You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Administration’ category.
A San Jose State University computer science student has won a victory in a struggle over control of his academic work.
Kyle Brady was threatened with punishment by a professor for posting code he had written for a class assignment online. (Brady wanted to make his code available to other programmers, his prof thought that making it public would facilitate cheating among students who were given the same assignment in the future.) Brady appealed his prof’s decision, and the university took his side.
As Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow says, this ruling affirms fundamental principles about the teacher/student relationship:
Profs — including me, at times — fall into the lazy trap of wanting to assign rotework that can be endlessly recycled as work for new students. But the convenience of profs must be secondary to the pedagogical value of the university experience. … Students work harder when the work is meaningful, when it has value other than as a yardstick for measuring their comprehension.
That’s worth saying again, I think. “The convenience of profs must be secondary to the pedagogical value of the university experience.” Exactly.
Teenage students at a school in Loughton, England staged a boycott of one of their classes this spring when they discovered that the classroom it was held in had been fitted out with video cameras.
The students at Davenant Foundation School discovered the cameras when they arrived in class one Monday morning — they had not been consulted on, or even informed of, their installation. Seventeen of eighteen students in the class walked out.
It took school administrators two weeks to address the students’ concerns, saying that the cameras had been installed for teacher training purposes and would not be activated without prior notice to the class. Later, however, students discovered that microphones in the room had been turned on. (They turned them off.)
Last week two of the protesters, Lela Clancy and Sam Goodman, published an opinion piece on their protest, and the public response to it, in The Guardian, one of Britain’s leading newspapers. It’s well worth reading.
(via Boing Boing)
A federal appeals court in Colorado has found that administrators at Lewis-Palmer High School did not violate Erica Corder’s rights when they forced her to apologize for remarks she made in a 2005 valedictorian’s address.
Corder’s speech — one of fifteen short addresses by students at the graduation — had been cleared by school officials in advance, but abandoned the agreed-upon text, instead delivering one that included the following lines:
I need to tell you about someone who loves you more than you could ever imagine. He died for you on a cross over 2,000 years ago, yet was resurrected and is living today in heaven. His name is Jesus Christ. If you don’t already know him personally I encourage you to find out more about the sacrifice he made for you so that you now have the opportunity to live in eternity with him.
Administrators then refused to give Corder her diploma until she made a public apology. Corder did so, but later sued the school.
In its ruling, the court found that because the graduation was a “school-sponsored activity,” and the public might reasonably believe that Corder’s speech had been approved by school officials, the punishment was not an unconstitutional one.
Corder’s attorney told the Student Press Law Center that censorship of, or punishment for, graduation speeches is improper. “When the student goes to the lectern to speak,” he said, “it’s their own words.”
The administration of Liberty University is moderating its position on the campus’s College Democrats club, which it dissolved a little over a week ago.
In a May 15 email, LU Vice President for Student Affairs Mark Hine told the club’s president that the College Democrats was “no longer going to be recognized as a Liberty University club,” citing university regulations requiring that all campus groups and their parent organizations adopt policies and positions consistent “with the distinctly Christian mission of the University, the Liberty Way, the Honor Code, or the policies and procedures promulgated by the University.” Groups in conflict with those principles, he noted, could not “be approved, recognized or permitted to meet on campus, advertise, distribute or post materials, or use University facilities.”
Yesterday, however, in an email to Rod Snyder, an official with the Young Democrats of America, LU chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. took a different stance. The College Democrats, he said, would not be allowed to use Liberty University’s name, but they “will not be prevented from meeting on campus or having a club.”
Fallwell claimed that Snyder had been “misinformed” about Liberty’s position on the CD, and he seems to have grasped onto an ambiguity in Hine’s original email as the basis for his new position. Although Hine said that CD would not be recognized as a club because of the Democratic party’s views, he did not explicitly say that the group would not be allowed to meet on campus. He strongly implied it, to the point that it’s the only sensible reading of his letter, but he didn’t say it explicitly.
This isn’t a complete reversal of the university’s May 15 policy, but it is a significant retreat, and a major victory for the school’s College Democrats.
Sunday morning update: Liberty University offered another olive branch to the College Democrats on Friday, offering full recognition if the group would affiliate with the national organization Democrats for Life rather than the Democratic Party. On its face, this seems like a plausible compromise, as the LU College Dems identifies itself as a pro-life organization.
There is, however, a hitch.
Democrats for Life does not endorse or campaign on behalf of pro-choice candidates. Ever. And if the Liberty University College Democrats were to affiliate with DfL, they wouldn’t be able to do so either. As LUCD president Brian Diaz pointed out to a local newspaper, that means that the group would have to sit on the sidelines of the 2012 presidential election.
Update: Liberty University has backed down somewhat from its original ban. Details here.
At Liberty University in Virginia, the campus chapter of the College Democrats was informed on May 15 that because the principles of the Democratic Party contradict “Christian doctrine” and “the moral principles held by Liberty University,” the club would no longer be recognized by the university.
The College Democrats chapter was recognized last October. LU, which was founded by conservative activist and preacher Jerry Falwell, has long hosted a chapter of the College Republicans.
The governor of Virginia and all four major candidates to replace him — three Democrats and a Republicans — have all said they oppose the university’s decision. The national Young Democrats are circulating a petition opposing the move, and Rachel Maddow hosted the club’s president Brian Diaz last night.
Liberty isn’t the only conservative religious college to ban a political club recently — administrators at Idaho’s Brigham Young University dissolved the College Democrats and the College Republicans this winter, saying they wanted the campus to be “politically neutral.” The Rexburg, Idaho Standard Journal has a long, thorough story on that decision.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments