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The University of Georgia has been buffeted by sexual harassment scandals in the last year. One professor has resigned, another was placed on administrative leave, and the women’s golf coach left under a cloud.
In response, the university has initiated a massive restructuring of its sexual harassment investigation procedures, a restructuring that has attracted criticism and is still ongoing.
Given this context, the administration’s decision to invite Clarence Thomas to be the undergraduate commencement speaker this spring has proven predictably controversial.
I’ve just stumbled across a guide to running feminist campaigns for student government offices, published by feministcampus.org.
It’s short, but it’s packed with practical information, and each section concludes with a series of questions to ask yourself about how to proceed. Well worth a look for anyone thinking about running an activist campaign for a student government position.
A new report in the Chronicle of Higher Education finds that the enrollment of poor students at America’s wealthiest colleges and universities is on the decline.
According to the Chronicle, just 13.1% of students at private colleges and universities with endowments of $500 million or more received Pell Grants in 2006-07, down from 14.3% two years earlier. At the wealthiest public institutions, enrollment of Pell Grant recipients fell from 19.6% to 18% in the same period.
Pell Grants are awarded to students with family incomes of less than $40,000.
Berea College in Kentucky had by far the highest Pell Grant enrollment of the schools studied, at 77.4%. The highest among public institutions, and the second highest overall, was UCLA, at 35.2%. Only six of the 114 colleges and universities studied saw an increase in Pell recipient enrollment between 2004 and 2006.
The students’ union at England’s University of Manchester held a “Reclaim the University” march yesterday to protest the growing corporatization of university administration. Tom Skinnner, the union’s general secretary, said that
The university should be run for students and research and education and nothing else. It is now run like a business. Businesses are always asking themselves two questions: how much cheaper can we do things without losing customers and how much can we charge without losing customers? Some students are on courses where 20 years ago they would have got 200 hours a year — but now that’s down to 86.
The union has created a Reclaim the Uni Facebook group which at this writing has more than seven hundred members.
studentactivism.net 
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