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The administration of Georgia Southern University has blocked a student group from inviting sixties radical and education reformer William Ayers to campus.
Ayers, a leader of the Weather Underground, became notorious during last year’s presidential campaign because of his connections to Barack Obama. He was invited to GSU by that campus’s Multicultural Advisory Council, a student group.
Though Ayers had spoken at GSU before without incident, his invitation drew criticism and protest this time, and the university claimed the controversy would raise security costs for the speech to $13,000. They cited these costs in vetoing the event.
The administration of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln rescinded a speaking invitation to Ayers last fall in the face of criticism by donors and political leaders. Ayers was forced to cancel a speech at the University of Toronto last month when he was denied entry into Canada by border officials.
Students at the State University of New York at Potsdam are gearing up a protest over the state government’s decision to divert new tuition revenue away from SUNY.
In the deficit reduction bill passed last week, only 10% of this spring’s $310 tuition increase is slotted to be used to support SUNY, and in Governor Paterson’s proposed budget for next year, only 20% of the $620 tuition hike will stay on campus.
The Potsdam student government mounted an on-campus rally against the policies this week, and they are organizing a lobby visit to Albany to bring the message directly to state government.
More drama for York University, attempting to rebound from its recent three-month shutdown. Students on the campus are organizing a recall of the five officers of York’s student government, the York Federation of Students.
The impetus for the recall is YFS’s support for striking faculty in recent months, but Middle East politics has come to play a role as well — many YFS leaders are outspoken critics of Israel, and many of those who are seeking to remove them from office are defenders of Israeli policies. Tensions flared between the two groups at an event on Wednesday.
Saturday Update: Here’s a new article on the dispute from the Toronto Star.
New School president Bob Kerrey has been under fire from students and faculty for months, but at a meeting yesterday a representative of student activist group New School in Exile upped the ante.
Reading from a prepared statement, she said that if Kerrey and vice president James Murtha don’t resign by April 1, “we will shut down the functions of the university. We will bring it to a halt. We will make it stop.”
“Through our civil disobedience,” she continued, “we will reclaim the university as a center of academic and political action … we will continue to struggle until we have restored the legacy and integrity of the New School!”
The University of Wisconsin at Madison announced on Thursday that it was cutting its ties to Russell Athetic, the clothing manufacturer. RA has been accused of closing a factory in Honduras in retaliation for union organizing there.
In November the Worker Rights Consortium released a report finding “substantial credible evidence” of such retaliation, and in late January the Fair Labor Association found that RA had engaged in “inappropriate and unacceptable actions” in response to labor organizing.
In a statement, a UW representative said that RA had not “has not met our expectations” regarding workers’ rights.
May 1 Update: FIFTY-SEVEN campuses to date. Wow!
studentactivism.net 
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