You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Student Government’ category.
The student government of Ottawa’s Carelton University has apologized for passing a resolution withdrawing its support for cystic fibrosis fundraising.
As we noted over the weekend, the Carleton student government had announced that it was dropping cystic fibrosis research as a beneficiary of its fundraising efforts because it had learned that the disease “only affect[ed] white people, and primarily men.” Neither of those statements turned out to be true.
At a packed public meeting on Monday, the president of the student government personally apologized for the resolution. The student government then went on to unanimously pass a resolution of apology, as well as a separate resolution pledging to increase campus cystic fibrosis fundraising going forward.
The author of the original resolution has resigned his position in student government.
The student government of Carelton University in Ottawa, Canada has withdrawn from a national cystic fibrosis fundraising campaign on the grounds that the disease’s sufferers are too white and too male.
In a resolution, the student government declared that cystic fibrosis “has been recently revealed to only affect white people, and primarily men.” (A representative of the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation says both of these claims are false.)
Public comment on the decision was swift and harsh, with one columnist at the conservative National Post calling the resolution “a new low … even by the loopy standards of student governments.”
Students at Carelton have launched a drive to impeach the president of the student government, as well as a faculty adviser to the group the student government member who drafted the resolution.
December 3 Update: The Carelton student government has apologized for the resolution, and pledged to increase fundraising for cystic fibrosis. See our followup story here.
The board of trustees of The College of DuPage, an Illinois Community College, have released a 230-point proposal for changes in college policy that students and faculty say violates established principles of university governance and academic freedom, and perhaps state and federal law as well.
The proposal, which the president of the DuPage faculty association calls “an attempt by the board to gain complete control over everything,” would give the board power to set specific policies on subjects ranging from curriculum to faculty salaries, grant them authority to veto speakers brought to campus, and place the student newspaper under the control of the college president.
The board’s action casts an already troubled college into further disarray. In May the president of DuPage was abruptly removed from office for reasons that were never made public, and just last month the chair of the board of trustees brought a defamation suit against three former board members who had complained that he had groped them and made suggestive comments to them during their tenure on the board.
The nine members of the American River College student government who voted to endorse California’s anti- same-sex marriage Proposition 8 have survived the recall vote that attempted to remove them from office.
The vote in the recall election was nearly seven times as high as the vote that brought the student government to office — 3,531 votes, as opposed to about five hundred — but still amounted to only nine percent of the ARC student body. Each of the student government members received about 53-54% of the vote in the recall.
With the presidential election shaping up as an Obama blowout in California this year, the biggest issue on the November ballot there is Proposition 8, a measure that would overturn the state court’s recent ruling in favor of same-sex marriage.
Polls show California voters equally divided on Prop 8, and the campaign is dividing the students at American River College (ARC), a Sacramento-area community college, as well.
On September 30, the ARC student government voted 8-3 to endorse Proposition 8, and anti-8 students immediately set to work gathering signatures for a recall election to remove the pro-8 representatives from office. The recall election was held earlier this week, and votes are still being counted.
The recall highlights low voter turnout in student government elections. According to one source, only 300 students voted in the last election at ARC, a college of over 37,000 students.
Five of the representatives facing recall are Christian students from the former Soviet Union, and controversy has arisen over dual-language flyers distributed during the recall effort on behalf of those students.
One blogger had the Russian text of a flyer translated, and found that where the English-language side of the handout asked “Does responding to Student requests by passing a resolution endorsing Prop 8 (Marriage Protection Amendment) make them ‘incompetent’ or unqualified for Office?”, the Russian-language side bore this message:
Stop homosexuals! They want to silence the voices of the believers and the Slavs in our college and they want to take the light from everyone who supports marriages!
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments