You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Campus Protests’ category.
10:20 pm: Students at the University of Vermont (UVM) are sitting in at the university president’s office, protesting budget cuts. Some arrests were made earlier today, more possible at any time.
I’m still getting up to speed with this story, and following it primarily on Twitter. Check out the @studentactivism feed for updates.
10:50 pm update: Multiple reports on Twitter suggest mass arrests going on at the sit-in. I’m not going to try to cover this minute-by-minute, since info is so sketchy right now. I’ll post again tonight if I get anything major and unambiguous, though, and I’ll have a full write-up in the morning.
Midnight update: The building has been cleared, with about 30 students arrested. One report says all but one were processed and released. Hundreds of students were outside the building supporting the arrested protesters as they were let go. A rally is planned at the university library tomorrow at noon.
10:00 am update: The morning follow-up post is up.
On April 22, 1969, hundreds of black and Latino students at New York’s City College took over seventeen campus buildings demanding reforms in the university’s treatment of students and faculty of color.
They shut down the university for two weeks, and their protests — which continued throughout the spring — led directly to the establishment of open admissions at the City University of New York a year later.
Open admissions nearly doubled the size of CUNY, and transformed the university forever. (It also helped open the door to the implementation of tuition in the system for the first time six years later.)
Today, students at City College will mark the anniversary with a 2 o’clock walkout in protest of budget cuts and tuition increases.
The Peoria, Arizona Unified School District will let gay eighth grader Chris Quintanilla wear a “Rainbows Are Gay” wristband to school.
As we reported last month, Quintanilla’s principal instructed him to remove the wristband when he saw him wearing it in a school hallway.
The wristband ban was apparently part of a larger pattern of behavior on the principal’s part. According to Quintanilla’s mother Natali, when she expressed concern that her son was being harassed at school for being gay, the principal told her that he wouldn’t be a target “if he didn’t put it out there the way he does.”
But the ACLU is now claiming victory, saying that the district “has assured the American Civil Liberties Union that it will no longer prevent [Quintanilla] from wearing [the] wristband at school.”
The district, for its part, says the whole thing was just a big misunderstanding. Why it took them more than a month to clear it up remains unclear.
Kevin Bondelli of the Young Democrats is exploring what he calls the Progressive Youth Movement in what he says “will most likely be a large series” of blogposts “entitled ‘Lessons from Sociopolitical Movements.'” It’s an exciting project, and I’m looking forward to seeing where he takes it.
I do, though, have some questions.
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.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments