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In an unexpectedly lopsided 8-1 vote, the United States Supreme Court this morning ruled that the 2003 school strip search of eighth grader Savana Redding was unconstitutional.
I wrote about oral arguments in the case, Safford v. Redding, here, here, and here. Today’s Supreme Court ruling can be found here. I’ll have more on the decision next week.
Evening update: Here’s some interesting coverage of the decision from Pandagon, Meanwhile, the Washington Post wonders whether this is Justice Souter’s last opinion.
Sunday night’s violent attack on students in a Tehran University dorm by police and religious militia members has exposed fault lines at the highest levels of Iranian government.
Yesterday, a group of parliamentarians visited the campus and spoke with students. After that visit, they called upon the government to release all those arrested and fire those responsible for the attack. In response, parliament speaker Ali Larijani, a longtime Ahmadinejad rival, announced the creation of an investigatory committee to investigate the incident.
Reports have circulated in the last 24 hours that as many as five students — three men and two women — were killed in the assault. The chancellor of the university has denied that any deaths occurred, but condemnation of the incident has been growing, as Speaker Larijani has publicly asked “What does it mean that in the middle of the night students are attacked in their dormitory?”
At the mass rally held yesterday, presidential candidate Ali Mousavi charged that the government had “attacked dormitories and brutally broken legs, heads, arms, [thrown] some of the students out of the windows, and arrested a lot of people.” Today, some eight hundred students are reported to have staged a sit-in at the university’s gates.
Iran is a young country, and its students have for decades stood at the forefront of political agitation. The Tehran University incident is not the only violent campus assault to occur since last Friday’s election, but it appears to be galvanizing — and polarizing — the country in a way that the others have not.
If the uprising now taking place in Iran does grow into a true rebellion, the Tehran University dormitory assault of June 14 will likely be seen as a turning point in the struggle.
3 pm update: The Chronicle of Higher Education has finally picked up the Tehran University story.
5 pm update: The chancellor of Shiraz University has resigned in protest over a similar attack there.
Reporting from Iran in the wake of the apparent theft of the presidential election is still extremely fragmentary, but it’s clear that there’s a tremendous amount of unrest, and that that unrest is in large part being led by students. Here’s what I’ve been able to glean about the situation so far this morning:
Hundreds of riot police have shut down the road to the dormitories at Tehran University, where student riots against the regime took place ten years ago. Violence has also been reported at Shahid Beheshti University. More than a hundred faculty members at Sharif University in Tehran have resigned in protest of the government’s actions regarding the election. University exams, scheduled for this weekend across Iran, have been postponed until next month.
Much of the most dramatic news on the Iranian situation is coming from Twitter. (English-language Twitter feeds from Iranian students include @change_for_iran and @tehranelection — I’ll add to this list as I can.) Many of these reports are unsourced and unverifiable, but a sample of results from a search on iranelection university gives a feel for what’s out there:
- @1luvfreedom Students at Univ of Tehran barricaded campus. Continue to hold the university against security forces’ violence. #iranelection
- @smileofcrash 180 teachers of Amir Kabir university resign for supporting people…Viva teachers:) #iranelection
- @Gita situation in tehran University is so worrisome. police have attacked to girls dormitory #tehran #iranelection
- @madyar: the students and people of ferdosiuniversity in mashhad have demonstration and they chant#IranElection #IranElections
A San Jose State University computer science student has won a victory in a struggle over control of his academic work.
Kyle Brady was threatened with punishment by a professor for posting code he had written for a class assignment online. (Brady wanted to make his code available to other programmers, his prof thought that making it public would facilitate cheating among students who were given the same assignment in the future.) Brady appealed his prof’s decision, and the university took his side.
As Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow says, this ruling affirms fundamental principles about the teacher/student relationship:
Profs — including me, at times — fall into the lazy trap of wanting to assign rotework that can be endlessly recycled as work for new students. But the convenience of profs must be secondary to the pedagogical value of the university experience. … Students work harder when the work is meaningful, when it has value other than as a yardstick for measuring their comprehension.
That’s worth saying again, I think. “The convenience of profs must be secondary to the pedagogical value of the university experience.” Exactly.
The highest appeals court in New York State has ruled that a Rochester curfew that barred under-18s from the city’s streets between 11 pm and 5 am, was an unconstitutional violation of the rights of both parents and children.
The court’s 34-page ruling is a strong and far-reaching defense of youth rights. If you’re interested in the subject, it’s definitely worth a read.
Update: The post on this ruling at The Volokh Conspiracy has spawned an interesting comments thread.
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