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A professor at the University of East London has been suspended from his position for predicting that there may “be real bankers hanging from lampposts” at Wednesday’s protests against the G20 economic summit.
Chris Knight, a professor of anthropology, is an organizer of G20 protests in London this week. He told the BBC that if bankers and government ministers don’t “surrender their power, obviously it’s going to get us even more wound up and things could get nasty.”
Knight’s G20 Meltdown is just one of many groups planning actions in London this week, but Knight’s eagerness to make incendiary statements to the media has made him the most quoted figure in the movement right now.
The UEL’s decision to suspend him has confirmed that position.
As we’ve noted before, the New School In Exile, a student activist group at New York City’s New School university, has pledged to shut the school down on April 1 if university president Bob Kerrey doesn’t resign. With that deadline now just five days away and Kerrey still ensconced in the president’s office, NSIE is preparing for a showdown.
The group has held several events this week, including a co-sponsored student-faculty forum at NYU, a staged reading of a short satirical play about Kerrey (now online), and a party late yesterday night.
They’ve scheduled a “student gathering and planning meeting” for six o’clock Sunday evening, though they’re tight-lipped about just what it is that’s being planned — their calendar for next Wednesday reads as follows: “[insert your action here], lots of fun, anarchy and playfulness. Don’t miss it.”
In a two-hour conference call last Sunday, activists for the 70% of American college faculty who are not on the tenure track gave their new national organization a name.
“New Faculty Majority: the National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Equity” will, organizers say, be a membership group that advocates for the interests of non-tenured faculty. They are hard at work on a mission statement, a website, and an organizational structure, and they are planning a national day of action for April 30 of this year.
For more information, and updates going forward, see the New Faculty Majority blog.
Spanish police on Wednesday forcibly evicted a hundred Barcelona University students from a campus building they had been occupying for 118 days. The removal, and a student-police clash that followed, are said to have resulted in eighty injuries and the arrest of nineteen students.
The students were protesting the Barcelona Plan, a European Union initiative for the internationalization of higher education that they fear will lead to reduced funding and increased corporate influence over higher education.
Journalists demonstrated outside a regional government building on Friday, saying that police had beaten some thirty photographers covering the disturbances. A government investigation of the police violence has been launched.
One journalist at the Friday protest carried a sign that read “Police don’t beat on me, I’m working.”
It’s been almost two weeks since the University of North Carolina became the twenty-first campus this year to break with Russell Athletic over labor violations. No other schools have dumped Russell since then, but the campaign against the apparel manufacturer is still going strong.
A few highlights of the last two weeks’ organizing:
- Activists at the University of Minnesota are building on their victory there — now that UM has axed Russell, they’re pressing for the university to join the Worker Rights Consortium’s Designated Suppliers Program.
- Villanova University’s athletics program has announced a temporary freeze in purchasing from Russell while they investigate the situation, and the campus newspaper published an editorial last Thursday calling on the university to break with Russell permanently.
- A member of Kansas University Students Against Sweatshops wrote an op-ed for the Daily Kansan urging KU to cut its Russell ties.
- The Student Coalition Against Labor Exploitation held a Russell Athletics teach-in at the University of Southern California.
- Campus activists attended last Friday’s Associated Students UCLA meeting to press the case for dumping Russell.
Meanwhile, Russell Athletic is inviting the presidents of the colleges and universities that have cut their ties with the company to visit Honduras on an RA-hosted “fact-finding trip.”
March 20 Update: USAS is tweeting that the Montana State University Bozeman has become the 22nd campus to drop Russell in 2009. Also, there’s a major story on the campaign going out over the AP wire. Also, USAS reports that MSU-Bozeman and Santa Clara University have both dumped Russell. That makes 23 campuses.
May 1 Update: Boston College and the University of California make FIFTY-SEVEN campuses. Wow.
studentactivism.net 
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