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“I think he’s underestimating us a lot and that we’re going to show him in the next couple weeks that we can really turn on the fire.”
–University of Vermont student activist and Students Stand Up member Cecile Reuge, on UVM president Dan Fogel.
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.
Here are the thirteen demands put forward by the students who sat in at the University of Vermont yesterday:
1. REVOKE all DISMISSALS and non-reappointments thus far issued.
2. TERMINATE all plans for more layoffs and non-reappointments of staff and faculty.
3. Return positions that have been reduced to part-time back to FULL-TIME status.
4. Issue a statement of NEUTRALITY respecting the right of staff and faculty to ORGANIZE.
5. DISCLOSE all budget reconciliation options that were reviewed and considered prior to the decision to initiate layoffs.
6. DISCLOSE all information related to administrative compensation and bonuses.
7. Return ALL administrative BONUSES from FY `08 and FY `09 to the UVM general fund.
8. Return administrative salary pool to the 2002 levels.
9. Pursue all legal options to utilize the university’s ENDOWMENT to close the FY `10 operating budget gap.
10. CAP rate of TUITION and room and board fee increase at corresponding year rate of inflation.
11. Establish with us a democratic process by which students, staff, and faculty have a decisive role in decisions regarding the budget.
12. CAP student body population at Fall 2009 levels.
13. REINSTATE the varsity Softball and Baseball teams.
On Tuesday, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Safford School District v. Redding, the case of Savana Redding, an eighth-grade girl who was strip-searched by school officials looking for prescription-strength ibuprofen.
It’s an interesting and important case, and I’ve got lots to say about it — expect another couple of posts on the subject in the next day or two. But I’d like to start by clearing up a misconception.
A reporter named David G. Savage covered the case for the Tribune Company, which publishes the Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times. In his story, which appeared in both of those papers, he said that when Justice Scalia asked Matthew Wright, the school district’s attorney, whether a body cavity search would be permissible in a school setting, Wright “insisted it would be legal.”
Savage’s take on the exchange has been echoed by a bunch of blogs. But it’s a profound misrepresentation of what Wright actually said.
Thirty-one student supporters of local activist group Students Stand Up (Twitter feed) were arrested during protests against budget cuts at the University of Vermont yesterday.
At three o’clock yesterday a group of about a hundred UVM students staged a sit-in at the offices of university president Dan Fogel. Seven of those students sat in inside Fogel’s suite, and were arrested in the afternoon, while the rest of the students, protesting immediately outside the presidential offices, were allowed to remain for a time.
According to the Burlington Free Press, the students’ list of thirteen demands included “revoking recent reductions in faculty, capping tuition increases at the rate of inflation and recovering all the bonuses paid to administrators in 2008 and 2009.”
At 9:30 in the evening the university shut the building to incoming students. It was announced that the building would close at ten o’clock, and that students who remained after closing would be subject to arrest. About half the sixty students then occupying the building left before arrests began, but at least twenty-five — including at least one who had been arrested earlier in the day — were booked on trespassing charges.
By the time police began making arrests, several hundred students had gathered outside the building in support of the sit-in. All but one of the protesters were released immediately after being booked.
A rally at the university’s library is planned for noon today. I’ll update this post as news comes in.
April 24 morning update: About a hundred students attended the noon rally, where students called for UVM president Dan Fogel’s resignation. Plans for more actions are in the works. Also, Students Stand Up has a Facebook group.
studentactivism.net 
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