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“This article is being written with the belief that our experiences can be absorbed and used, and, what is most important, the Movement can go on to higher levels, evading old mistakes in order to commit the mistakes of the future.”

 — Mark Rudd, President of Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society, 1969.


“Student government is a broken reed. If actual, it is capricious, impulsive, and unreliable; if not, it is a subterfuge and pretense.”

— Andrew S. Draper, President of the University of Illinois, 1904.

A new report from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education finds that 74.2 percent of American colleges and universities, and 77 percent of public higher ed institutions, “maintain policies that clearly restrict speech that, outside the borders of campus, is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”

The 28-page report can be found online here.

Edit: As Ashley notes in comments, and as I should have mentioned up front, FAIR is a right-leaning organization. I posted about their report in the spirit of “here’s something to look at” rather than as an endorsement of them as an organization, or even of their report. See my comment below for a little more detail, and look for a longer update at the end of the week.

The last of a group of students who had been occupying a grove of trees on the University of California Santa Cruz campus abandoned their protest site on Saturday. The protesters had been sitting in on three platforms in the redwood and oak grove since November 2007 to block construction of a biomedical facility on the site.

Three of the four protesters left the site before police arrived on Saturday morning, and the fourth was taken into custody. By noon the site had been fenced off and university employees were preparing to begin work cutting down the trees.

The student and youth riots that have caused more than one billion dollars in property damage in Greece over the last week have flared again.

On Saturday evening, exactly one week after fifteen-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos was shot and killed by police, youths threw gasoline bombs and rocks at the station where the officer charged with the shooting was based. The violence quickly spread to other parts of Athens, and other Greek cities saw rioting that night as well.

It has been reported that police stockpiles of teargas are nearly depleted nationwide, and that the government is appealing to other nations for donations to replenish supplies.

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

To contact Angus, click here. For more about him, check out AngusJohnston.com.