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Links from the student protest at the New School:
The website and blog of “The New School In Exile,” organizers/participants in the recently ended sit-in and associated actions.
A roundup of media coverage of the protests.
The text of the agreement between the protesters and university president Bob Kerrey.
An essay by one of the protesters on the lessons he learned in the sit-in.
A clip from Brian Lehrer’s talk show on New York public radio, in which he talks with one of the protesters’ media liaisons.
A Flickr slideshow of the protest, and another set of photos. (Several other photosets are up at NYC Indymedia.)
New School president Bob Kerrey’s new blog.
I’ll be keeping an eye out for more resources and links. Feel free to pass additional ones along in comments.
About a week ago, this story made the rounds.
A professor at the University of Michigan answered an ad on craigslist for sexual services placed by a woman who turned out to be a U of M law student. In the course of the encounter that followed, he hit her with a belt and slapped her face. She went to the cops, he claimed it was all consensual. The cops refused to charge him with assault, instead charging them both with misdemeanor offenses relating to the transaction itself, and one local (non-campus) cop made an extremely offensive public comment ridiculing the woman who had been beaten for going to the police.
I didn’t post about the story at the time because I didn’t have much of an angle on it, and because it’s often hard to know what to make of a crime story when it first breaks. It wasn’t clear what action the university was taking, or planning to take, for instance.
But now the law student has spoken out, and her statement is very much worth reading. Here it is.
A new report from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education finds that 74.2 percent of American colleges and universities, and 77 percent of public higher ed institutions, “maintain policies that clearly restrict speech that, outside the borders of campus, is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”
The 28-page report can be found online here.
Edit: As Ashley notes in comments, and as I should have mentioned up front, FAIR is a right-leaning organization. I posted about their report in the spirit of “here’s something to look at” rather than as an endorsement of them as an organization, or even of their report. See my comment below for a little more detail, and look for a longer update at the end of the week.
Back in the spring, Arkansas law professor Richard Peltz brought a defamation lawsuit against two law students who had circulated a letter accusing him of racism in the classroom. At the time, the students’ lawyer argued that a charge of racist behavior, “in the context of public discourse at a law school,” was not grounds for legal action.
Peltz requested and received an investigation of his actions by administrators, and in October the school’s interim dean gave Peltz a letter stating that his investigation had revealed “no evidence that you are or have been a racist … during your employment at the law school.”
Saying that he brought the lawsuit to force the university to take a stand on his behavior, Peltz then dropped the suit and circulated a nine-page memo responding to the charges that had been made against him.
The parents of two Washington State cheerleaders are suing their daughters’ high school for suspending them from the squad after nude photographs of the students began to circulate in the school. The students say that the two photos were distributed inadvertently.
The families charge that school officials allowed staffers to view the photos unnecessarily and that the school should have promptly reported the incident to police as a possible child pornography case.
The lawsuit also contends that the two girls were inappropriately targeted for punishment. It notes that students who may have received or forwarded the photographs, including members of the school’s football team, were not disciplined.
A school official is quoted as saying that “when you sign up to be a cheerleader — or for any student activity — you agree to certain codes of behavior.” “We consider them student leaders,” she continued, “and we want them to be role models.”
I’d want to know more about this particular case before coming to any real conclusions about it, but it does seem to me that distributing a naked picture of a fellow student without permission is a far more serious offense than taking a picture of yourself naked. That fact leaves me sympathetic to the plaintiffs in this suit, and inclined to believe that they’re raising important questions about school policy.
Update: Having done a brief search for additional reporting on this lawsuit, I have to add that I find media outlets’ eagerness to augment their coverage of this story with photographs of cheerleaders — from this high school, in uniform, with their faces blurred out — frankly repulsive.
studentactivism.net 
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