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Eight Venezuelan police officers have been arrested in connection with the shooting death of student activist Yuban Ortega Urdaneta two weeks ago. The charges against the officers include homicide.
Ortega, a supporter of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez and the president of the student association of the University Technical Institute of Ejido, was reportedly shot in the forehead during a campus protest against university corruption on April 28. He died of his wounds three days later.
The shooting of Ortega sparked three days of student riots in the city of Mérida, just north of the Ejido campus. In a television appearance after Ortega’s death, president Chavez said that “the full weight of the law must fall” on whoever was responsible.
On the subway home from this meeting, I sketched out the skeleton of a post riffing on the conversation we had there. I just came across those notes again, and though I don’t have time right this minute to write them up into a full essay, I figure I might as well put them out there anyway. I welcome comments and questions, and if you’d like to see the longer version, feel free to prod me.
How are students brought into a movement?
- By being met where they are.
- By being given a sense of the possible.
- By feeling their power.
- By confronting their powerlessness.
- By experiencing a one-to-one connection.
- By experiencing community.
(This is really less a set of six principles than three sets, each made up of two principles in tension with one another. As the physicist Niels Bohr once said, “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”)
The Associated Students of the University of Arizona took a $917,000 hit when a concert they sponsored drew a smaller-than-expected crowd.
ASUC paid a total of $1.4 million to mount the show, and brought in barely a third that much in revenue. Jay-Z headlined the concert, whose bill also included Kelly Clarkson, Third Eye Blind, and The Veronicas.
The loss wipes out ASUC’s $350,000 emergency reserve fund. The remainder of the debt will be covered by the campus bookstore, which provides the student government with more than half a million dollars in support each year. For the next five years, those annual payments will be cut by $114,000.
The Jay-Z concert was ASUC’s first stadium show in more than thirty years, and the culmination of a four-year campaign by the student government to bring large-scale performances to campus.
A second Binghamton Student Association representative who used racist slurs against an SA vice president last week has lost his position as a result.
As I reported last Saturday, representative Mike Lombardi resigned from the SA days after telling vice president for finance Alice Liou to “go eat a dog,” while Ehlad Bar-Shai, who had taunted Liou for having “squinty eyes” prior the Lombardi incident, was elected chair of the SA’s Student Assembly in a close vote.
News of Bar-Shai’s comments spread widely on campus after his election, however, and a protest rally was held last weekend calling for him to be removed from office.
Last night, at the final Assembly meeting of the year, Bar-Shai asked to make a formal apology, but a motion to reconsider his election was introduced before he was able to do so.
Bar-Shai argued that the motion to reconsider was out of order, but was turned aside. When the Assembly approved the motion Bar-Shai and several supporters withdrew from the meeting, causing it to lose quorum.
But the Assembly was eventually able to re-establish quorum, a new election was held, and incumbent Assembly chair Josh Berk, who had lost to Bar-Shai at the previous meeting, was re-elected by a vote of 15-4.
Last fall, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs student government president David Williams refused to sign a $2100 budget allocation for a National Coming Out Day event sponsored by Spectrum, a LGBT student group on campus. His action didn’t block the money from being disbursed, but did delay its release.
Williams said that the decision reflected his personal beliefs. Other students said it violated the student goverment constitution, and launched a campaign to remove him from his position.
The removal effort drew broad support, but ran into various bureaucratic and procedural stumbling blocks. Six months later, Williams remains in office, and he even ran for re-election this spring.
That election campaign gave the students of the campus the chance to weigh in on the controversy directly, however, and the result was decisive. Not only did Williams and his running mate lose, they lost to Daniel Garcia and James Burge, who are both gay men of color.
The effort to impeach Williams, whose term ends June 1, continues.
studentactivism.net 
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