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“This article is being written with the belief that our experiences can be absorbed and used, and, what is most important, the Movement can go on to higher levels, evading old mistakes in order to commit the mistakes of the future.”

 — Mark Rudd, President of Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society, 1969.


“Student government is a broken reed. If actual, it is capricious, impulsive, and unreliable; if not, it is a subterfuge and pretense.”

— Andrew S. Draper, President of the University of Illinois, 1904.

The Daily Princetonian‘s blog has a scan up of a 1958 pamphlet for alumni about admissions policies for their children, and it’s great reading.

Go check it out.

Jan Kemp, an English professor at the University of Georgia who exposed exploitation of student athletes in the 1980s, leading to reforms in NCAA eligibility policies, has died of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Kemp was fired by UGA in the early 1980s for refusing to inflate the grades of varsity athletes who were in some cases functionally illiterate. When she sued the university for wrongful dismissal, the university’s academic policies were themselves put on trial.

In one of the most damning pieces of evidence, an audiotape was introduced on which the head of remedial studies at UGA could be heard telling fellow professors that student athletes were “a kind of raw material in the production of some goods to be sold as whatever product, and they get nothing in return.” 

Kemp was reinstated as a result of that trial, and awarded more than one million dollars in damages. The verdict led to the resignation of the university’s president, and to new academic standards for athletes at UGA and in the NCAA as a whole.

Alexandros Grigoropoulos, the fifteen-year-old whose death at the hands of police has sparked four days of student and youth rioting across the country of Greece, is being buried today. Protests are continuing.

The two police officers who were involved in the Grigoropoulos shooting have been indicted, one of them for murder.

Greek schools are closed today in an expression of mourning for Grigoropoulos. Children, parents, and teachers held a peaceful demonstration in Athens this morning to protest his death.

Government forces have still not entered the nation’s campuses, which have been off-limits to the police and army since the fall of the Greek junta in the 1970s, and which have as a result been used as staging areas for protesters and rioters.

The tag “griots” is being used to identify material pertaining to the ongoing Greek crisis on Twitter, Flickr, and various blogs.

About This Blog

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StudentActivism.net is the work of Angus Johnston, a historian and advocate of American student organizing.

To contact Angus, click here. For more about him, check out AngusJohnston.com.