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Last month we reported that the University of Ottawa was considering imposing a new code of student conduct governing non-academic activities.
The university has seen a wave of student activism in the last two years, and students have expressed concern that this new code may be used to clamp down on campus organizing.
Shortly after our last report, several hundred students marched in protest against the proposed code. Opponents of the code have also created a blog to aid in their organizing effort.
(The above article says that several blogs and a Facebook group have been created, but we’ve only been able to uncover the one blog linked to above. If anyone is aware of other resources created by the Ottawa organizers, let us know and we’ll update this post.)
President Bush will give this year’s commencement address at Furman University in South Carolina, and the invitation has sparked bitter division on the campus.
A group of more than two hundred students, faculty, and staff have signed a petition opposing the decision to host Bush, saying his actions on military, civil liberties, environmental, and budgetary issues “violate American values.” The petition has been posted on the university’s website.
After the first petition appeared, a second was circulated. This one challenged the claims made in the first letter, supported the decision to invite Bush to speak, and made three requests of the university:
1. We ask Furman University to hold professors to their contractual agreement to attend commencement exercises in recognition of Furman’s graduating class and its accomplishments by refusing to grant any “conscientious objector” releases. We also request the names of all faculty members who have submitted such a request, as well as an update of any additional faculty members who do so between now and graduation. Students who have worked hard to earn a degree deserve to know who has decided not to honor their achievements, and surely such “conscientious objectors” would want their names to be known.
2. We further ask that Furman refuse to post the political views of a fraction of the faculty and student body on our Web site. Professors have the right to express their views, but we are under no obligation to reward their publicity stunt by providing a link to it from Furman’s home page. Their letter contains no objection relevant to the fact that President Bush will be coming to Furman to congratulate the Class of 2008.
3. If Furman continues to post the contents of their letter, we expect this response will be postedimmediately next to the professors’ letter on the same page and for the same duration. We also expect that all other responses from any students, parents, alumni, faculty, staff members, trustees, or anyone connected with the Furman community will be given the same privilege and posted in their entirety. To do otherwise would be placing a higher value on some expressions of “free speech” than on others.
The authors of the second petition claim that it has garnered nearly six hundred signatures, more than three hundred of them from students.
More news on this story as it develops.
Elon University senior Andrew Bennett has pledged to donate fifty thousand dollars to his school’s “Safe Rides” program, a service that provides students with free rides home from parties and bars on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights.
“Safe Rides” is a student-operated service that currently gives rides to about a hundred students a night. The program currently operates two cars, and Bennett’s donation will allow them to increase staffing and publicity. In the wake of the gift, the university announced that it would be donating a van to Safe Rides to allow it to extend its reach still further.
Story via SAFER Campus, which also covers the possible shutdown of a similar service at Coastal Carolina University. One distinction between the two programs that SAFER Campus doesn’t mention — Elon’s is student-run, while CCU’s is an administration-sponsored project.
Two years ago today John McCain gave the commencement address that prompted me to write the following essay.
In the course of John McCain’s speech at the New School’s commencement this week, he offered this appraisal of the development of his own character:
When I was a young man, I was quite infatuated with self-expression, and rightly so because, if memory conveniently serves, I was so much more eloquent, well-informed, and wiser than anyone else I knew. It seemed I understood the world and the purpose of life so much more profoundly than most people. I believed that to be especially true with many of my elders, people whose only accomplishment, as far as I could tell, was that they had been born before me, and, consequently, had suffered some number of years deprived of my insights. I had opinions on everything, and I was always right. I loved to argue, and I could become understandably belligerent with people who lacked the grace and intelligence to agree with me. With my superior qualities so obvious, it was an intolerable hardship to have to suffer fools gladly. So I rarely did. All their resistance to my brilliantly conceived and cogently argued views proved was that they possessed an inferior intellect and a weaker character than God had blessed me with, and I felt it was my clear duty to so inform them. It’s a pity that there wasn’t a blogosphere then. I would have felt very much at home in the medium.
McCain is here addressing a group of newly-minted college graduates. His message? “When I was like you, I was stupid.”
One expects politicians to pander to their audiences, but this is something different. In this speech, McCain is pandering to an audience other than the one in front of him. His oratory is designed to flatter the self-image of his peers at the expense of the people to whom he is speaking. His speech is an ugly, self-satisfied insult, and Jean Rohe, a New School student who shared the stage with him at the commencement, rightly called him on it. Speaking before McCain, but having seen an advance copy of his speech, Rohe said
Senator McCain will … tell us about his strong-headed self-assuredness in his youth, which prevented him from hearing the ideas of others, and in so doing he will imply that those of us who are young are too naïve to have valid opinions. I am young, and although I don’t profess to possess the wisdom that time affords us, I do know that pre-emptive war is dangerous and wrong.
Rohe explained her decision to confront McCain in an essay published at the Huffington Post the following day, and it didn’t take long for the McCain camp to respond. In a comment he left at the website Mark Salter, a senior McCain aide who had co-written the speech, rebuked Rohe, contrasting McCain’s “regard for his audience” with Rohe’s “comical self-importance” and patronizing her and her classmates:
Should you grow up and ever get down to the hard business of making a living and finding a purpose for your lives beyond self-indulgence some of you might then know a happiness far more sublime than the fleeting pleasure of living in an echo chamber.
As it turns out, though, Rowe is not the pampered child of Salter’s fantasies:
You assume that I have no experience making a living. I have been a full-time college student and have worked a job to pay my own rent and my own expenses for the past two years. You assume that I live in an “echo chamber” of liberal head-patting, when, in fact, I live in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a neighborhood notorious for its cultural diversity and sometimes, conflict.
John McCain was twenty-two years old when he graduated from the Naval Academy and, as his senatorial website puts it, “began his career as a Naval aviator.” Jean Rohe was twenty-two when she rose at the New School to respond to McCain’s insult to her and her fellow students. She is no less an adult today than McCain was in 1958, and it is a shame that neither McCain nor Mark Salter can see that.
An off-campus end-of-semester party turned into a melee in Middletown, Connecticut Thursday night, as Wesleyan students clashed with police.
One report contends that used pepper spray, tasers, and dogs on the students, five of whom were arrested on incitement to riot and other charges.
Before dawn, as many as sixty students converged on the police department to file complaints about officers’ tactics.
The Wesleyan student newspaper, the Argus, published a special edition on the disturbance on Friday. Wesleyan blog Wesleying has been covering the situation as it develops.
Update: Here’s an analysis of the events of Thursday night that struck me as well worth reading.
studentactivism.net 
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