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Students at Anderson University in Indiana aren’t allowed to drink. Not even off campus. Not even if they’re twenty-one. Not even if they’re twenty-one and off campus.
So the day before yesterday a few of them staged an act of civil disobedience.
About twenty-five students left morning chapel services on Tuesday and walked as a group to Kroakerheads, a bar about a mile from campus. (They arrived there at about 10:30, half an hour before Kroakerheads usually opens, but they’d called ahead and asked the staff to open early.)
They entered the bar. Some ordered beers, some ordered sodas, some didn’t order anything. All were in violation of Anderson student regulations, however — the rules bar not just drinking, but also being in the presence of others who are drinking.
The protest was staged by a student group called Students for a Democratic AU. One protest organizer, Caleb Fletcher, said it was not merely about the alcohol policy, but also “how the student body, as part of the institution, has been left out of policy decisions and the decision-making process.”
According to the Anderson student handbook, disciplinary sanctions for first-offenses relations to drinking include probation, medical evaluation, notification of parents, and “educational assignment/follow-up treatment.” Sanctions for second offenses include all of the above plus a fine and loss of privileges, with suspension or expulsion for third offenses.
An Anderson security employee observed and photographed the protest, and a university spokesman told the Associated Press that the university would follow its standard disciplinary process in dealing with the students who participated.
Anderson’s student government held a forum on the alcohol policies last night, and about two hundred of the university’s 2700 students attended. At the forum, Anderson’s president, James Edwards, defended the regulations, noting that they have been in place since the university opened in 1917.
Edwards did open the door a crack to a relaxing of the rules, saying that there may eventually be changes regarding “how the community and our expectations are enforced.” Others noted that other restrictions on social activities At Anderson have recently been lifted, including bans on playing cards and holding hands.
The university’s ban on dancing was lifted in 2007.
An interesting article from the Kansas City Star on what colleges tell (and don’t tell) families about students’ underage drinking violations.
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) limits what universities can do with information about students, but it gives campuses broad discretion in some areas. The Star explores the question of what universities do, and should, tell students’ families when a student violates drinking rules.
Students at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur pelted the home of the Institute’s director with stones and overturned his car yesterday after the death of a student who had been seen at the Institute’s hospital.
The student, Rohit Kumar, went to the B C Roy Hospital on campus complaining of a headache, and was given pain pills and released. On his way back to the hostel he lived in, he collapsed. According to one report, the hospital then took two hours to arrange for an ambulance to transfer him to a better-equipped facility, and did not provide a medical professional to accompany him on the trip. Kumar deteriorated in transit, and was pronounced dead on arrival at Midnapore General Hospital.
The B C Roy Hospital has long been criticized as inadequate by members of the IIT Kharagpur community, and as news of Kumar’s death spread on campus, more than a thousand students gathered at the home of Institute director Damodar Acharya to express their anger. The crowd vandalized Acharya’s house and overturned his car before forcing him to sign a letter of resignation from the university.
The university announced on Monday that it would be authorizing an external inquiry into Kumar’s death. Updates on the story are being posted to Twitter with the hashtag #iitdeath.
April 10 update: This morning at five o’clock New School students occupied a building on campus. Follow that story here.
Spring break ends tomorrow at the New School, a New York City university that has seen ongoing student protest in recent months. Two recent messages from The New School In Exile, the group behind many of the recent demonstrations, suggest that the next few weeks are likely to be lively ones.
That New School In Exile is planning more protest has long been a given. In February they announced that they would shut down the New School if university president Bob Kerrey didn’t resign by April 1.
As of today, Kerrey is still in office with just ten days left on the clock.
In an open letter posted to their website early this morning, NSIE declared that a loose group of thirty to sixty students has been meeting regularly this semester to prepare for April 1. The letter says their grievances can only be “addressed … through the removal of those who have systematically obstructed channels of reform,” and calls the April first deadline “an opportunity for all students to come together and take back their university.”
Just hours before spring break began, an NSIE activist was arrested for allegedly spray-painting “Bye Bob” on the door of Kerrey’s Greenwich Village residence. A message that appeared on the NSIE blog shortly after that arrest declared that “the New School and any other forms of authoritarian structure imposed upon us … will never jeopardize our movement through crack-downs and other inhospitable actions.”
“We will win,” it continued, “because We stand together no matter what befalls us … you can punish us as individuals as much as you like, but you cannot break our collective will!”
Stay tuned.
March 30 update: Still no action, but a new post on their website promises that April 1 will be a day to remember.
In a two-hour conference call last Sunday, activists for the 70% of American college faculty who are not on the tenure track gave their new national organization a name.
“New Faculty Majority: the National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Equity” will, organizers say, be a membership group that advocates for the interests of non-tenured faculty. They are hard at work on a mission statement, a website, and an organizational structure, and they are planning a national day of action for April 30 of this year.
For more information, and updates going forward, see the New Faculty Majority blog.
studentactivism.net 
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