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I was figuring today would be a slow news day on the York University strike. I figured wrong.
- The Liberal party is rejecting calls for a tuition refund.
- CUPE is planning a court challenge to the upcoming back-to-work legislation.
- More than a thousand students have signed on to a class-action lawsuit against York over their handling of the strike.
January 28 Update: CUPE won’t be challenging the BTW law after all. Classes at York should resume on Monday.
Not long ago, the York Federation of Students raised the idea of a tuition rebate for students affected by the strike. This morning’s Globe and Mail notes that there’s some precedent for such a move, and that some politicians don’t seem averse to it now.
The same article quotes New Democratic Party leader Howard Hampton as suggesting that his party’s refusal to grant consent to a back-to-work bill may delay the legislation’s passage by only “two or three days.”
Meanwhile, the York administration has released a timetable for when classes would resume if a back-to-work law passes this week. In short, if the law is enacted today, tomorrow, or Wednesday, classes would start up two days later. If it passes on Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, classes will resume next Monday.
Finally, there’s the question of what’s likely to happen if CUPE fights a back-to-work law in court. York law professor David Doorey posted some thoughts on that question on his blog last week.
10:44 am Update: Journalist Sarah Millar of the National Post is liveblogging (livetweeting?) the legislature’s question time on her Twitter feed.
1:36 pm Update: Liberal Party sources are now saying that Thursday is the earliest the bill could pass, which would make Monday the earliest York could re-open.
In recent months, the president of Northwestern College in Minnesota, a Christian college of more than three thousand students, has come under attack over a variety of theological and managerial issues.
On Tuesday, the student government at NWC released a letter calling upon the President Cureton to step down. The one-page letter cites scripture nine times in the course of making its case.
That’s something you don’t see every day.
Nearly a thousand students and others gathered at a Thursday meeting of the Arizona board of regents on Thursday to protest planned budget cuts to the state’s public universities.
The proposal, announced in the legislature the previous week, would slash $600 million in funding, imposing cuts ranging from 4% to 12% on universities’ budgets.
The Associated Students of the University of Arizona (ASUA) and the Arizona Student Association (ASA) are planning a trip to the state’s capitol in Phoenix this Wednesday, January 28, to protest the cuts directly at the state legislature. Details on the protest can be found at the ASA website.
A federal judge has ruled against a high school student who was barred from running for re-election as class secretary after she called school officials “douchebags” on her blog. The ruling highlights the unsettled nature of First Amendment law as it applies to high school students’ off-campus speech, as well as the limited protections courts have granted to student government.
The court had previously found that participation in student government “is a privilege,” and that students do not have a constitutional right to run for student government office “while engaging in uncivil and offensive communications regarding school administrators.” It found that the school had punished Doninger for “vulgar language,” not for criticizing school officials’ actions, and that they were within their rights to do so.
In its latest ruling, the same court found that although an appeals court had cast their previous argument into question, the administrators were protected from legal action. The underlying question at issue in this case is whether a student has “a right not to be prohibited from participating in a voluntary, extracurricular activity because of off campus speech” that the student has reason to expect will become known on campus, the court said, and that question is unresolved.
In 1979, an appeals court ruled in strong language that students generally cannot be punished for off-campus speech. The Doninger court, however, argued that…
“we are not living in the same world that existed in 1979. The students in Thomas were writing articles for an obscene publication on a typewriter and handing out copies after school. Today, students are connected to each other through e-mail, instant messaging, blogs, social networking sites, and text messages. An e-mail can be sent to dozens or hundreds of other students by hitting ‘send.’ … Off-campus speech can become on-campus speech with the click of a mouse.”
studentactivism.net 
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