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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.
Teenage students at a school in Loughton, England staged a boycott of one of their classes this spring when they discovered that the classroom it was held in had been fitted out with video cameras.
The students at Davenant Foundation School discovered the cameras when they arrived in class one Monday morning — they had not been consulted on, or even informed of, their installation. Seventeen of eighteen students in the class walked out.
It took school administrators two weeks to address the students’ concerns, saying that the cameras had been installed for teacher training purposes and would not be activated without prior notice to the class. Later, however, students discovered that microphones in the room had been turned on. (They turned them off.)
Last week two of the protesters, Lela Clancy and Sam Goodman, published an opinion piece on their protest, and the public response to it, in The Guardian, one of Britain’s leading newspapers. It’s well worth reading.
(via Boing Boing)
A federal appeals court in Colorado has found that administrators at Lewis-Palmer High School did not violate Erica Corder’s rights when they forced her to apologize for remarks she made in a 2005 valedictorian’s address.
Corder’s speech — one of fifteen short addresses by students at the graduation — had been cleared by school officials in advance, but abandoned the agreed-upon text, instead delivering one that included the following lines:
I need to tell you about someone who loves you more than you could ever imagine. He died for you on a cross over 2,000 years ago, yet was resurrected and is living today in heaven. His name is Jesus Christ. If you don’t already know him personally I encourage you to find out more about the sacrifice he made for you so that you now have the opportunity to live in eternity with him.
Administrators then refused to give Corder her diploma until she made a public apology. Corder did so, but later sued the school.
In its ruling, the court found that because the graduation was a “school-sponsored activity,” and the public might reasonably believe that Corder’s speech had been approved by school officials, the punishment was not an unconstitutional one.
Corder’s attorney told the Student Press Law Center that censorship of, or punishment for, graduation speeches is improper. “When the student goes to the lectern to speak,” he said, “it’s their own words.”
studentactivism.net 
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