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It was announced over the weekend that administrators at Boston College had vetoed a planned campus appearance by former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers. The student sponsors of the engagement, who included the BC chapter of the College Democrats, were said to be seeking an off-campus venue to move the speech to.
Now comes word that the event will take place on campus as originally planned, though without Ayers in attendance. Ayers will remain in Chicago, where he lives, and speak via satellite hookup to the audience at the college’s Devlin Hall.
His speech, at 6 o’clock this evening, will be open to BC students, faculty, and staff only.
Postscript: A separate Ayers speech in an educational venue has just been cancelled outright. He had been scheduled to give a talk at Naperville North High School in Illinois next week, but his invitation has been withdrawn. A statement from the school district’s superintendent cited “the level of emotion and outrage” that had greeted news of the speech as the reason for the cancellation.
Update: The BC administration nixed the video link, too. Here’s the chief of the campus police, Robert Morse: “It is canceled, there is no telecast. It’s virtually the same thing, it would be viewed by the community as the same thing.” The speech organizers held a forum on academic freedom instead.
Second Update: BC cancelled Ayers’ speech because of alleged links between the Weather Underground and the notorious 1970 murder of Boston police officer Walter Schroeder. But Schroeder was killed in the course of a bank robbery that was intended to fund the Black Panthers, not the Weather Underground, and there is apparently no evidence of any Weather connection to the crime.
An Australian friend draws our attention to two stories that appeared in the Australian press last week:
The government of Western Australia is considering placing police officers in that state’s high schools, in response to a recent increase in assaults on teachers there…
…And an officer assigned to an “elite unit designed to be the public face of [the] police in high schools” in the state of New South Wales has been arrested on charges that he sexually assaulted a child.
This is just one incident, of course. But it does serve as a reminder that whatever the benefits to teachers and students of bringing police onto school grounds may be, the practice carries real costs as well.
(Thanks to lauredhel of Hoyden About Town for the tip.)
Here’s the latest communiqué from The New School In Exile:
No, we haven’t forgotten about April 1st, and neither has the administration. But don’t worry, there is plenty in the works, and the day should not disappoint.
Think carnival. Think circus. Think roving flash mobs. Think zombie Kerrey and Murtha armies. Think beanbag circus freaks and superheroes. Think shutting the school down. Think fun 
We’ll see you on the flip side!
I’ll admit it. They’ve got my attention.
Update: NSIE has put up a countdown clock on their website. Zero hour is just after one o’clock tomorrow afternoon — 1:01:59 pm, to be exact. I have no idea what, if anything, this means.
I don’t know if the Education Times site is new, or just new to me, but I’m going to be making it a regular stop from now on.
It’s a straightforward site — links to news articles on K-12 and higher education, with brief summaries — but it’s got a lot of stuff, and it’s easy to navigate. Because they emphasize quantity over depth, they cover a lot more ground than Inside Higher Ed or the Chronicle. If it’s the kind of thing you’re interested in, you’ll be interested.
And they (like us) are on Twitter, too.
A professor at the University of East London has been suspended from his position for predicting that there may “be real bankers hanging from lampposts” at Wednesday’s protests against the G20 economic summit.
Chris Knight, a professor of anthropology, is an organizer of G20 protests in London this week. He told the BBC that if bankers and government ministers don’t “surrender their power, obviously it’s going to get us even more wound up and things could get nasty.”
Knight’s G20 Meltdown is just one of many groups planning actions in London this week, but Knight’s eagerness to make incendiary statements to the media has made him the most quoted figure in the movement right now.
The UEL’s decision to suspend him has confirmed that position.
studentactivism.net 
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