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Last week the Cal State Northridge Daily Sundial ran an article on student drinking habits that claimed that American first-year students “spend more time drinking than studying.” Their source for this claim was a deeply flawed report produced by a company that markets anti-alcohol programs to college campuses.
As we reported last month, the study in question was little more than a marketing handout for Outside the Classroom, a for-profit company that produces anti-drinking programming for use by student affairs administrators.
The study received quite a lot of attention on its release, in large part because it was presented at the annual meeting of NASPA, a professional association for professionals in the student affairs field. What received much less attention was the fact that Outside the Classroom is a major corporate sponsor of NASPA, and paid for time at the group’s annual meeting.
And the problems with the study don’t end with its sponsorship. Its methodology is questionable and its most often repeated conclusions are not supported by the evidence it offers.
In short, the Outside the Classroom “study” is shoddy, anti-student research from a company with a financial interest in portraying students as problem drinkers. Disseminating it doesn’t bring us any closer to actually understanding student drinking habits, healthy or unhealthy.
On April 22, 1969, hundreds of black and Latino students at New York’s City College took over seventeen campus buildings demanding reforms in the university’s treatment of students and faculty of color.
They shut down the university for two weeks, and their protests — which continued throughout the spring — led directly to the establishment of open admissions at the City University of New York a year later.
Open admissions nearly doubled the size of CUNY, and transformed the university forever. (It also helped open the door to the implementation of tuition in the system for the first time six years later.)
Today, students at City College will mark the anniversary with a 2 o’clock walkout in protest of budget cuts and tuition increases.
This morning the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of an eighth-grade girl who was strip-searched at school over suspicions that she was hiding prescription-strength Advil somewhere on her body.
The transcript of the arguments will be released later — and I’ll update this post when I have them — but reporters who were present describe the two sides’ attorneys staking out extremely different interpretations of the constitutional issues at stake.
Adam B. Wolf, representing the student, Savana Redding, said that schools must have “location specific” information to search inside a student’s underwear. Even if a student is suspected of hiding weapons or heroin, he said, a school has no right to conduct such a search without evidence that contraband is hidden on the student’s body.
The attorney for the school, on the other hand, said that the school would have been legally justified in conducting a body cavity search on Redding, if they considered it appropriate.
The Court’s ruling in the case is likely to come sometime in June.
4:15 pm update: The transcripts of the oral arguments have been posted (PDF). I’ll read and comment when I get the chance.
6:15 pm update: Reading the transcripts now. The Baltimore Sun badly misrepresented the school attorney’s response to the cavity search question. More later.
The student government at the University of Florida is in a bind.
The university is saying that two student services programs — the Multicultural and Diversity Affairs program and the Center for Leadership and Service — are may be eliminated in the upcoming academic year. To save them, some students are proposing that students foot the bill with an increase to the campus Activity Fee.
MDA houses UF’s Institute of Black Culture and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Affairs, while CLS supports volunteering and student leadership development programs on campus.
University administrators are always eager to find ways to dump student affairs expenses out of their operating budget and into student fee-based funding mechanisms, and student governments across the country have learned to be wary of such proposals.
But the threat to shut down these programs may not be an empty one. The university is facing a possible a ten percent cut in its Student Affairs budget for the coming year, and a UF administrator says MDA and CLS, which cost a combined $508,000 annually, are the only budget lines in Student Affairs that aren’t mandated by state law.
Student governments have to tread carefully in these situations. It can be very difficult to separate fact from fiction in administrators’ claims. Even when the threat to a program is real, a short-term crisis often leads to a permanent shift in revenue streams.
We’re going to be seeing a lot more of these dilemmas in the months and years to come. How student governments respond to them will be a major test of their ability to advocate effectively for students’ interests.
Back in December I wrote about the parents of two high school students who were suing their daughters’ school for suspending them from the cheerleading squad after administrators acquired nude cellphone photos of them.
The students say they never distributed the photos. Though the pictures were circulating widely in the school without the students’ knowledge or permission, none of the students who forwarded or received the photos were ever punished.
In their lawsuit, the families say that the school allowed more school officials to view the photos than was necessary, that they did not conduct a proper investigation of the distribution of the photos, and that they failed to report the incident to the police. (The parents themselves filed a police report on the incident after they learned of it.)
That’s the story as it stood in December. I did some follow-up research this week, and here’s what I found:
studentactivism.net 
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