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The administration of Evergreen State College has suspended that school’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society.

In February, students and others clashed with campus police after a Dead Prez concert in the university gym, overturning and vandalizing a police car. After that incident, the university declared a moratorium on on-campus concerts. In March, SDS held an anti-war folk music performance in defiance of the ban.

The chapter has been suspended for the remainder of the academic year and placed on probation until January 2009.  According to an SDS press release, “the suspension means that SDS has lost its budget and office, can no longer hold meetings, book events, or use school facilities and equipment.”

An interview with two members of the suspended SDS chapter has been posted at the Dissident Voice.

Police seized the cell phones of the nine students arrested in last week’s anti-sweatshop sit-in at the U of Montana, and have yet to return them. 

According to the chief of the UM office of public safety, the phones are evidence — he says “students were using the cell phones, some to take pictures within the building, some to communicate with the rally outside, helping them and facilitating the crime of disorderly conduct.” 

Protesters claim that the seizures were intended to disrupt future protests. Ella Torti, a UM sophomore and one of the nine arrestees, told the local newspaper that she believes that the police are “trying to hinder our ability to organize.”

Ten thousand people participated in Colorado University’s annual marijuana smoke-out on the campus quad yesterday, twice as many as toked up one year ago. In the past, campus cops have photographed offenders or turned on the sprinkler system, but yesterday, outnumbered 500-to-1, they simply gave up.

Because of the scale of the event, it became a magnet for students promoting other causes. CU junior Max Lichtenstein handed out more than a hundred Rice Krispies treats attached to flyers asking students to call the White House to protest the genocide in Darfur … “Tomorrow, when you’re sober.”

According to the ACLU, Harvard University’s campus police department has been conducting plainclothes surveillance of campus protests. They say undercover campus cops photographed participants in a March demonstration, and they’ve filed a Freedom of Information Act request to uncover whether the university is passing surveillance information to government agencies.

A student who was at the protest says “it’s a little unnerving to find Harvard undercover police spying and taking pictures of Harvard students on public property.”

(via Cambridge Common)

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

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