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Via the blog Bitch PhD comes a link to an online Student Voting Rights Guide from the Brennan Center for Justice.
It’s an interactive guide — you specify whether you’re voting on campus or from your pre-college hometown, and it shows you the regulations on registration, residency, identification, and absentee voting for all fifty states. The rules show up as a color-coded map, and you can click through for specific information.
It’s a great resource for activists planning GOTV campaigns. Spread the word!
An interesting background piece from the First Amendment Center on the organizational relationship between student newspapers and campus administrators. The piece gives particular attention to the trend toward student papers organizing themselves as non-profit corporations independent of the universitites they cover.
History geeks may want to check out the Free Speech Movement Digital Archive, a collection of documents from, and writing about, the historic Berkeley protests of 1964-65.
We’ve added the link to our collection at left.
As we reported last month, the student government of Toronto’s York University has voted to deny recognition to campus groups that oppose abortion rights. Now comes word that one such group, Students for Bioethical Awareness, is challenging the ban as a violation of the campus’s code of student conduct.
An essay on free-speech rights in high schools from a First Amendment scholar:
After 12 years of censorship and regimentation, many high school students will graduate this spring with little or no idea about what it means to be a free, active and engaged citizen in a democracy. When they march across the stage to get their diploma, let’s hope someone slips them a copy of the First Amendment – with instructions on how to use it.
Far too many public school officials are afraid of freedom and avoid anything that looks like democracy. Under the heading of “safety and discipline,” administrators censor student religious and political speech, shut down student newspapers and limit student government to discussions about decorations at the prom.
Fortunately, a growing number of brave students defy the odds and take seriously what they hear about free speech in civics class…
studentactivism.net 
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