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At the end of last year The New School In Exile was the most famous single-campus student activist group in the country. Waging a confrontational campaign against former Senator Bob Kerrey, the New School’s deeply unpopular president, they won concessions from administrators — and major media coverage — by staging an audacious 32-hour occupation of a university building.
As the spring semester got underway, the wind seemed to be at NSIE’s back. In an emergency meeting in February, New School faculty unanimously declared their “strong and continuing … sentiment of no confidence” in Kerrey’s administration. Later that month, NSIE members participated in an NYU sit-in modeled on their own. New York magazine ran a damning portrait of Kerrey as an administrator at sea in the face of an extraordinary student and faculty “insurrection,” and in mid-March an NSIE activist was arrested as he spray-painted “Bye Bob” on the door of Kerrey’s residence.
The spring’s grandest gesture came in the course of the February emergency meeting, when graduate student Geeti Das read a statement from NSIE. The group was calling on Kerrey to resign by April first, she said. “If on that date he has not resigned, we will shut down the functions of the university. We will bring it to a halt.”
Her ultimatum was was reported by the New York Times, as was the applause it received.
April first was yesterday. Kerrey is still in place, and the New School is still functioning. According to the NSIE itself, yesterday passed “more or less without incident.” The group held a few small events yesterday (about which more below), but they engaged in no direct action, and haven’t announced any follow-up.
So what happened?
(This is part one of a four-part series. Part two is here and part three is here.)
Frustrated with students’ use of cell phones in class, a British Columbia high school principal took action last week — he bought a signal jammer online, and plugged it in at his office.
Unfortunately for him, jamming cell phones is illegal under Canadian law.
Principal Steve Gray installed the gizmo on Tuesday. By the end of the day Wednesday rumors of the jammer’s existence were beginning to spread. On Thursday, more than a quarter of Port Hardy Secondary School’s 343 students skipped classes in protest, and on Friday morning Gray took the jammer offline.
“We did our research on the Internet,” said Amber Wright, an eleventh grader who helped organize the student strike. “Breaking the law is not a good way to send a message.”
Students said that their parents use the cell phones to keep in touch with them, and that relaying messages through the school is slow and cumbersome.
Principal Gray told the Toronto Globe and Mail that he himself carries a cell phone at school, but that he only uses it in emergencies.
A big victory for students’ rights: a federal judge has blocked a Pennsylvania prosecutor’s plans to file child pornography charges against three teenage girls who stored suggestive photos of themselves on their cell phones.
Two of the three were wearing opaque bras in the photographs at issue, and the third was topless. None was engaging in sexual activity. The three were among twenty students in Pennsylvania’s Tunkhannock School District who were contacted by the prosecutor after school officials confiscated their cell phones, searched them, and found nude or revealing photos on them.
The prosecutor told the twenty students that they had a choice — they could sign up for an ongoing educational program on “what it means to be a girl in today’s society” and mandatory drug tests, or they could be charged with possession and distribution of child pornography, a felony.
Seventeen of the students signed up for the program. The other three sued. And yesterday a federal judge took their side.
The prosecutor, reached for comment yesterday, refused to say whether he would appeal the judge’s decision.
Here’s another great resource — the National Coalition Against Censorship.
We’ve linked to their blog in our sidebar, but feel free to poke around their main site, too.They’ve got lots of stuff going on, including various projects run through their Youth Free Expression Network.
It was announced over the weekend that administrators at Boston College had vetoed a planned campus appearance by former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers. The student sponsors of the engagement, who included the BC chapter of the College Democrats, were said to be seeking an off-campus venue to move the speech to.
Now comes word that the event will take place on campus as originally planned, though without Ayers in attendance. Ayers will remain in Chicago, where he lives, and speak via satellite hookup to the audience at the college’s Devlin Hall.
His speech, at 6 o’clock this evening, will be open to BC students, faculty, and staff only.
Postscript: A separate Ayers speech in an educational venue has just been cancelled outright. He had been scheduled to give a talk at Naperville North High School in Illinois next week, but his invitation has been withdrawn. A statement from the school district’s superintendent cited “the level of emotion and outrage” that had greeted news of the speech as the reason for the cancellation.
Update: The BC administration nixed the video link, too. Here’s the chief of the campus police, Robert Morse: “It is canceled, there is no telecast. It’s virtually the same thing, it would be viewed by the community as the same thing.” The speech organizers held a forum on academic freedom instead.
Second Update: BC cancelled Ayers’ speech because of alleged links between the Weather Underground and the notorious 1970 murder of Boston police officer Walter Schroeder. But Schroeder was killed in the course of a bank robbery that was intended to fund the Black Panthers, not the Weather Underground, and there is apparently no evidence of any Weather connection to the crime.
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