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A Mississippi student is suing her high school after a cheerleading coach demanded her Facebook password, then used it to access and disseminate private email.
According to the lawsuit the coach, Tommie Hill, told the Pearl High School cheerleading squad that they would all have to give her their Facebook passwords. Several squad members responded by deleting their accounts from their cell phones, but sophomore Mandi Jackson complied with the request.
The suit claims that Hill accessed Jackson’s account later that day, and forwarded Jackson’s private Facebook messages to at least four other school officials. The officials then “publicly reprimanded … and humiliated” Jackson, suspended her from cheerleader training, and banned her from other school events.
Jackson’s attorney, Rita Nahlik Silin, told the Student Press Law Center that Hill’s actions were “a blatant violation of her right to privacy, her right to free speech, her right to free association and her right to due process. It’s egregious to me,” she said, “that a 14-year-old girl is essentially told you can’t speak your mind, can’t publish anything, can’t be honest or have an open discussion with someone without someone else essentially eavesdropping.”
As Lee Baker of the Citizen Media Law Project notes, this incident reflects a not-uncommon belief on the part of authority figures that “they have the right to invade others’ privacy and eavesdrop on private or semi-private conversations merely because these conversations take place online.” In Baker’s words, “asking for a student’s Facebook password in order to read private messages is akin to asking the student’s permission to install a wiretap on his or her phone.”
A new report on student loan debt finds the proportion of community college students saddled with debt at graduation has skyrocketed in the last five years.
The report, a College Board analysis of the U.S. Education Department’s National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, found that nearly half of 2007-08 community college graduates took out education loans to pay for school, up from thirty-seven percent in 2003-04. Of those students who did take out loans, half accumulated debts of more than $10,000.
Borrowing rose from 30% to 38% of graduates of public community colleges, and from 90% to 98% of graduates of for-profit two-year schools. The debt burden among those taking out loans was higher at the private two-years, too — 43% had debts of more than $20,000, compared to just 13% of public community college grads.
All told, 59% of college graduates left school with at least some educational debt in 2007-08, up from 55% just four years earlier. Students’ median debt rose from $13,663 to $15,123 in the same period, an 11% rise.
These figures exclude credit card debt and loans from friends and family, by the way, so the true numbers are even higher.
Update: As the Chronicle of Higher Education notes, debt burdens for four-year college grads vary dramatically by college type too. They point out that “10 percent of students at four-year public institutions had $40,000 or more in loans, while 22 percent of graduates of private four-year institutions and 25 percent of students graduating from for-profit four-year institutions had that level of debt.”
I haven’t posted much about the Russell Athletic story this last while, but I got an email yesterday from United Students Against Sweatshops that demonstrates that their work has really been moving forward.
When I posted last, in early May, USAS had won fifty-seven campus disaffiliations from Russell over the course of the spring semester in protest of the apparel company’s labor policies in Honduras, specifically its decision to close a newly-unionized factory Jerzees de Honduras factory in the wake of its unionization.
Since then, nearly thirty more campuses have joined the Russell boycott, bringing the total to eighty-four. New recruits to the cause include merchandising bigwigs the University of Arizona, Brown, Louisville, the University of Florida, and North Carolina State. USAS is now calling this “the largest collegiate boycott of an apparel company in history.”
You can follow the story as it develops at USAS’s Boycott Russell Athletic blog, which I’ve added to our blogroll today.
In a speech this afternoon, President Obama is expected to unveil a ten-year, $12 billion proposal to improve American community colleges.
The bulk of the money will take the form of challenge grants to support curricular and other innovation. The plan also includes $2.5 billion in seed money for facilities renovation and $500 million for free, public domain, online courses.
White House sources say part of the funding for the project could come from the $4 billion a year in savings expected from a pending restructuring of the nation’s college loan system.
The United States Student Association’s 62nd annual National Student Congress opens at the University of Colorado at Boulder in eleven days.
USSA, founded in 1947, is the nation’s oldest national student group, and its pre-eminent student government organization. I got my start in national student organizing in USSA, and I’m always thrilled to go back.
This year, I’ll be running a workshop, co-facilitating the Congress’s people of color “allies space,” and lending a hand in various other ways over the course of the week.
I’ll have more to say about the allies space later, and I’ll be blogging (and tweeting) from the Congress once I get there. In the meantime, here’s the title and description of my workshop, scheduled for Thursday, July 23rd, at two o’clock:
Media and Social Networking for Student Activism, Past and Present
Long before the creation of the internet, campus organizers were social networkers. What can their strategies teach today’s activists, and how can today’s students use new media and online networking to advance their work? This workshop, led by historian, activist, and blogger Angus Johnston, will explore the role of technology, media, and human contact in historical and contemporary student organizing.
Media and Social Networking for Student Activism, Past and Present
Long before the creation of the internet, campus organizers were social networkers. What can their strategies teach today’s activists, and how can today’s students use new media and online networking to advance their work? This workshop, led by historian, activist, and blogger Angus Johnston, will explore the role of technology, media, and human contact in historical and contemporary student organizing.
Hope to see you there!
studentactivism.net 
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