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Oakland University, a public research university of 18,000 students located just north of Detroit, has been shut down by a faculty strike on the first day of the fall semester.
The campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors has been in contract talks with OU since mid-May, but the two sides remain divided on issues of pay, workload, and health benefits. Negotiations are continuing with the assistance of a state-appointed mediator.
In a statement announcing the closing, the university suggested that its “difficult economic circumstances” limited its ability to meet the AAUP’s contract demands. The union, however, claims that while the state’s “economic crisis is real, Oakland’s is not.”
Some three hundred faculty and students rallied at the campus this afternoon in support of the strikers, and negotiations are expected to continue through the holiday weekend.
Update: The Detroit News says OU student government president Kristin Dayag supports the strike.
In a Delhi meeting Monday, Indian education minister Kapil Sibal told Australia’s deputy prime minister that the Australian government needs to do far more to protect the rights and safety of the one hundred thousand Indians studying in that country.
As the two leaders met, thousands of students marched in Australia’s largest cities, condemning government inaction against violence and exploitation targeting their community. “After a decade of neglect,” Australian National Union of Students president David Barrow proclaimed, “local and international students rally together to demand justice.”
The treatment of Indian students in Australia has provoked a diplomatic crisis between the two nations in recent months. Two vicious assaults this spring drew attention to an epidemic of bias crime against Indian students, and prompted a major protest march in downtown Melbourne that blocked a busy intersection for hours. The assaults and the protest, organized by the Federation of Indian Students in Australia, made the ongoing violence front-page news in both countries.
Indian students’ tuition payments represent a major revenue stream for Australian higher education, and the bias scandal has led to a new scrutiny for educational practices as well. Three private training colleges have shut their doors in recent months, amid charges that the for-profit institutions were offering substandard education and defrauding learners.
Update: I’d meant to include these first-person accounts of bias violence, but the link fell through the cracks while I was writing.
Trigger warning: The following post quotes a repulsive racist joke that features the N-word.
The Oxford University Conservative Association, one of Britain’s largest and most influential campus political organizations, has been stripped of its university recognition after members of its top leadership told racist jokes at an organization dinner — jokes that were met with applause, laughter, and cheers from the students in attendance.
OUCA is Oxford’s student affiliate of the right-wing Conservative Party. Many of the Conservatives’ top leaders are alumni of the OUCA, which has more than six hundred members. (Americans can think of the group as a vague equivalent of the Harvard Young Republicans, but much bigger and more influential.)
At a “hustings” dinner in June, candidates for the OUCA presidency were asked to repeat the most inappropriate joke they knew. One told a joke about lynching, while another, expatriate American Nick Gallagher, is said to have offered this: “What do you say when you see a television moving around in the dark? ‘Drop it nigger, or I’ll shoot you!’ ”
As I said at the top, reports suggest that there was no objection to either of these jokes from the crowd in attendance.
Gallagher and another student were suspended from OUCA after news of the jokes broke in the British press, and this week Oxford announced that it will no longer allow the group to use the university’s name or participate in the annual organizational fair for new students.
The most impressive part of the whole story was the defenses of Gallagher’s joke. Gallagher himself is said to have claimed that it was from a Chris Rock routine (um, no), while an unnamed friend offered this response:
“To suggest Nick is racist is just ridiculous. This has been blown out of all proportion and everyone just needs to lighten up.”
Via Kevin Prentiss (@kprentiss on Twitter) comes a link to the University of North Alabama’s Sidewalk Chalk Reservation Form.
The form states — in all caps, bolded, and underlined — that “chalking on university sidewalks requires reservations and approval from designated building supervisors or other assigned personnel.”
Chalking also requires, according to the form, advance notice and reservation of space. It requires compliance with a five-point list of restrictions, including a prohibition on chalking near doorways, near the university amphitheater, or with non-pastel chalk. “Chalking,” it states, “is only to be used to beautify the image of the UNA campus and to promote the organization using it.” Violation of any of the above rules will, according to the form, subject the organization responsible to a fine “in excess of $150.”
Over on Twitter, Kevin is a little abashed about linking to the form (“Apologies to the uni involved. I’m sure this is common.”), but I’ve got no such qualms. This is no way to run a university. Hell, it’d be no way to run a junior high.
The university is a community, and its public spaces are, in a very real sense, student space. If a little chalk dust gets tracked into the dining hall, or folks attending a concert at the amphitheater have to run a gauntlet of chalked announcements for Take Back the Night and the chemistry club semi-formal, that goes with the territory. It’s part of being a university.
UNA hands out the Sidewalk Chalk Reservation form — and free chalk! — at its Office of Student Engagement. But you can’t foster student engagement by treating students like guests. When you make students fill out a form to reserve sidewalk space for chalking. You’re telling them that they’re interlopers on campus. You’re telling them that this is your university, not theirs.
And you shouldn’t be surprised when they decide to take it back.
There’s a great article up at the MediaShift blog about student newspapers and online publishing.
According to one recent study, more than a third of college papers are still print-only. The MediaShift post looks at why that is, what the barriers to publishing online are, and why it’s so important to make the effort.
The whole thing is worth reading, but here are a few excerpts:
Make no mistake, college news is a messy business. Students are learning, and their mistakes all too often show up in print. An online presence will broadcast those mistakes to the world, so the theory goes. Also, a college that supports student press freedoms when distributed to 2,000 people on campus might not be so keen to distribute “bad news” about the campus when the whole world is watching.
[But] staying offline is a disservice to student journalists who cannot use the online tools now widespread in the industry. A student who can’t put material online can’t really understand the impact of social networks like Twitter or Facebook to spread news. They can’t really understand what it is to create a personal brand. And they can’t really understand the challenges of multimedia production.
A college that will not allow their student journalists to practice online journalism in a “real world” setting is abandoning its commitment to education in order to save face. And that is a tragedy not only for the college, but for the students who look to higher education to prepare them for the future.
Good stuff. And I’d add that a paper-only student newspaper is going to lose on-campus readership, particularly at a commuter campus, sequester itself from broader regional and national debates, and cut itself and its readership off from its own history.
Keeping a student paper offline isn’t just a disservice to the students who work on the paper, it’s a disservice to students who are doing organizing and activism on the campus as well.
Update: Butch Oxendine makes some excellent points in comments. An excerpt:
[Student newspapers] will maintain their relevance by specifically writing about campus-based issues, problems, and news that no one else is covering and reporting on. They will maintain their relevance by pulling the plug on the use of “wire” service reports from the Associated Press, etc.
Student newspapers must evolve. They’re not doing it well now. In tight economic times, more of them every year are being shut down. If they don’t have a web presence, they won’t be ready for this transition.
studentactivism.net 
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