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I’ll be writing more about the specifics soon, but I’ve got some big plans for Twitter-based activist projects in the works.
If you’re on Twitter, consider following our feed. If you’re not on Twitter yet, you should sign up — amazing people are doing amazing stuff over there.
Last month I wrote about a DA threatening high school students with child porn prosecutions for taking photos of themselves on their cell phones.
Now comes word of another prosecutor abusing his authority in a teen “sexting” case, this time harassing a high school administrator.
The story starts in March 2008: Ting-Yi Oei, an assistant principal in Virginia, is investigating sexting at his school. He confiscates an underwear snap from a student’s cellphone. He can’t identify the person in the photo, so he reports to his principal and closes the investigation.
When he suspends that student for an unrelated offense a couple of weeks later, the student’s mother calls the cops.
Prosecutors investigate, charge him with failure to report child abuse. That charge isn’t going anywhere, because he made a full report to his principal. So they charge him with child pornography. They delay informing him of the charges so they can have him arrested at school on his first day back after summer vacation.
The media run stories, with his photo, saying he’s been arrested for child porn. He’s placed on leave. Television news crews stalk him. Prosecutors press him to resign. He racks up a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in legal bills.
Finally, three weeks ago — even months after his arrest, and nearly a year after Oei first talked to the cops — a judge throws the charges out, finding Oei has broken no laws.
A dispute over a controversial issue of a conservative student newspaper is boiling over at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
The March-April issue of The Minuteman, a right-wing UMass student publication, contained both an investigative article on the budget of a campus group called Student Bridges and an insipid humor piece that ridiculed the appearance of one of that group’s leaders.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has distributed a video in which, it claims, “hundreds of copies of The Minuteman are stolen out of the hands of a student intending to distribute the paper.” The student holding the video does not appear to resist or object when other students take copies of the paper from him, however, and in one of the few clear pieces of audio in the footage a conservative student is heard saying, with amusement, “This is amazing. This is amazing footage, I’ve gotta say.”
Subsequent to that videotaped confrontation, the UMass student government association passed a resolution calling upon the Silent Majority, publishers of The Minuteman, to apologize for what it characterized as “slanderous defamation of character,” and raising the possibility of the suspension of the group’s charter if it didn’t comply.
At the next week’s meeting of the SGA, this past Wednesday, a member of the student government was ejected in the wake of a dispute over whether a second resolution, rescinding the first, could be placed on the agenda.
This story doesn’t look like it’s done yet. Check back for more in the days to come.
The week since the New School occupation has seen a lot of action. There was a protest on Friday night, a roving anarchist happening on Sunday afternoon, an emergency campus assembly on Monday, a courtyard sit-in on Wednesday, and another major street protest on Thursday.
The protesters released a statement on Monday, by the way, and both the New School In Exile website and the occupiers’ blog have been active all week. (Both sites carry the text of a wide variety of statements on the occupation from bodies inside and outside the New School, along with their other coverage.)
And this afternoon some very interesting news came in via Twitter.
The New School provost has announced that all students suspended in last week’s occupation will be allowed “to complete their academic work this semester.” His statement calls this a “modification” of their suspensions, but unless there’s some hidden catch, it sounds very much as if their suspensions have in fact been lifted.
Disciplinary actions against the students are ongoing, and this announcement isn’t an amnesty, by any stretch. But given recent history of the New School’s attitudes toward the occupiers — president Bob Kerrey told the New York Post a week ago that he did not “consider them students” — this is a major shift.
Update: A kind reader has passed along the entire text of the announcement from the provost on the “modification” of the suspensions. (It’s the first comment on this post.) Thanks!
Students and faculty at the University of Texas at Austin are going to walk out of classes at 11:30 this morning and march to the Texas State Capitol in protest of a bill to allow guns on campus.
Today is the second anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre, in which a student shot and killed 32 people before committing suicide.
Under the terms of a bill under consideration in the state legislature, Texas residents with concealed-carry permits would be allowed to bring their weapons onto the campuses of the state’s public universities. The UT student government came out against the law in a lopsided vote earlier this semester.
(Via @thedailytexan on Twitter.)
Friday update: Two hundred students participated in the walkout and rally. The Daily Texan has the story.
studentactivism.net 
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