and use of alcohol.”
The university’s dean of students inserted himself into the referendum debate a week ago, sending a mass email to students arguing that “individuals choosing to possess and/or use marijuana merit different educational sanctions from those who violate the alcohol policy.” All of the candidates running for student government president and vice president endorsed the referendum, however, and it passed by a two-to-one margin.
Update: These referenda have been put on the ballot by NORML chapters at a bunch of campuses — one passed at Purdue just last week.
studentactivism.net 
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