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A group of students presented a University of Florida administrator with a petition Wednesday protesting the disproportionate impact of recent university layoffs on women and people of color.
According to the group, women represent 34% of full-time UF faculty, but 61% of those fired as a result of recent budget cuts. Among people of color, the figures were 25% and 54%, respectively.
Update: Here’s an article from the Gainesville Sun about other recent student organizing against UF budget cuts.
A former student has filed a lawsuit against Eastern Michigan University claiming that she was dismissed from a graduate program in counseling for refusing to “affirm or validate homosexual behavior within the context of a counseling relationship.”
At the start of this year, when she was nearing the end of her coursework at EMU, Julea Ward was engaged in a Counseling Practicum. Ward has religious objections to homosexuality, and when she discovered that one of her assigned clients was gay, she asked her professor whether she should see the client or have him reassigned. That question, she contends, set in motion a chain of events that ultimately led to disciplinary proceedings and her removal from the program.
The university has declined to comment publicly on the case, but in a March 12 letter the chair of her disciplinary committee said that Ward had “by clear and convincing evidence” violated ethical standards requiring that counselors “avoid imposing values that are inconsistent with counseling goals” or engage in discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
A copy of Ward’s complaint, with various documents relating to the disciplinary charges, can be found in PDF form here.
Update: We analyze Ward’s suit and the conservative blogosphere’s response.
French students escalated ongoing protests in advance of the Easter holiday this week, occupying offices on two campuses and barricading a Paris street.
Early in the week student protesters held university administrators in Orleans, Rennes, and Strasbourg hostage for a brief time. In Rennes, the president was forced to flee his office and call for help from a stairway, and in Strasbourg more than a hundred students forced their way into a room where thirty administrators were meeting, blocking their way out for a time.
On Wednesday protesters in Paris turned the Boulevard Saint-Michel into an impromptu beach, dumping sand into the road and blocking traffic. The beach was a nod to a slogan from the May 1968 protests that shook French society: “sous les pavés, la plage” — under the cobblestones, the beach. (For a discussion of the various shades of meaning behind this slogan, click here.)
Protests against changes to French higher education policy have been going on for two months, and administrators now say that if the disruption does not end after Easter, the spring semester may be lost entirely. Click here for a Reuters article from the newspaper Le Monde on the recent demonstrations, or here for Google’s English translation.
This post was updated on April 10 with new details on the Rennes and Strasbourg protests.
“The employers will love this generation. They are not going to press many grievances. There won’t be much trouble. They are going to be easy to handle. There aren’t going to be riots. There aren’t going to be revolutions.”
–Clark Kerr, Chancellor of the University of California, 1959.
The University of Maryland, College Park says it “must allow” the campus Student Power Party to stage a free speech forum tonight, even though that forum will include a viewing of excerpts from Pirates II, the film that the university refused to allow students to screen on campus last week.
Meanwhile, the state legislator who over the weekend threatened to eliminate UMD’s funding if the film was shown is now saying he may seek to cut the university’s capital budget.
Here’s the Facebook page for tonight’s screening, which was scheduled to start at 7 pm, and Gawker’s take on the whole thing.
Tuesday update: The forum and screening went off without a hitch, and the state senator who was threatening to cut UMD’s funds backed down — sort of. He now says that he won’t seek to cut funding over last night’s event, but will press universities to implement policies that say “you can’t have university-sponsored XXX entertainment on campus” going forward.
About two hundred students showed up last night, watching the first half hour of the movie after a discussion of campus speech issues. When asked why they hadn’t shown the whole thing Student Power Party spokesperson Malcolm Harris said “you’d be hard-pressed to find a lot of students who want to sit around for a two-and-a-half-hour viewing of pornography on a Monday night.”
Student government elections are taking place today and tomorrow at UMD, with the Student Power Party running as one of four slates.
studentactivism.net 
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