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Last month we reported that the University of Ottawa was considering imposing a new code of student conduct governing non-academic activities.
The university has seen a wave of student activism in the last two years, and students have expressed concern that this new code may be used to clamp down on campus organizing.
Shortly after our last report, several hundred students marched in protest against the proposed code. Opponents of the code have also created a blog to aid in their organizing effort.
(The above article says that several blogs and a Facebook group have been created, but we’ve only been able to uncover the one blog linked to above. If anyone is aware of other resources created by the Ottawa organizers, let us know and we’ll update this post.)
Elon University senior Andrew Bennett has pledged to donate fifty thousand dollars to his school’s “Safe Rides” program, a service that provides students with free rides home from parties and bars on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights.
“Safe Rides” is a student-operated service that currently gives rides to about a hundred students a night. The program currently operates two cars, and Bennett’s donation will allow them to increase staffing and publicity. In the wake of the gift, the university announced that it would be donating a van to Safe Rides to allow it to extend its reach still further.
Story via SAFER Campus, which also covers the possible shutdown of a similar service at Coastal Carolina University. One distinction between the two programs that SAFER Campus doesn’t mention — Elon’s is student-run, while CCU’s is an administration-sponsored project.
The Arizona State Senate has passed a bill requiring that textbook publishers inform professors about the cost and contents of new textbooks, so that profs can make informed choices when assigning books for classes.
The passage of the bill was the result of intensive lobbying by the Arizona Student Association, and its passage was hailed by student activists.
Ten states currently have similar legislation in effect. The Arizona bill was passed by large bipartisan majorities in both houses of the state legislature, and student leaders expect governor Janet Napolitano to sign it.
Mesa State College’s student government used online voting exclusively for the first time this spring, and their method of dealing with write-in candidates caused the student judiciary to throw out the election results in the race for student trustee.
The student government constitution at Mesa State provides one nomination process for standard candidates for office, and another, with a later deadline, for official write-in candidates. This year, one student ran for student trustee in the ordinary fashion, and two others ran as write-ins.
The voting software the student government used for the election had no provision for write-in candidates, however, so student election officials and advisors agreed to place the names of all three candidates on the ballot screen, with “(write-in)” following two of them.
Write-in candidate Susanna Morris won the election by a two-to-one margin, and incumbent Ashley Mates, the sole non-write-in on the ballot, brought suit in student court.
A new election will be held in the fall.
A couple of weeks ago we reported that a “task force” appointed by a vice president of Wichita State University would be reviewing the operational and editorial practices of the WSU student newspaper, the Sunflower. It was announced that the paper’s student government funding for the upcoming fiscal year would not be disbursed until that review was complete.
That task force has now been appointed, and several other developments have taken place.
The task force will be made up of two students, two administrators, two faculty members, and the university’s general counsel.
Outgoing editor Todd Vogts attended the first task force meeting last week and said afterward that the faculty members seemed to be taking a stand in support of the newspaper’s first amendment rights.
In a potentially significant development, the university’s president has pledged that Sunflower funding will be disbursed as originally scheduled, and will not be contingent on the task force’s findings as originally announced.
The task force will meet again in the fall.
studentactivism.net 
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