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Student parties turned into riots at two American colleges last night.
At the University of Minnesota, an off-campus student party associated with the campus’s Spring Jam got rowdy when a fire was built in the middle of a street. Bottles and rocks were reportedly thrown at police, who retaliated with tear gas, pepper spray, and “foam rounds.”
Here’s commenter Sun from the Minnesota Daily website with a first-hand perspective:
“I wouldn’t call this a riot as much as a large get-together that was slightly out of hand. People were not hurting each other or raiding houses. There was a strong communal understanding of respect, however, there was some bottle smashing and fire starting. If you were there you know what I’m trying to get at … the majority of the activity was allotted to mere standing and conversing with occasional sing-a-longs.”
Standing and conversing with occasional sing-a-longs, bottle smashing, and fire starting. Got it.
Only four people were arrested in the UM incident, but KentNewsNet is reporting that police made 125 arrests in the course of an off-campus confrontation at Kent State. There, participants suggest that the party turned into a riot because of police action.
May 9 update: Police search teams have found a corpse a little over a mile from where George Zinkhan’s Jeep was abandoned after the April 25th shootings discussed below. The Atlanta Journal Constitution is reporting that the body has been tentatively identified as Zinkhan’s.
Earlier today, three people were shot to death in Athens, Georgia, and UGA marketing professor George M. Zinkhan III has been identified as the alleged shooter.
The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s website has a mostly straightforward article up on the incident, linking to local media coverage and noting the steps that the university has taken to inform the campus community.
At the bottom of the piece, however, the Chronicle added an eyebrow-raising passage. After noting that students had been quoted in the UGA student newspaper the Red and Black saying that the news of the shooting was “hard to believe” and that Zinkhan was a “nice guy,” the article concluded with this:
“His ratings on the Rate My Professors Web site, however, were mixed. One commenter described him as ‘brilliant and really funny,’ but others said he was ‘cold hearted’ and a ‘creep.’ “
I’m a big proponent of student evaluation of faculty, but this strikes me as wildly inappropriate.
8:30 pm update: Via Womanist Musings, a reminder that the obligatory “nice guy” quote in articles about white middle-class men accused of murder is problematic too.
10:45 am update: Comments at the Chronicle are running heavily against the decision to include the Rate My Professor quotes in the article, and many of them are based on the premise that RMP is inherently worthless as a source.
I just posted this over there:
“If commenters at Rate My Professor had posted that Zinkhan had been violent or bizarrely aggressive toward them, that would have been something to at least consider mentioning in this article. Such comments would have been relevant to what he is accused of now, and might have raised the question of whether there were warning signs in Zinkhan’s relationship with students that UGA should have been aware of.
“But the comments posted weren’t those kinds of comments — they barely rose above the level of generic insults. Even if one believes, as I do, that RMP ratings can provide real information about a professor, these particular comments did not, and they should not have been quoted here.”
1:00 pm update: Huh. The Chronicle has now eliminated the references to RateMyProfessor from the article, and deleted all eighteen of the reader comments that criticized their decision to include the quotes. No note, no explanation, no other changes to the article.
9:00 pm update: The Chronicle has now posted an explanation of their decision to excise the Rate My Professor quotes and conducted another purge of the comments to the article, removing about half a dozen new comments critical of their original decision. They’ve also closed comments on the article, so that nobody can post criticizing their decision to censor the comments thread a second time.
Lordy.
11:00 pm update: It just keeps getting more and more ridiculous. The Chronicle has disabled comments on its follow-up article on the Zinkhan case, apparently because people were using that comment thread to air their grievances about the previous thread. As of this writing, the sole comment on the Chronicle’s article on another recent campus shooting, from commenter “Bing,” reads as follows:
“I am disgusted that all comments critical of the Chronicle’s decision to use anonymous RateMyProfessor screeds in reporting of the Georgia shooting have been taken down and that commenting has been disabled. It’s sad that I have to let the Chronicle know how disappointed I am through another posting. I have no doubt that this one will disappear too, thereby making it perfectly relevant to the article. The irony.”
As long as they keep doing this, I’ll keep updating this post, I guess.
11:20 pm update: And now that newest comment has been taken down too.
In Wednesday’s edition of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Royal Purple, managing editor Michael Daly slammed the “preferential treatment” some athletes consider their due, and “the coaches and administrators who send the message it’s acceptable to behave how you want because you can run fast or jump high.” As an example, he cited a recent incident in which police had to be called to the campus campus weight room to deal with an athlete who refused to show ID on entry.
Whitewater football coach Lance Leipold wasn’t happy.
“This is fucking bullshit,” Leipold told Purple sports editor Christopher Kuhagen (see note below). In an email, he said the paper would “no longer have access to student-athletes or coaches in the football program,” and in a phone call he told Kuhagen to “go cover soccer.”
After the Purple published a story on Leipold’s outbursts, however, he quickly issued an apology by email. “I want to sincerely apologize for my recent behavior,” he wrote. “Some of the language I used with you was inappropriate and I am very sorry. You, UW-Whitewater campus community and alumni expect and deserve better from me as the Head Football Coach and the example I need to set for our program. I am open to meeting with you anytime to discuss this further.”
He and his team would, he said, continue to make themselves available to the Purple‘s reporters.
Note: In the Purple article on Leipold’s tirades, the expletive before “bullshit” was deleted. It’s possible, but unlikely, that it was something other than “fucking.”
“I think he’s underestimating us a lot and that we’re going to show him in the next couple weeks that we can really turn on the fire.”
–University of Vermont student activist and Students Stand Up member Cecile Reuge, on UVM president Dan Fogel.
On Tuesday, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Safford School District v. Redding, the case of Savana Redding, an eighth-grade girl who was strip-searched by school officials looking for prescription-strength ibuprofen.
It’s an interesting and important case, and I’ve got lots to say about it — expect another couple of posts on the subject in the next day or two. But I’d like to start by clearing up a misconception.
A reporter named David G. Savage covered the case for the Tribune Company, which publishes the Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times. In his story, which appeared in both of those papers, he said that when Justice Scalia asked Matthew Wright, the school district’s attorney, whether a body cavity search would be permissible in a school setting, Wright “insisted it would be legal.”
Savage’s take on the exchange has been echoed by a bunch of blogs. But it’s a profound misrepresentation of what Wright actually said.
studentactivism.net 
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