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I’ll be flying to Croatia in a few days for a three-day symposium on contemporary student activism.
The meeting, “Student Protests of 2009: Methods, Context, and Implications,” (or, in the original Croatian, Studentski Prosvjedi 2009: Metode, Kontekst, I Implikacije) is being sponsored by the Sociology students’ organization at the University of Zagreb, which saw a series of student occupations last spring. The upcoming event grew out of that experience, and out of the broader wave of student activism that’s been sweeping Europe in recent months. (The call for papers can be found here.)
I’ll have more to say about the symposium before it happens, and I’ll be blogging and tweeting about it while it’s going on, but for now here’s the schedule:
Friday
Does the Actual European Bologna strategy Respond to the European Students’ Aspirations?, Guillaume Sylvestre, France
The Struggle to Free Higher Education, Luka Matic, Croatia
Bachelor of Ass, Marcel Mansouri, Germany
Opening Banquet
Saturday
Politics in Education, Adis Sadikovic and Gorica Stevanovic, Bosnia and Herzegovina
From Democracy to Social Issues? Student Protests in Serbia Since the Early 1990s, Dorde Tomic, Germany
American Student Organizing in an Age of Social Networks, Angus Johnston, United States
The Student Protests as a Test for Civic Society, Kristiyan Vladislavov Hristov and Diana Boykova Velcheva, Bulgaria
Transitional Education, Azra Hadzihajdic and Emin Eminagic, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Sunday
Affective Politics, Zdravko Popovic, Croatia
Types of Protest Participants: An Empirical Analysis, panel presentation, Croatia
Croatian Student Protests and Video Cameras: The Importance of Filming as Much As Possible, Igor Bezinovic, Croatia
Short Film
Roundtable Discussion
The three faculty members suspended from Southwestern College after a budget protest two weeks ago returned to their jobs on Thursday, but the situation is far from resolved.
Earlier this week college officials floated the possibility that the profs might face criminal charges as a result of their actions, though police at the scene of the protest made no arrests and the only detailed eyewitness report available indicates that the entire event was peaceful and uneventful.
And yesterday the local blog Save Our Southwestern College reported that formal letters of reprimand are to be placed in each suspended professor’s file.
As SOSC notes, SWC has yet to provide any coherent public account of its seemingly erratic actions in the wake of the protest.
Meanwhile SWC president Raj Chopra, who went on vacation just hours after the suspensions were handed down, remains absent and incommunicado.
In the last two days German students have launched lecture hall occupations at the Universities of Heidelberg, Munster, and Potsdam in solidarity with the Austrian student protests that have been going on for the last two weeks.
The German student demonstrators’ website can be found here. (A Google translation can be found here.)
The site’s name, “unsereunis,” is taken from one of the slogans of the Austrian student movement, and translates as “our universities.” Alongwith #unibrennt, #unsereunis is one of the major Twitter hashtags for the movement.
More news as I get it.
In late September the Student Government Association of the University of North Texas, under heavy pressure from UNT parents and alumni, voted down a bylaw amendment that would have allowed same-sex couples to run for homecoming king and queen.
Now the SGA is letting UNT’s students decide the issue for themselves.
In a 22-1 vote on October 21, the UNT student senate voted to call a student referendum on the bylaw change. Balloting will be conducted online from November 16th through the 20th.
The vote reportedly followed a protest at the SGA one week earlier, at which more than fifty students descended on a meeting chanting pro-equality slogans.
The original proposal to allow same-sex couples in the homecoming court deeply divided the student senate, who rejected it by a vote of 10-5 with 8 abstentions.
Update | Students rejected the proposal to allow same-sex homecoming couples by a margin of 58% to 42%. Thirteen percent of UNT students took part in the referendum.
Inside Higher Ed has a new piece up this morning on the Southwestern College fiasco, bringing the story pretty much up to date. Go check it out.
Also this morning, a source on campus sent me a copy of the latest memo from the administration. It says that hearings for the four suspended (or, to use SWC’s preferred phrasing, withdrawal-of-consent-to-be-on-campused) faculty members have been cancelled at the request of the faculty members involved.
“The Human Resources Deparment,” the memo continues, “is diligently moving to conclude the investigation on this matter in the hopes that it can be resolved and that the three individuals may be returned to campus this week.”
Yet another weird twist in a story composed exclusively of weird twists, in other words. But it gets a little less weird if you look at the text of the law under which the suspensions were authorized.
According to that law, a withdrawal of consent for an individual to be on campus automatically expires after fourteen days, and it cannot be renewed. An individual whose consent has been withdrawn may request a hearing, but the law says nothing about the format of such hearings, who conducts them, or what they are required or empowered to do.
Whether or not “the investigation on this matter … can be resolved” in the next few days, the three suspended professors will be back on campus by the end of the week. The SWC administration’s memo notwithstanding, there’s no “may” about it. On Friday they go back to work.
Assuming that there are no more weird twists, of course.
studentactivism.net 
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