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Venezuelans are voting on term-limits today, in a referendum that president Hugo Chavez hopes will clear the way for him to remain in office indefinitely.
Students handed Chavez a defeat on this issue in December 2007, but he’s cracked down on their organizing efforts in recent months, and polls show the Chavez forces leading by a slim margin this time around.
Update: No. No, they won’t thwart him again.
The administration of Georgia Southern University has blocked a student group from inviting sixties radical and education reformer William Ayers to campus.
Ayers, a leader of the Weather Underground, became notorious during last year’s presidential campaign because of his connections to Barack Obama. He was invited to GSU by that campus’s Multicultural Advisory Council, a student group.
Though Ayers had spoken at GSU before without incident, his invitation drew criticism and protest this time, and the university claimed the controversy would raise security costs for the speech to $13,000. They cited these costs in vetoing the event.
The administration of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln rescinded a speaking invitation to Ayers last fall in the face of criticism by donors and political leaders. Ayers was forced to cancel a speech at the University of Toronto last month when he was denied entry into Canada by border officials.
Students at the State University of New York at Potsdam are gearing up a protest over the state government’s decision to divert new tuition revenue away from SUNY.
In the deficit reduction bill passed last week, only 10% of this spring’s $310 tuition increase is slotted to be used to support SUNY, and in Governor Paterson’s proposed budget for next year, only 20% of the $620 tuition hike will stay on campus.
The Potsdam student government mounted an on-campus rally against the policies this week, and they are organizing a lobby visit to Albany to bring the message directly to state government.
According to the London School of Economics Gaza protest blog, two new British university occupations in response to Israeli policy began on Wednesday, at the University of Strathclyde and Manchester University.
This brings to at least seventeen the number of such occupations since mid-January, all of which — with the exception of Manchester University — have ended. (Other sources say there have been as many as 22 actions.)
The activist group Stop the War is hosting a meeting of protest organizers from around Britain tomorrow in London.
An Irish student march against new tuition fees yesterday drew as many as 15,000 participants.
The march, sponsored by the Union of Students in Ireland, took place as government officials suggested that a tax on high-income university graduates might take the place of tuition charges going forward.
studentactivism.net 
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