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An interesting article from the Kansas City Star on what colleges tell (and don’t tell) families about students’ underage drinking violations.
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) limits what universities can do with information about students, but it gives campuses broad discretion in some areas. The Star explores the question of what universities do, and should, tell students’ families when a student violates drinking rules.
The United States Supreme Court will hear arguments next month in the case of a 13-year-old eighth grader who was strip-searched in 2003 by school officials who were searching her for ibuprofen.
An appeals court ruled last year that the search violated Savana Redding’s constitutional rights, as well as “any known principle of human dignity,” but the ruling was a split decision. The Supreme Court will also be faced with the question of whether Redding has the right to sue the assistant principal who ordered the search.
Redding is now an undergraduate at Eastern Arizona College, majoring in psychology.
“Autonomy is hard for some people to understand. It is only possible to understand when you don’t have it.”
–Anonymous UC Berkeley student, circa 1969. (Quoted in Right On: A Documentary of Student Protest, by Maryl Levine and John Naisbitt.)
Spanish police on Wednesday forcibly evicted a hundred Barcelona University students from a campus building they had been occupying for 118 days. The removal, and a student-police clash that followed, are said to have resulted in eighty injuries and the arrest of nineteen students.
The students were protesting the Barcelona Plan, a European Union initiative for the internationalization of higher education that they fear will lead to reduced funding and increased corporate influence over higher education.
Journalists demonstrated outside a regional government building on Friday, saying that police had beaten some thirty photographers covering the disturbances. A government investigation of the police violence has been launched.
One journalist at the Friday protest carried a sign that read “Police don’t beat on me, I’m working.”
It’s been almost two weeks since the University of North Carolina became the twenty-first campus this year to break with Russell Athletic over labor violations. No other schools have dumped Russell since then, but the campaign against the apparel manufacturer is still going strong.
A few highlights of the last two weeks’ organizing:
- Activists at the University of Minnesota are building on their victory there — now that UM has axed Russell, they’re pressing for the university to join the Worker Rights Consortium’s Designated Suppliers Program.
- Villanova University’s athletics program has announced a temporary freeze in purchasing from Russell while they investigate the situation, and the campus newspaper published an editorial last Thursday calling on the university to break with Russell permanently.
- A member of Kansas University Students Against Sweatshops wrote an op-ed for the Daily Kansan urging KU to cut its Russell ties.
- The Student Coalition Against Labor Exploitation held a Russell Athletics teach-in at the University of Southern California.
- Campus activists attended last Friday’s Associated Students UCLA meeting to press the case for dumping Russell.
Meanwhile, Russell Athletic is inviting the presidents of the colleges and universities that have cut their ties with the company to visit Honduras on an RA-hosted “fact-finding trip.”
March 20 Update: USAS is tweeting that the Montana State University Bozeman has become the 22nd campus to drop Russell in 2009. Also, there’s a major story on the campaign going out over the AP wire. Also, USAS reports that MSU-Bozeman and Santa Clara University have both dumped Russell. That makes 23 campuses.
May 1 Update: Boston College and the University of California make FIFTY-SEVEN campuses. Wow.
studentactivism.net 
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