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From The New York Times comes word that small private colleges, anxious to increase enrollments and tuition revenue, are launching women’s wrestling teams to attract female students.
Women’s wrestling got a boost with the inclusion of the sport in the 2004 olympics, but today only five colleges in the United States field teams. Most of those teams are newly-formed, and three more will be starting up this fall.
Five thousand girls wrestled for high school teams in the US in 2006-07, and one college’s coach says her team brings in “20 to 25 extra students who normally wouldn’t have looked at Jamestown College” each year.
Two stories: the New York Times reports on American students’ efforts to live according to principles of environmental sustainability in the dorms, and WireTap magazine reports on student organizing around sustainable food practices on campus.
We’ve recently reported on two sexual assault scandals at Tulane University — the school’s failure to investigate allegations of drugging and rape at fraternity parties, and the mild punishment meted out by the campus judiciary to a student it found guilty of committing sexual assault in a dorm.
Today, via SAFER Campus, we have word of two other incidents that took place at Tulane this year.
In October, a male student was allegedly sexually assaulted by a Tulane campus police officer. The officer in question was dismissed from his job, but the administration has made no public statement on the incident or on whether any further steps have been taken. As SAFER Campus notes, federal law mandates that colleges inform the student body when such crimes occur.
In April, a student wrote in the campus newspaper of being assaulted on his way home from a party by assailants who called him a “fag.” The campus police, he says, did not conduct a criminal investigation of the assault, and the university administration failed to offer him any outreach or counseling in the wake of the crime.
SAFER Campus has on these stories — and the other Tulane events we’ve been following — here.
Ten members of Tulane University’s Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity were arrested this week, and the fraternity was suspended, after a brutal hazing incident that sent two pledges to the hospital. In a statement, the university declared that it has “zero tolerance for any type of … incident which can potentially endanger the well-being of any student.”
But the Tulane student government urged the university to investigate Pi Kappa Alpha, known as PIKE, for drugging female attendees at its parties more than two years ago, and its complaint was ignored.
In March 2006 the undergraduate student government at Tulane sent a five-paragraph letter to the university administration raising concerns about Pi Kappa Alpha, stating that there was “legitimate reason to believe” that the frat had “served drugged beverages to unsuspecting guests” at a party the previous month.
According to the letter, such allegations had been made “every year” in “recent memory” by female guests at Pi Kappa Alpha parties, with attendees “suspect[ing] that they may have been date raped” while drugged.
The letter also charged that “numerous people were taken to the hospital or injured” as a result of incidents at Pi Kappa Alpha parties, and that the university had responded with “minor punishments and slaps on the wrist.” The fraternity was engaged in “egregious and continuous abuse of the students and the rules,” the letter said, and “the situation gets worse every year.”
In a statement this week, the Tulane administration said that there had “apparently” been “no response from Tulane to this letter.”
On April 26 of this year two Pi Kappa Alpha pledges were hospitalized with second- and third-degree burns after a five-hour hazing ordeal in which fraternity members poured boiling water, crab-boil, and cayenne pepper sauce on pledges’ bodies. Police learned of the incident this past weekend, and filed charges against ten fraternity members on Tuesday.
Tulane suspended the fraternity the same day.
A major police operation on the San Diego State University campus led to the arrest of 75 students on drug charges yesterday. Fifty pounds of marijuana and four pounds of cocaine were seized in the sting, which involved seven SDSU fraternities.
The arrests were the culmination of six months of undercover work in SDSU’s frats, initiated after a 19-year-old student died of a cocaine and alcohol overdose last year. All of those arrested were men, and approximately twenty were charged with drug sales rather than possession.
On Tuesday SDSU suspended six fraternities — Lambda Chi Alpha, Phi Kappa Psi, Phi Kappa Theta, Theta Chi, Sigma Alpha Epsilon and Sigma Alpha Mu — that were implicated in the case. All of the arrested students have been suspended, and those who lived in campus housing are being evicted.
studentactivism.net 
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