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With Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings getting underway this morning, now seems like as good a time as any to revisit the Supreme Court nominee’s past as a student activist.
The Daily Princetonian has posted seven letters and articles by or about Sotomayor from her undergraduate days, and taken together they reveal her to be a committed advocate for Latinos and Latinas on campus, an opponent of anti-gay violence, and as the recipient of the university’s highest undergraduate honor for her “dedication to the life of minority students at Princeton.”
In a May 10, 1974 letter, Sotomayor explained a complaint filed by “the Puerto Rican and Chicano students of Princeton” alleging “an institutional pattern of discrimination” at the university. In it she noted that there were then only 31 Puerto Rican and 27 Chicano students enrolled at Princeton, and rebuked the university for its “total absence of regard, concern and respect for an entire people and their culture.” (Sotomayor is quoted in two Daily Princetonian articles on the complaint as well.)
In a letter published on September 12, 1974, Sotomayor and five other student advisors to a search for a new assistant dean for student affairs laid out their criticism of the lack of direct student involvement in the search and the racial and ethnic dynamics of the process. (Sotomayor is quoted directly on the controversy here.)
In a group letter from February 27, 1976, Sotomayor and 38 other members of the campus community condemned the recent vandalism of a dorm room that was home to two students active in the Gay Alliance of Princeton.
And on February 28, 1976, it was announced that Sotomayor was one of two co-recipients of Princeton’s M. Taylor Pine Honor Prize, “the highest honor the university confers on an undergraduate.” The Princetonian article on the honor referred to Sotomayor as having “maintained almost straight A’s for the last two years, but” being “especially known for her extracurricular activities.” (The photo at above right accompanied this article.) A follow-up piece two days later noted that Sotomayor was the first Latino student to win the award.
A group of alumni plan to purchase and reopen Antioch College, a 150-year-old private Ohio college with a radical history.
Antioch, the flagship of the six-campus Antioch University system, closed two years ago, but now the alumni group has struck a deal with AU’s board of trustees to buy the campus, its endowment, and the rights to its name for $6 million.
The deal, which has to be approved by Ohio state officials, would allow the college to reopen as an independent institution. The alumni group plans to start small, with an annual budget of $4.5 million and an enrollment of just seventy students in the first year of operations, and they hope to admit their first new students in the fall of 2011.
Cripchick has a great, thorough post up on how to ensure that your events are accessible to everyone. Here’s the list of topics she covers:
- childcare
- sliding pay scales
- different ways of getting information out
- gender-neutral bathrooms
- food options
- wheelchair and other mobility-related access
- structured schedules and awareness of time
- alternative formats
- audio description
- accessible language
- understanding different learning styles
- access to quiet space
- commitment to being anti-oppression
- trigger warnings
- arrangements for carpools/room sharing
- identities and experiences
There’s more in comments, too. Go read.
Sunday night’s violent attack on students in a Tehran University dorm by police and religious militia members has exposed fault lines at the highest levels of Iranian government.
Yesterday, a group of parliamentarians visited the campus and spoke with students. After that visit, they called upon the government to release all those arrested and fire those responsible for the attack. In response, parliament speaker Ali Larijani, a longtime Ahmadinejad rival, announced the creation of an investigatory committee to investigate the incident.
Reports have circulated in the last 24 hours that as many as five students — three men and two women — were killed in the assault. The chancellor of the university has denied that any deaths occurred, but condemnation of the incident has been growing, as Speaker Larijani has publicly asked “What does it mean that in the middle of the night students are attacked in their dormitory?”
At the mass rally held yesterday, presidential candidate Ali Mousavi charged that the government had “attacked dormitories and brutally broken legs, heads, arms, [thrown] some of the students out of the windows, and arrested a lot of people.” Today, some eight hundred students are reported to have staged a sit-in at the university’s gates.
Iran is a young country, and its students have for decades stood at the forefront of political agitation. The Tehran University incident is not the only violent campus assault to occur since last Friday’s election, but it appears to be galvanizing — and polarizing — the country in a way that the others have not.
If the uprising now taking place in Iran does grow into a true rebellion, the Tehran University dormitory assault of June 14 will likely be seen as a turning point in the struggle.
3 pm update: The Chronicle of Higher Education has finally picked up the Tehran University story.
5 pm update: The chancellor of Shiraz University has resigned in protest over a similar attack there.
Members of the Iranian parliament are repudiating last night’s government attack on students in dormitories at Tehran University, and the parliament’s speaker has appointed a committee to investigate the event.
According to a report by INSA, the Iranian Students News Agency, a group of parliamentarians visited the university today, taking testimony from students who witnessed the previous night’s events.
After their trip to the campus the group made a statement calling “for the damages [to dormitory buildings] to be repaired … arrested students to be released and those who carried out [these] unfortunate events to be arrested.”
In response to the lawmakers’ call, parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani constituted the group as a formal committee charged with investigating the “unfortunate incidents.”
5 pm update: Larijani is a longtime rival of Ahmadinejad, but he conspicuously congratulated the president on his re-election over the weekend. His appointment of this committee may suggest that he believes the political winds are shifting.
10 pm update: The Guardian (UK) says it has received an unconfirmed report that five Tehran University students died in the dorm assault. It names the five students, and reports that they are believed to have been buried today. The Guardian also reports that seven people involved in a student protest are said to have been killed by riot police in Shiraz, and that students at Isfahan University may have been thrown from upper-story windows.
11 pm update: According to this site, two of the five students killed were women. The female students who were said to have died were Mobina Ehterami and Fatemeh Barati, and the men were Kasra Sharafi, Kambiz Shoaei, and Mohsen Imani.
studentactivism.net 
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