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The administration of Liberty University is moderating its position on the campus’s College Democrats club, which it dissolved a little over a week ago.
In a May 15 email, LU Vice President for Student Affairs Mark Hine told the club’s president that the College Democrats was “no longer going to be recognized as a Liberty University club,” citing university regulations requiring that all campus groups and their parent organizations adopt policies and positions consistent “with the distinctly Christian mission of the University, the Liberty Way, the Honor Code, or the policies and procedures promulgated by the University.” Groups in conflict with those principles, he noted, could not “be approved, recognized or permitted to meet on campus, advertise, distribute or post materials, or use University facilities.”
Yesterday, however, in an email to Rod Snyder, an official with the Young Democrats of America, LU chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. took a different stance. The College Democrats, he said, would not be allowed to use Liberty University’s name, but they “will not be prevented from meeting on campus or having a club.”
Fallwell claimed that Snyder had been “misinformed” about Liberty’s position on the CD, and he seems to have grasped onto an ambiguity in Hine’s original email as the basis for his new position. Although Hine said that CD would not be recognized as a club because of the Democratic party’s views, he did not explicitly say that the group would not be allowed to meet on campus. He strongly implied it, to the point that it’s the only sensible reading of his letter, but he didn’t say it explicitly.
This isn’t a complete reversal of the university’s May 15 policy, but it is a significant retreat, and a major victory for the school’s College Democrats.
Sunday morning update: Liberty University offered another olive branch to the College Democrats on Friday, offering full recognition if the group would affiliate with the national organization Democrats for Life rather than the Democratic Party. On its face, this seems like a plausible compromise, as the LU College Dems identifies itself as a pro-life organization.
There is, however, a hitch.
Democrats for Life does not endorse or campaign on behalf of pro-choice candidates. Ever. And if the Liberty University College Democrats were to affiliate with DfL, they wouldn’t be able to do so either. As LUCD president Brian Diaz pointed out to a local newspaper, that means that the group would have to sit on the sidelines of the 2012 presidential election.
Update: Liberty University has backed down somewhat from its original ban. Details here.
At Liberty University in Virginia, the campus chapter of the College Democrats was informed on May 15 that because the principles of the Democratic Party contradict “Christian doctrine” and “the moral principles held by Liberty University,” the club would no longer be recognized by the university.
The College Democrats chapter was recognized last October. LU, which was founded by conservative activist and preacher Jerry Falwell, has long hosted a chapter of the College Republicans.
The governor of Virginia and all four major candidates to replace him — three Democrats and a Republicans — have all said they oppose the university’s decision. The national Young Democrats are circulating a petition opposing the move, and Rachel Maddow hosted the club’s president Brian Diaz last night.
Liberty isn’t the only conservative religious college to ban a political club recently — administrators at Idaho’s Brigham Young University dissolved the College Democrats and the College Republicans this winter, saying they wanted the campus to be “politically neutral.” The Rexburg, Idaho Standard Journal has a long, thorough story on that decision.
So this isn’t something I would have expected to see in the Chronicle, even as a guest opinion piece.
In this Friday’s issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Charles Schwartz, an emeritus professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, argues that students should appoint trustees to public colleges and universities in proportion to the support that their tuition and fees provide to those institutions.
As “state support has dwindled,” Schwartz argues, tuition and fees have come to underwrite an ever-growing part of universities’ operating budgets. Given that, the principle of no taxation without representation argues that students (and, in situations in which they are not paying their own way, their parents) be given a voice in choosing university trustees and regents.
This is more than just a provocation on Schwartz’s part. He offers several sensible mechanisms by which this reform could be implemented, notes a parallel structure in the management of California’s public employees’ retirement fund, and even suggests that such representation could be mandated by federal law if it is not implemented on the state level.
Is such a change coming anytime soon? No, probably not. But it’s absolutely true that students directly fund public colleges and universities to an extent that was unimaginable just a few decades ago, and Schwartz is absolutely right to point out that right now “the industry of higher education treats undergraduate students as cash cows.”
Good for him, and good for the Chronicle for publishing him.
Notre Dame’s commencement begins this afternoon at 2 o’clock, with live streaming video here. President Obama will receive an honorary doctorate and deliver the commencement address. I’ll be liveblogging the event, which anti-abortion activists have threatened to disrupt.
Obama beat John McCain 57% to 41% in a straw poll of Notre Dame students last October, and the Notre Dame Observer has said that initial feedback from their student readership was strongly supportive of the commencement invitation. A poll out on Thursday, by the way, finds that only 34% of American Catholics, and only 43% of regular Catholic churchgoers, think UND should rescind their invitation to Obama.
1:40 pm: Anti-Obama protesters have been out in force at Notre Dame for weeks now. Perennial GOP also-ran Alan Keyes was arrested on campus pushing a bloody doll in a Spongebob Squarepants stroller last Monday, and a plane flying a banner bearing an image of an aborted fetus has been buzzing the campus since late April.
1:50 pm: The live feed from commencement is up now, with video of graduates filing into the venue. The commencement is being held in the Joyce Center, the campus’s 11,000-seat basketball arena. The official list of prohibited items is a long one.
1:58 pm: Commencement is beginning two minutes early, with the procession of the faculty.
May 26 update: The AP is reporting that Obama has picked Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. I’ve got a new post up this morning exploring her views on race and gender in the judiciary.
In August 2007 Judge Sonia Sotomayor sat on a panel that ruled on an appeal in a high school free speech case, Doninger v. Niehoff.
The ruling in that case has come under heavy criticism from some civil libertarians, but though it’s not good, I’m not convinced it’s as bad as some people have made out. Here’s the deal:
Avery Doninger was a member of the student council of Lewis Mills High School in Connecticut. In the spring of 2007, the student council and the LMHS administration butted heads over a school concert called Jamfest, which administrators were not allowing to go forward on its originally scheduled date.
At one point in the dispute Doninger put up a blogpost saying that the principal had canceled the concert because she was “pissed off” about student pressure. Doninger called the administration “douchebags” for canceling Jamfest, and urged students to complain to the principal and “piss her off more.”
According to the principal, however, the concert had never been canceled, and in fact the day after Doninger put up her post, students and administrators reached an agreement to reschedule it.
The principal learned of Doninger’s blogpost two weeks after it went up, and punished Doninger for posting it by not allowing her to run for Senior Class Secretary. She gave four reasons: Doninger had not followed proper procedures for resolving disagreements with the administration, the post’s language had been “vulgar,” claims in the post had been inaccurate, and the exhortation to other students to “piss her off more” had been inappropriate.
Doninger ran as a write-in candidate in the election, and won, but was not allowed to take office. She and her parents then challenged that decision in court, asking for an injunction that would allow her to be seated as class secretary.
A federal district court denied that request, saying that Doninger did not have a strong enough likelihood of winning her case at trial. In making that ruling, the court accepted the principal’s account of several factual matters, rejecting Doninger’s claims.
This is where Sotomayor enters the picture, sitting as a member of a three-judge appeals court panel.
studentactivism.net 
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