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The New School Free Press has the transcript of the Wednesday night speech in which Bob Kerrey told the New School Board of Trustees that he wouldn’t be seeking a contract extension. As I was reading it over just now, a passage from near the end leaped out at me:
“My term as President will end no later than July 1, 2011.”
No later than. Huh.
Like lots of other people, I reported yesterday that Kerrey had announced he would be leaving the New School at the end of his current contract — but that’s not actually what he said. He said he would be leaving by then, and he was careful to leave the door open for an earlier departure.
Now, to be fair, he did say earlier in the speech that he had “confidence I can continue to lead this university through June 30, 2011 when my current contract ends.” And he has said in the past that if he ever lost the support of the New School’s trustees, he’d resign. But still.
Look what else he said, near the top of the speech: “To understate the case, this has been a challenging semester for the university and my family. There have been moments when I reached the limit of my willingness to continue serving as your president.”
It’s been clear for a long time that Kerrey has been ambivalent about continuing on as president of the New School. It doesn’t look to me like he’s completely put that ambivalence behind him, even now.
Bucknell University’s administration has denied a conservative student group permission to hold an affirmative action bake sale.
Such sales, in which cupcakes and cookies are offered at full price to white male students and cheaper for women and students of color, have become a common attention-grabbing tactic for right-wing campus groups in recent years. Clashes with administrators over the sales have been common too, with sponsors claiming that they’re protected speech and universities noting that they’re — by design — a discriminatory practice.
Wikipedia has a pretty extensive article on affirmative action bake sales, including mention of a nice move by the Graduate and Professional Students of Color student organization at the University of Illinois, which responded to one such sale by holding a white privilege popcorn giveaway in which white white men were given a full bag of popcorn, while women and people of color got a mostly-empty bag.
Late last Saturday night, at about 3 am, there was a shootout at a Georgia college student’s apartment.
Charles Bailey, who was present but apparently not one of the shooters, says that two masked men burst into a party, intent on robbery and rape, and that one of the partygoers fought them off with a gun he had in his backpack. By the end of the altercation, one of the outsiders, a man named Calvin Lavant, was dead and one of the women at the party had been shot several times.
Although the incident did not take place on campus property, supporters of campus concealed carry legislation are trumpeting it as evidence of the effectiveness of armed self-defense among students.
Others aren’t convinced. A lot of Pandagon commenters, for instance, think the story doesn’t quite make sense.
Was this a massacre averted? Maybe. A drug deal gone wrong? Perhaps. Could be either, could be something else. But I have a hunch we’re all going to be hearing more about this story.
8 am Thursday update: Pandagon has been down since last night, so that link above doesn’t work.
8:30 am update: Police have arrested a man named Jamal Hill who is suspected of being the other perpetrator of the home invasion. An article on that arrest identifies Charles Bailey as living in the apartment.
I love student media, and I don’t think it gets anywhere near the respect it deserves. I don’t like it when people pick on the campus press. But when a student newspaper adopts the bad habits of the mainstream media, and publishes a sloppy, hostile-to-students story, it should get called on it, I think.
Yesterday’s Kent State News includes a piece on the aftermath of the local student riot that happened a couple of weeks back, a riot that some have blamed on police misconduct. The title of this story?
“Some incoming freshmen rethinking their decision to attend KSU after riots.”
But there’s a problem — the article doesn’t give any evidence that the headline’s claim is true.
The piece says the mother of incoming student Kayla Will is having second thoughts about Kent State in the wake of the riots, but that Kayla isn’t. “These riots,” the article says, “don’t impact her desire to go to Kent State.”
Another entering student, Leah Friedlander, says her parents “trust me to stay out of harm’s way.” According to the paper, “she has been planning on attending Kent State for pre-pharamacy since her junior year of high school, and the riots didn’t change her decision.”
That’s the total of the interviewing the paper did. Two students, neither of whom is rethinking anything.
And if the university itself is worried, they’re not saying so — they sent out a letter to incoming students to reassure them, one administrator says, but they’ve received only “minimal calls” about the issue.
This article is grounded in the premise that last month’s student rioters harmed the image of Kent State among likely attendees, but the article provides no support for that premise. None.
A yearlong drug investigation at the University of Illinois culminated in more than two dozen arrests last week.
But all the cops found was six ounces of pot and some Xanax.
The UI campus police launched “Operation Thunder Strike” last fall, and the force decided to make “a little bit of a splash” before the end of the semester, according to Lt. Roy Acree. They obtained search warrants and arrest warrants for seventeen people, and swept in on three fraternity houses and several apartments starting last Tuesday.
They made twenty-five arrests, twenty-one of UI students, but Acree said the total haul was “180 grams of cannabis, numerous pieces of drug paraphernalia, cocaine residue, and some Xanax pills.” Cops also confiscated two vehicles, three television sets, two computers, and about three thousand dollars in cash.
Spring classes end tomorrow at UI, and final exams start this Friday.
(The Chronicle of Higher Education swallowed the campus cops’ line on this bust, by the way, but the comment thread on their story is turning into a real doozy.)
studentactivism.net 
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