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Update: I’ve put up a follow-up post with new details and links on this story here, and a discussion of Chopra’s actions here.
Wow. This is … wow.
Four professors at Southwestern College, a community college in Chula Vista, California, have been suspended from their jobs and barred from campus — apparently for supporting a peaceful student budget protest.
The protest took place last Thursday, and drew the participation of several hundred SWC students. By Friday, the four professors had all received letters saying that they had been suspended effective immediately. The letters suggested that each of the four had violated a California state law prohibiting the willful disruption of “the orderly operation of the campus.”
English Professor Philip Lopez, the president of the college’s faculty union and one of the four suspended professors said he had been given no clear explanation for his suspension, but was sure it was an act of retaliation for the protest. “Clearly,” he told Inside Higher Ed, “the administration doesn’t think there is such a thing as the First Amendment.”
Another of the suspended professors, creative writing instructor Andrew Rempt, told the San Diego Union Tribune that the college’s head of human resources showed up at his home on Thursday evening with a police officer in tow to deliver his suspension letter by hand.
The president of the college, Raj K. Chopra, is on vacation, and the position of college spokesperson is currently vacant. Inside Higher Ed was unable to reach any other college official for an explanation of their action.
Update | A short, cryptic statement from Chopra’s executive assistant claims that the university is conducting an “investigation” of a matter “unrelated to the student rally.”
Second Update | This story keeps getting weirder. According to the blog Save Our Southwestern College, Chopra and HR director Jackie Osborne both went on vacation on Friday morning, hours after putting the faculty suspensions into effect. Chopra is expected to be gone from campus for three weeks.
Third Update | A post at Save Our Southwestern College identifies all four suspended professors. An anonymous comment on that post states that three of the four suspended professors participated in the budget rally, and that the suspension of the fourth was lifted when it was learned that she had not been in attendance at the protest. That commenter also claims that “at least one student … has received a letter warning him of the consequences of speaking out at SWC.”
Fourth Update | In a new interview with a local television station, targeted professor Philip Lopez calls the suspensions an act of “union busting,” and says all four profs were critics of Chopra’s policies.
Tuesday Update | As noted at the top of this story, I’ve now written a follow-up post with new details and links.
The student government at Idaho’s Boise State University has passed a resolution asking BSU’s faculty senate to amend a proposal that would reportedly end student participation in the academic grievance process.
Under current procedure, if a student’s complaint about an academic issue cannot be resolved through discussions with his or her professor, the chair of department, or the relevant dean, the dispute is brought to an Academic Grievance Board composed of seven faculty members and seven students.
But under a proposal currently under consideration by the faculty senate, students would be removed from the grievance process entirely.
Under the new setup, the final decision on any academic grievance would be made by the provost’s office, with the provost empowered, “at his or her discretion,” to “convene a panel … of three deans or associate deans” to assist in making a judgment.
One BSU administrator called the existing process cumbersome and antiquated, with a vice president of the university’s faculty senate saying that it is often difficult to find seven student members to sit on the grievance board.
But student government leaders rejected the idea that students should be removed from the process entirely, proposing that a six-member panel, including three students selected by the BSU student government and three faculty members selected by the provost, be given ultimate responsibility for grievance appeals.
Hat tip to the National Student News Service for bringing our attention to this story.
Linda Sue Warner, the president of Haskell Indian Nation University, isn’t having a good year.
Warner, who has served as president of HINU since 2007, took criticism in February for a bizarre episode in which she forced a student critic of her administration to graduate early. At the time, Warner was summoned to Washington DC for an emergency meeting with university trustees and government officials.
Warner kept her job after that incident, but it wasn’t long before she was in the spotlight again.
As part of a campaign to improve and expand the campus, Warner sought to raise tuition from $215 a semester to $1000. HINU is, however, the only four-year college for Native American students that is operated by the federal government, and it has a long tradition of free or nearly-free education. Warner’s plans to nearly quintuple fees sparked a huge campus backlash, and the university’s board of regents called for her to be fired.
That hasn’t happened … yet.
At the beginning of the fall semester, Warner was told by her bosses at the Bureau of Indian Education that she would not be returning to HINU this year. Instead, she would be sent to the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, a two-year college in New Mexico, to help them with their accreditation process. HINU would have an interim president while she was away.
According to news reports, Warner has been forbidden to talk to the press.
As of now, Warner is slated to return to HINU in January. We’ll keep an eye on the story and let you know whether that happens.
In the meantime, be sure to check out our coverage of that involuntary early graduation story from the spring. It’s a weird one.
Students at California State University Fresno staged a walkout and teach-in on Wednesday, protesting the massive fee increases and budget cuts that are underway at California’s public universities.
An estimated four hundred Fresno State students participated in the walkout, which built steam over the course of the morning and included a march around campus.
At two o’clock that afternoon, one hundred students climbed the stairs to the fourth floor of the campus library, which houses the offices of Fresno State president John D. Welty.
The students sat in outside his suite for two hours before Welty arrived, and secured an agreement that Welty will participate in a public meeting one week from Tuesday to discuss students’ demands.
This was the fifth sit-in of the fall semester at a California public university, following actions at UCLA and Berkeley, and two at UC Santa Cruz. This weekend, students from across California will gather at Berkeley for a statewide activist conference on the budget crisis.
Nearly three hundred Berkeley students kept the campus’s Anthropology library open from its scheduled closing time on Friday afternoon until 24 hours later, in protest of a new policy closing campus libraries on Saturdays.
Eighty students stayed overnight in the library, and they were joined by others in the morning. Some of the group studied, while others held teach-ins on the campus budget during the day on Saturday.
There are more than twenty libraries on the Berkeley campus, and administrators have eliminated weekend hours for at but two of them as a cost-saving measure.
October 13 update: Good on-the-scene report on the library takeover from Alternet. Here’s a taste:
What characterizes this movement (or maybe, what characterizes this as a movement), is the readiness of students, staff, and faculty to mobilize, as well as a diversity of tactics and strategies, coming from a myriad of organizations, bodies, coalitions, and mutually interested individuals who may be involved in none of those at all. This is the face of a new student movement, a movement invested in our spaces of learning, and one which demands to control the terms and conditions of our education.
studentactivism.net 
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