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The British police have in recent months opened files on more than two hundred students who have been identified as potential “criminals and would-be terrorists” by teachers and other authority figures.
Under a program called the “Channel project,” launched in selected British localities 18 months ago, Muslim students who have expressed “bad attitudes towards ‘the West'” have been reported to the police and subsequently subjected to formal intervention by community members or government officals. Such intervention is said to range from meetings with religious leaders to investigation by social services workers and “intervention directly by the police.”
Students targeted by the Channel project have been as young as thirteen.
The Observer, the University of Notre Dame’s student newspaper, says its student readers strongly support the selection of President Obama as ND’s 2009 commencement speaker.
Of the 282 letters it has received from students on the subject, the Observer says that nearly three-quarters — 73 percent — support the decision to invite the president. Among graduating seniors, the core audience for the speech, a full 97 support are supportive. Alumni opinion on the address is a near mirror-image of student views, however, with 70 percent of 313 alumni correspondents opposing Obama’s presence at commencement.
On Wednesday, a coalition of Notre Dame student groups announced their “deepest opposition” to the decision to invite Obama. That coalition included Notre Dame Right to Life, The Irish Rover Student Newspaper, Notre Dame College Republicans, The University of Notre Dame Anscombe Society, Notre Dame Identity Project, Militia of the Immaculata, Children of Mary, Orestes Brownson Council, Notre Dame Law School Right to Life, Notre Dame Law St Thomas More Society, and The Federalist Society at Notre Dame Law School.
Exit polls show that President Obama won the Catholic vote in November by a nine-point margin, two points greater than his victory in the electorate as a whole.
In recent months, the president of Northwestern College in Minnesota, a Christian college of more than three thousand students, has come under attack over a variety of theological and managerial issues.
On Tuesday, the student government at NWC released a letter calling upon the President Cureton to step down. The one-page letter cites scripture nine times in the course of making its case.
That’s something you don’t see every day.
The Secular Student Alliance has announced its annual awards for the best atheist clubs at North American colleges and universities. The awards are granted in the categories Best Service Project, Best Media Appearance, Best New Affiliate, Best Website, and Best Overall Affiliate, and come with cash prizes of $300 to $500.
This year’s honorees include the Atheists, Agnostics, and Freethinkers of the University of Illinois, who conducted a joint relief-work trip to New Orleans with members of that college’s Campus Crusade for Christ.
An anti-abortion group at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point put up a display of four thousand white crosses on a campus lawn last week, symbolizing the four thousand fetuses that they say are aborted each day. Stevens Point student Roderick King objected to the installation, saying that because abortion is a constitutional right, “you don’t have the right to challenge it. … Do not put this in front of all of us. This is not your right.” He then pulled several hundred of the crosses out of the ground before being convinced to leave peacefully.
This was by all accounts a minor event. Leaders in “Pointers for Life,” the group that put up the crosses, told the Wausau Daily Herald that their displays are often targeted by vandals. But the incident has received wide coverage among conservative blogs and media outlets, in part because King is one of nineteen members of the UWSP student senate.
The prominent conservative legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy described King as a student government official in their story on the incident. Michelle Malkin identified him as a student government senator. Many other sites called him a student government leader or simply a student leader. The group that put up the crosses has called on King to resign or be removed from his student government office.
King has written a letter to the Stevens Point Journal rejecting the calls for his resignation, and saying that he was “not acting in the name of UWSP Student Government Association, but as an individual who believes one person’s right to freedom of speech stops when it infringes on another person’s right to a secular education.”
studentactivism.net 
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