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The PA State Police sent fifteen cops dressed as college students to a Haverford dorm party Thursday night, citing more than thirty students for underage drinking.
Drinking in the dorms is allowed for over-21s at Haverford, and the party was advertised on Facebook. But cops planned the raid after checking out the profiles of students who’d put themselves down as planning to attend and finding that many of them were underage.
Police showed up at the party 10:30, hoping to arrive as it was getting underway, but by the time they got there most of the alcohol was gone. They hung around for half an hour, observing, then announced themselves and started asking partiers for ID. They detained about forty students, and issued citations to 31 of those.
One interesting tidbit: The cops didn’t give the university a heads-up before crashing the party. Haverford’s president, Stephen G. Emerson, learned about the raid when a student called him after the police started asking for ID, and Emerson arrived on the scene himself about half an hour later.
Via Kevin Prentiss (@kprentiss on Twitter) comes a link to the University of North Alabama’s Sidewalk Chalk Reservation Form.
The form states — in all caps, bolded, and underlined — that “chalking on university sidewalks requires reservations and approval from designated building supervisors or other assigned personnel.”
Chalking also requires, according to the form, advance notice and reservation of space. It requires compliance with a five-point list of restrictions, including a prohibition on chalking near doorways, near the university amphitheater, or with non-pastel chalk. “Chalking,” it states, “is only to be used to beautify the image of the UNA campus and to promote the organization using it.” Violation of any of the above rules will, according to the form, subject the organization responsible to a fine “in excess of $150.”
Over on Twitter, Kevin is a little abashed about linking to the form (“Apologies to the uni involved. I’m sure this is common.”), but I’ve got no such qualms. This is no way to run a university. Hell, it’d be no way to run a junior high.
The university is a community, and its public spaces are, in a very real sense, student space. If a little chalk dust gets tracked into the dining hall, or folks attending a concert at the amphitheater have to run a gauntlet of chalked announcements for Take Back the Night and the chemistry club semi-formal, that goes with the territory. It’s part of being a university.
UNA hands out the Sidewalk Chalk Reservation form — and free chalk! — at its Office of Student Engagement. But you can’t foster student engagement by treating students like guests. When you make students fill out a form to reserve sidewalk space for chalking. You’re telling them that they’re interlopers on campus. You’re telling them that this is your university, not theirs.
And you shouldn’t be surprised when they decide to take it back.
A Mississippi student is suing her high school after a cheerleading coach demanded her Facebook password, then used it to access and disseminate private email.
According to the lawsuit the coach, Tommie Hill, told the Pearl High School cheerleading squad that they would all have to give her their Facebook passwords. Several squad members responded by deleting their accounts from their cell phones, but sophomore Mandi Jackson complied with the request.
The suit claims that Hill accessed Jackson’s account later that day, and forwarded Jackson’s private Facebook messages to at least four other school officials. The officials then “publicly reprimanded … and humiliated” Jackson, suspended her from cheerleader training, and banned her from other school events.
Jackson’s attorney, Rita Nahlik Silin, told the Student Press Law Center that Hill’s actions were “a blatant violation of her right to privacy, her right to free speech, her right to free association and her right to due process. It’s egregious to me,” she said, “that a 14-year-old girl is essentially told you can’t speak your mind, can’t publish anything, can’t be honest or have an open discussion with someone without someone else essentially eavesdropping.”
As Lee Baker of the Citizen Media Law Project notes, this incident reflects a not-uncommon belief on the part of authority figures that “they have the right to invade others’ privacy and eavesdrop on private or semi-private conversations merely because these conversations take place online.” In Baker’s words, “asking for a student’s Facebook password in order to read private messages is akin to asking the student’s permission to install a wiretap on his or her phone.”
A group of Florida teenagers has brought suit against the city of West Palm Beach, in hopes of overturning that city’s youth curfew.
The National Youth Rights Association of Southeast Florida (NYRA-SEFL) filed the lawsuit in federal court late last month, after their efforts to negotiate with the city were rebuffed.
According to the executive director of the national NYRA, this lawsuit is the first formal legal challenge to a curfew ordinance ever brought by a youth-led youth civil rights group.
Afternoon update: Here’s a copy of the complaint.
In reading about the book The Third Reich and the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses, which I mentioned here last week, I stumbled upon the website of an interesting museum exhibit that’s currently up here in New York.
Beyond Swastika and Jim Crow: Jewish Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges traces the history of several dozen German Jewish professors who, after fleeing Nazi Germany, took teaching positions at segregated colleges in the American South. According to the website, the exhibit emphasizes the relationships that grew up between these professors and their students, and the effect that this unusual meeting of cultures had on both groups.
The exhibit runs at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan through January. I’ll report back after my visit.
studentactivism.net 
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