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“If you want to try for those young voters, first of all, you’ve got to stand for something, because one of the things that stands out with a young voter is originality.”
That was South Carolina governor Mark Sanford right after the 2008 presidential election. Today, in a move that is widely seen as positioning himself for a run at the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, he’s saying he’ll turn down $700 million dollars in federal education funding for his state.
Sanford says the government should be paying down debt, not running up new bills, but his refusal of the stimulus money only makes sense as a symbolic gesture … and it’s an odd one. The stimulus money has been allocated. It’s not going back into the general fund. If South Carolina doesn’t accept its share, it’ll go somewhere else — California’s Governor Schwarzenegger has already said he’ll be happy to take it.
And as Senator Lindsay Graham — a South Carolina Republican, and no fan of the stimulus — has noted, South Carolinians will footing their share of the bill for this expenditure, whether any of it returns to the state or not.
So Sanford’s approach is definitely original. He’s the only governor planning to refuse the education money. It’s an approach that’s getting a lot of attention among conservative activists. But his position is costing him support at home — his favorability rating in South Carolina now stands at 40%, nine points below President Obama. And it’s hard to see it doing him much good with young voters in 2012 — in the primary or the general election.
More than a thousand teachers and students marched on the South Carolina state house yesterday, with a simple message: “Take the money.”
Sanford has until midnight tomorrow to listen.
A student who prosecutors say hacked into his university’s computer network last fall, raising students’ grades and cutting their tuition charges, has been found guilty of five federal charges.
The government says that Marcus Barrington, then a student at Florida A&M University, conspired with a group of other students to alter fellow students’ grades and change residency records from out-of-state to in-state. The university is said to have lost more than $100,000 in out-of-state tuition revenue as a result.
Barrington’s two co-defendants, Lawrence Secrease and Christopher Jacquette, filed guilty pleas. Both testified against him in his trial, which ended Friday. The jury took just two hours to find Barrington guilty on all charges.
Barrington’s attorney made a statement after the verdict. “It’s sad to see these young people get in trouble especially on this kind of conduct,” he said. “In my day, it would have been a cheating incident and today it’s a federal crime. I just don’t understand what the difference is.”
Barrington faces a possible prison term of nearly thirty years when he is sentenced in June.
(via UWire)
A professor at the University of East London has been suspended from his position for predicting that there may “be real bankers hanging from lampposts” at Wednesday’s protests against the G20 economic summit.
Chris Knight, a professor of anthropology, is an organizer of G20 protests in London this week. He told the BBC that if bankers and government ministers don’t “surrender their power, obviously it’s going to get us even more wound up and things could get nasty.”
Knight’s G20 Meltdown is just one of many groups planning actions in London this week, but Knight’s eagerness to make incendiary statements to the media has made him the most quoted figure in the movement right now.
The UEL’s decision to suspend him has confirmed that position.
Kristen Juras, the University of Montana law professor who has been campaigning to force the UM Kaimin to dump its sex advice column, appeared at a campus forum with the Kaimin‘s editor last night.
Juras called student activity fee support for the paper “government” funding, and described that funding as “a privilege.” She has in the past threatened to intervene with the university’s trustees or even the Montana state legislature to attempt to get that privilege withdrawn.
At last night’s forum, Juras said that any Kaimin sex column should be written by a “sexologist,” though she acknowledged, when pressed, that other student columns — such as those on religion — do not require such “expertise.”
Kaimin editor Bill Oram defended the column’s lackadaisical tone. “We’ll stop talking casually about sex when students stop having sex casually,” he said. “We’ll stop talking about sex in a fun way when sex stops being fun.”
Juras took a less lighthearted stance. “I’m not opposed to sex,” she said at one point. “I’m happily married and it’s an important part of our relationship.”
In a two-hour conference call last Sunday, activists for the 70% of American college faculty who are not on the tenure track gave their new national organization a name.
“New Faculty Majority: the National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Equity” will, organizers say, be a membership group that advocates for the interests of non-tenured faculty. They are hard at work on a mission statement, a website, and an organizational structure, and they are planning a national day of action for April 30 of this year.
For more information, and updates going forward, see the New Faculty Majority blog.
studentactivism.net 
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