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The students of the University of Arkansas voted this week to urge the U of A to adopt “sanctions for the possession and use of marijuana … no greater than those imposed by the University for the possession and use of alcohol.”
The university’s dean of students inserted himself into the referendum debate a week ago, sending a mass email to students arguing that “individuals choosing to possess and/or use marijuana merit different educational sanctions from those who violate the alcohol policy.” All of the candidates running for student government president and vice president endorsed the referendum, however, and it passed by a two-to-one margin.
Update: These referenda have been put on the ballot by NORML chapters at a bunch of campuses — one passed at Purdue just last week.
Earlier reports on this morning’s New School occupation can be found here.
The New School has released a statement to the media on what it calls this morning’s “break in at 65 Fifth Avenue.” The action was not “a simple political protest,” according to the statement, since the protesters’ “entry into this building was forced, they removed a man who was cleaning the building, took his phone, injured a security officer, and did physical damage to the building.”
In the statement, the New School confirms that it asked the NYPD “to remove and arrest those who were trespassing on our property,” and declares that all New School students involved have been suspended effective immediately.
The New School Free Press, a student newspaper, reports that in addition to the nineteen people arrested inside the building, at least one New School student and one NYU student were “maced and arrested” at about 11:30 this morning. There is no confirmation of the charge that police used tear gas and pepper spray inside 65 Fifth Avenue as they retook the building.
Click “Read the rest of this entry” for afternoon updates.
July 2010 Update: A federal judge has ruled in EMU’s favor, upholding Julea Ward’s expulsion.
The story of Julea Ward, a former counseling student who is suing Eastern Michigan University over her expulsion from their graduate program, is burning up the right-wing blogosphere.
Conservative commenters on the case generally argue that Ward, a Christian, was removed from the program because she refused to “advocate for homosexual behavior” — or, as National Review‘s David French puts it, “vocally support same-sex sexual conduct.”
But Ward’s attorneys have posted various documents relating to her dismissal up online, and those documents tell a different story.
A former student has filed a lawsuit against Eastern Michigan University claiming that she was dismissed from a graduate program in counseling for refusing to “affirm or validate homosexual behavior within the context of a counseling relationship.”
At the start of this year, when she was nearing the end of her coursework at EMU, Julea Ward was engaged in a Counseling Practicum. Ward has religious objections to homosexuality, and when she discovered that one of her assigned clients was gay, she asked her professor whether she should see the client or have him reassigned. That question, she contends, set in motion a chain of events that ultimately led to disciplinary proceedings and her removal from the program.
The university has declined to comment publicly on the case, but in a March 12 letter the chair of her disciplinary committee said that Ward had “by clear and convincing evidence” violated ethical standards requiring that counselors “avoid imposing values that are inconsistent with counseling goals” or engage in discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
A copy of Ward’s complaint, with various documents relating to the disciplinary charges, can be found in PDF form here.
Update: We analyze Ward’s suit and the conservative blogosphere’s response.
Before dawn on July 18, 1992, members of a Peruvian government death squad entered the dorms of Enrique Guzmán y Valle National Education University, known as La Cantuta. They rousted the students from their beds, abducting nine of them.
La Cantuta had a long history of radical Maoist politics, and the nine students were suspected of involvement in a recent car bombing.
The death squad members took the students, and a professor who they abducted from his home, to an off-campus location. There the ten were tortured and killed. The corpses of four of those killed were discovered in an unmarked grave a year later; the other six bodies have never been accounted for.
Yesterday a Peruvian court convicted Peru’s former president, Alberto Fujimori, of having ordered the La Cantuta killings, as well as a massacre the previous year in which fifteen people were killed. Fujimori served as Peru’s president from 1990 to 2000.
Fujimori’s daughter, Keiko Fujimori, a 34-year-old member of the Peruvian national congress, will be a candidate in Peru’s presidential elections next year. If elected, she has pledged to grant her father a full pardon.
studentactivism.net 
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