You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Campus Life’ category.
Ari Melber of The Nation has put together a sharp overview of the flap over Condoleeza Rice’srecent comments on torture, and his piece does a better job than any other I’ve read of highlighting what a student power moment this is.
Three Stanford students — one with a video camera, the other two just asking questions — buttonholed Rice at a dorm event, and changed the direction of America’s debate on Bush-era torture policy. There was none of the preening or shouting that the talk show pundits wallow in, just good, solid questions and deeply inadequate answers. (At least one of the questioners didn’t even know he was on camera — he was just engaging with Rice in the moment.)
And the three students who made it happen? Sammy Abusrur, is a sports reporter for the Stanford Daily. Jeremy Cohn is a public policy major and an alto saxophonist in the Stanford marching band. Reyna Garcia, who taped the exchange and uploaded it to YouTube, is a sophomore.
Steven Oliver and Kendra Key met in the contest for the student government presidency at the University of Alabama this year.
More than fourteen thousand students, well over half the campus population, voted — the most in UA history. The race was close, with less than two percentage points separating the two candidates. But in the end Olvier, a white man, defeated Key, a black woman, by two hundred and sixty-one votes.
UA is the flagship campus of Alabama’s state university system, and it has never had a black student body president. In the fourteen years since its current student government was established, seventeen students of color have run for campus-wide office. All have lost.
Race is not the only factor in Alabama’s student government elections, of course. (The campus’s student body is more than eighty-five percent white, to start with, which means the majority of Key’s support came from white students.) Oliver ran with heavy support from fraternities and sororities, and the divide between greeks and independents played a major role in the campaign.
But the fact that UA’s student officers have been — and remain — all white has significant consequences for the student government, and the campus as a whole. UA’s student newspaper, the Crimson White, grapples with those consequences in two articles — here and here.
United Students Against Sweatshops has extended its remarkable string of victories against clothing-maker Russell Athletic.
This week Boston College and the entire University of California system announced their intention to terminate contracts with RA, bringing to fifty-seven the number of colleges and universities that have disaffiliated so far this year.
The campaign against Russell Athletic stems from the company’s history of anti-labor activity in Honduras, specifically its closing of the Jerzees de Honduras factory in the wake of its unionization.
In Wednesday’s edition of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Royal Purple, managing editor Michael Daly slammed the “preferential treatment” some athletes consider their due, and “the coaches and administrators who send the message it’s acceptable to behave how you want because you can run fast or jump high.” As an example, he cited a recent incident in which police had to be called to the campus campus weight room to deal with an athlete who refused to show ID on entry.
Whitewater football coach Lance Leipold wasn’t happy.
“This is fucking bullshit,” Leipold told Purple sports editor Christopher Kuhagen (see note below). In an email, he said the paper would “no longer have access to student-athletes or coaches in the football program,” and in a phone call he told Kuhagen to “go cover soccer.”
After the Purple published a story on Leipold’s outbursts, however, he quickly issued an apology by email. “I want to sincerely apologize for my recent behavior,” he wrote. “Some of the language I used with you was inappropriate and I am very sorry. You, UW-Whitewater campus community and alumni expect and deserve better from me as the Head Football Coach and the example I need to set for our program. I am open to meeting with you anytime to discuss this further.”
He and his team would, he said, continue to make themselves available to the Purple‘s reporters.
Note: In the Purple article on Leipold’s tirades, the expletive before “bullshit” was deleted. It’s possible, but unlikely, that it was something other than “fucking.”
I posted earlier about one misconception about Tuesday’s Supreme Court arguments in the case of Safford School District v. Redding, and now I’d like to take on another.
The case stems from a lawsuit brought by Savana Redding, who was strip-searched when she was in the eighth grade by school officials looking for prescription-strength ibuprofen.
In a Slate story on the oral arguments, Dahlia Lithwick quotes ACLU attorney Adam Wolf as saying that school officials required “a 13-year-old girl to take off her pants, her shirt, move around her bra so she reveals her breasts, and the same thing with her underpants to reveal her pelvic area.” Justice Breyer, Lithwick says, responded by wondering whether the strip search Wolf described was “all that different” from requiring a student to “change into a swimming suit or your gym clothes.”
But Breyer’s example was not, as Lithwick claims, offered as parallel to Wolf’s — just the opposite.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments