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Nine activists, seven of them students, were arrested at Ohio State University yesterday afternoon at the offices of university president Gordon Gee. The nine were part of a group of more than a hundred who had gathered to protest OSU’s relationship with campus contractor Sodexo.
The activists were affiliated with the OSU chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops, a national organization whose members have mounted nearly a dozen major campus protests across the country in recent weeks. USAS was spurred to action by reports of Sodexo worker rights abuses in at least five countries, as well as reports of mistreatment by Sodexo workers at OSU’s own sports stadium.
Western Washington University last week broke ties with Sodexo in the face of a USAS-led campaign, while administrators at Emory and the University of Washington have arrested students peacefully protesting against the company.
After more than a week of delays and disputes the votes from the just-ended UAW 2865 election have been completed, and AWDU, the insurgent slate allied with the recent University of California student uprising, have won a significant victory.
UAW 2865 represents the UC system’s student academic employees, this was both a student election and a union election. Both sides won some positions, and both sides are claiming a measure of vindication in the results, but incumbents USEJ were shut out in the most prominent officer races and took barely 40% of the seats on the local’s statewide council.
I’m still getting up to speed on this election’s long-term implications, but quite a few people in California who I’ve grown to like and trust over the last few years are very pleased by this news.
Here’s how AWDU is describing the road ahead:
Now it is time for us to bring this strength to our fight against the attacks on higher education. As a next step, we are calling on all graduate students and undergraduate tutors – no matter who they supported in the election – to come together for a statewide membership meeting of the union on May 21st to chart the way forward. We’ll get you more details soon. But high on the agenda is stepping up the fight against increasing class sizes, fee hikes, rising housing costs, new budget cuts, and UC management’s capping of funding for fee remissions and health benefits for graduate student employees.
We will stand together against the attacks on higher education, in real unity borne of fruitful discussion that includes disagreement. A grassroots, bottom-up union is strong when it provides space for open debate, and we hope that every member continues to express criticism when necessary. We also know that many members of the USEJ slate and many USEJ supporters never wanted to stop the vote count in the first place. We hope that the Elections Committee’s dismissal of the fabricated allegations by some of the outgoing union officers will help up us begin a more honest dialogue with each other.
The incredible diversity of our newly elected Joint Council and entire union is a vital strength that we must actively build upon. By working together, including with the new Joint Council members from USEJ, we will win historic advances for the rights of student-workers and the expansion of public education. We look forward to building a new kind of union together.
“The job of an actor is to play a role. The job of a cheerleader is to cheer.”
— Eugene Volokh on Doe v. Silsbee Independent School District
• • •
The Doe case, as most of my readers probably know, involves a high school cheerleader in Texas, identified in court papers as “HS,” who was kicked off her squad for refusing to cheer for her alleged rapist. She had accused the player a few months earlier, but he had remained on the school basketball team. It was school tradition for the cheerleading squad to cheer from the sidelines when players attempted foul shots, but HS refused in the case of this player — standing silently with her arms crossed. After a warning, she was removed from the squad. (The player in question pled guilty to an assault charge some time afterward.)
HS sued the school for taking her off the squad, and lost. She appealed, and lost again. Last week her final appeal was rejected.
Eugene Volokh, a constitutional lawyer I respect, thinks the courts got this one right. If this lawsuit had prevailed, he says, “cheerleaders would be free to refuse to cheer for any reason that they think sufficient.” They could refuse to cheer for teams with gay or undocumented immigrant players, or those who “belong to a reprehensible religion, or refuse to properly support our military.”
I think HS was right to refuse to cheer her attacker, and I think the school was deeply wrong in how it handled the case. (For one blogger’s assessment of just how wrong they were, read this.) Whether by dropping her assailant from the team or suspending the practice of sideline cheers or just letting her sit those particular cheers out, the school should have found a way to accommodate HS’s reasonable desire not to cheer the name of a person who had recently sexually assaulted her.
But they didn’t. And given that they didn’t, I think the courts did the only thing they could. I just don’t see a way to craft a rule that would allow HS to refuse to cheer that wouldn’t also protect a cheerleader who shouted “slut” at a single mother on an opposing team, or an actor who changed the lines of a school play to give it a particular religious message, or a football player who wrote “I HATE FAGS” on his jersey, big enough to be seen from the stands.
It’s possible, as some commenters at Volokh’s blog suggest, that HS might have had other legal remedies. It’s been suggested that she might have had — and might still have — grounds for a lawsuit on equal protection claim, or for infliction of emotional distress. I’m not in a position to evaluate those suggestions. But as a matter of First Amendment law, I think the courts got this one right.
By the way, one other element of this case is worth mentioning — that the appeals court ruled HS’s lawsuit “frivolous,” and ordered her family to pay $45,000 in legal fees to the school district. It’s my understanding that the district has the option of waiving the collection of that judgment, and I hope they do so.
Update | The ACS Blog reaches a different First Amendment conclusion than I did, and it does so by addressing a question Volokh took as a given — whether cheerleaders are “agents” of the school, and speaking on the school’s behalf when they perform as cheerleaders. Their position is that so long as a cheerleader’s symbolic protest doesn’t substantially disrupt the school’s functioning, it’s protected speech.
I’m going to have to chew on this one. It’s not obvious to me that students have a blanket First Amendment right to Sharpie messages onto their uniforms while cheering or playing sports, or to shout obnoxious comments at opposing teams while on the field. I’m attracted to the pro-speech side of the argument — as always — but I’m not sure where I come down on this particular issue.
What do y’all think?
Nearly a dozen students occupied a portion of the Rutgers administration building overnight in defiance of an administration that cut off their access to food and water yesterday evening. The group was able to sneak supplies in via a makeshift pulley system, and say they have no intention of leaving until their demands are met.
The group is demanding that Rutgers’ president endorse a tuition freeze, that new scholarships be put in place for underprivileged and first-generation students, that transcript fees be eliminated, and that the university increase “support for the rights of ALL University affiliated workers.” In addition, the group is calling on Rutgers to implement a new shared governance structure for the university. (A detailed explanation of the demands can be found at the above link.)
The occupiers have a Facebook page and a Twitter feed, and the For Student Power blog has been liveblogging their action since yesterday afternoon.
Students at the University of California at Berkeley are hunger striking to protest the university’s lack of commitment to ethnic studies.
Five representatives of the group met with a university official yesterday. Vice Chancellor Harry Le Grande agreed to two of their demands — that he support an ethnic studies bill currently pending in the state legislature and “publicly acknowledge the unfulfilled promise of the creation of a Third World College at UC Berkeley.”
There was no movement, however, on the demand that the university reinstate Ethnic Studies staffers whose positions were recently eliminated, or the demand that the university’s “Operational Excellence” restructuring initiative be halted.
The hunger strikers have been holding vigil in front of California Hall since their action began, though they left their position for a time overnight when threatened with arrest.
studentactivism.net 
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