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April 10 update: This morning at five o’clock New School students occupied a building on campus. Follow that story here.
Spring break ends tomorrow at the New School, a New York City university that has seen ongoing student protest in recent months. Two recent messages from The New School In Exile, the group behind many of the recent demonstrations, suggest that the next few weeks are likely to be lively ones.
That New School In Exile is planning more protest has long been a given. In February they announced that they would shut down the New School if university president Bob Kerrey didn’t resign by April 1.
As of today, Kerrey is still in office with just ten days left on the clock.
In an open letter posted to their website early this morning, NSIE declared that a loose group of thirty to sixty students has been meeting regularly this semester to prepare for April 1. The letter says their grievances can only be “addressed … through the removal of those who have systematically obstructed channels of reform,” and calls the April first deadline “an opportunity for all students to come together and take back their university.”
Just hours before spring break began, an NSIE activist was arrested for allegedly spray-painting “Bye Bob” on the door of Kerrey’s Greenwich Village residence. A message that appeared on the NSIE blog shortly after that arrest declared that “the New School and any other forms of authoritarian structure imposed upon us … will never jeopardize our movement through crack-downs and other inhospitable actions.”
“We will win,” it continued, “because We stand together no matter what befalls us … you can punish us as individuals as much as you like, but you cannot break our collective will!”
Stay tuned.
March 30 update: Still no action, but a new post on their website promises that April 1 will be a day to remember.
Spanish police on Wednesday forcibly evicted a hundred Barcelona University students from a campus building they had been occupying for 118 days. The removal, and a student-police clash that followed, are said to have resulted in eighty injuries and the arrest of nineteen students.
The students were protesting the Barcelona Plan, a European Union initiative for the internationalization of higher education that they fear will lead to reduced funding and increased corporate influence over higher education.
Journalists demonstrated outside a regional government building on Friday, saying that police had beaten some thirty photographers covering the disturbances. A government investigation of the police violence has been launched.
One journalist at the Friday protest carried a sign that read “Police don’t beat on me, I’m working.”
Yesterday I tweeted a link to a photo of a 1967 sit-in at Duke University, but it wasn’t until just now that I followed up to see the story behind the protest.
Wow.
In the fall of 1967, the Duke student government proposed a regulation that would have barred student organizations from patronizing segregated off-campus establishments. The regulation was put to the Duke student body in a referendum … and it failed by a 60-40 margin.
In response to the vote, members of the campus Afro-American Society staged a sit-in in the hallway outside the offices of the university president, and the university senate quickly agreed to impose the ban that the students had rejected.
The Civil Rights Act banned discrimination in public accommodations in 1964, but Duke had not enrolled its first black undergraduate students until the fall of 1963, and the university did not hire its first black professor until 1966, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the college’s white student majority would still be so hostile to integration in 1967.
Shocking, perhaps, but not surprising.
Chris Quintanilla, a 14-year-old eighth-grader in Peoria, Arizona, says he was told by his principal to remove a rainbow wristband that carried the slogan “Rainbows Are Gay.”
The student’s mother says that when she talked to the principal about his action, he told her that some teachers found the phrase offensive.
This is not the first time Natali Quintanilla and the principal have clashed over the school’s treatment of her son. She says that when she told him that Chris was being harassed at school for being gay earlier this year, she was told that he wouldn’t be picked on “if he didn’t put it out there the way he does.”
Unable to secure protection of her son’s free-speech rights directly through the school, Natali Quintanilla took the issue to the ACLU.
The ACLU sent the school district a three-page letter reminding them of students’ free speech rights in school, and asked them to “confirm … within 10 days” that “the District will now allow Chris and other students to wear or otherwise display messages or symbols expressing their support of LGBT rights.”
The district has not yet responded.
April 20 update: Quintanilla has been cleared to start wearing the wristband again.
A survey of more than six hundred American colleges found that more than half knowingly admit students who are in the United States illegally under at least some circumstances.
The survey, conducted by American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, found that 54 percent of the 613 schools responding knowingly admitted undocumented students, although some said they only did so if the student had graduated from an in-state high school or had certified their intention to seek legal status. Public community colleges were the most likely to admit students known to be undocumented, with 7o percent of those respondents saying they did so.
Just a heads-up: the link above leads to the website of the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the comments on that article are just as creepy as one would expect.
studentactivism.net 
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