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A dispute over a controversial issue of a conservative student newspaper is boiling over at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
The March-April issue of The Minuteman, a right-wing UMass student publication, contained both an investigative article on the budget of a campus group called Student Bridges and an insipid humor piece that ridiculed the appearance of one of that group’s leaders.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has distributed a video in which, it claims, “hundreds of copies of The Minuteman are stolen out of the hands of a student intending to distribute the paper.” The student holding the video does not appear to resist or object when other students take copies of the paper from him, however, and in one of the few clear pieces of audio in the footage a conservative student is heard saying, with amusement, “This is amazing. This is amazing footage, I’ve gotta say.”
Subsequent to that videotaped confrontation, the UMass student government association passed a resolution calling upon the Silent Majority, publishers of The Minuteman, to apologize for what it characterized as “slanderous defamation of character,” and raising the possibility of the suspension of the group’s charter if it didn’t comply.
At the next week’s meeting of the SGA, this past Wednesday, a member of the student government was ejected in the wake of a dispute over whether a second resolution, rescinding the first, could be placed on the agenda.
This story doesn’t look like it’s done yet. Check back for more in the days to come.
British student activists are holding a “National Student Co-ordination” meeting today in London.
This winter saw a wave of university occupations sweep across the UK, most of them engaged with conditions in in Gaza. Today’s meeting is intended to co-ordinate that ongoing organizing as well as to “broaden out the movement to include other struggles and post-occupation activities.”
The NSC’s website/blog is here. There’s also a Facebook event page, and the blog of the student occupation at the London School of Economics has a feed for info from other UK student activist groups. Check back with all three sites for more news going forward.
The week since the New School occupation has seen a lot of action. There was a protest on Friday night, a roving anarchist happening on Sunday afternoon, an emergency campus assembly on Monday, a courtyard sit-in on Wednesday, and another major street protest on Thursday.
The protesters released a statement on Monday, by the way, and both the New School In Exile website and the occupiers’ blog have been active all week. (Both sites carry the text of a wide variety of statements on the occupation from bodies inside and outside the New School, along with their other coverage.)
And this afternoon some very interesting news came in via Twitter.
The New School provost has announced that all students suspended in last week’s occupation will be allowed “to complete their academic work this semester.” His statement calls this a “modification” of their suspensions, but unless there’s some hidden catch, it sounds very much as if their suspensions have in fact been lifted.
Disciplinary actions against the students are ongoing, and this announcement isn’t an amnesty, by any stretch. But given recent history of the New School’s attitudes toward the occupiers — president Bob Kerrey told the New York Post a week ago that he did not “consider them students” — this is a major shift.
Update: A kind reader has passed along the entire text of the announcement from the provost on the “modification” of the suspensions. (It’s the first comment on this post.) Thanks!
Turns out I missed the exact anniversary — it was on Tuesday — but it’s been one year since studentactivism.net went live. In honor of that milestone, here’s a list of the site’s top ten search terms ever and the posts that inspired them…
10: sds wiki
Back in January I wrote about a very cool wiki that Students for Democratic Society had set up. Unfortunately, the wiki hasn’t been functioning for a while, but I’m hoping they’ll bring it back online soon.
9: obama youth ball
I wrote six stories in January about the Obama youth inaugural ball, covering controversies over the event’s logistics and message, as well as the decision to sell exclusive television rights to MTV.
8: bill ayers
Former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers’ name pops up on the site with some regularity, but most of the search traffic he’s received here came because of a post about someone else — student activist and antiwar radical David Ifshin, who became a friend of John McCain’s after the war ended.
7: self-entitled college students
This search is for references to a recent journal article that purported to find a strong “sense of entitlement” among American students. The article has major flaws, some of which I’ve discussed here and here. (And yes, I’ve got a third post on the article planned. I’ll write it eventually.)
6: julea ward
Julea Ward’s prominence on this list, just a week after I wrote about her, is a testament not only to public interest in her lawsuit against Eastern Michigan University, but also to the effect of including an easily Googlable name in the title of a post.
5: new school in exile
Eighteen posts so far on these New York City activists, and I’m working on another.
4: tulane rape
I’ve posted on three different stories relating to sexual violence at Tulane — the university’s failure to investigate charges made by the student government relating to druggings and possible rapes at one fraternity’s parties, the mild punishment the university meted out to a student accused of committing rape in the Tulane dorms, and a case in which a student claimed he’d been sexually assaulted by a campus police officer.
3: hillary clinton
Last May I posted about Secretary Clinton’s relationship to the campus radicalism of the 1960s, and in December I wrote about some parallels between the story of an Obama speechwriter’s groping of a life size Clinton cut-out and that of a campus prank that took place a hundred years earlier.
2: york university strike
Although few US citizens noticed at the time, one of Canada’s largest universities was shut down for three months this winter by the third-longest higher education strike in Canada’s history. Many of the strikers were graduate students, and undergraduates were active in organizing both in support of and in opposition to the strike, so it was a natural story for this site.
1: student activism
That’s what we’re here for. Thanks for a great year.
Students and faculty at the University of Texas at Austin are going to walk out of classes at 11:30 this morning and march to the Texas State Capitol in protest of a bill to allow guns on campus.
Today is the second anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre, in which a student shot and killed 32 people before committing suicide.
Under the terms of a bill under consideration in the state legislature, Texas residents with concealed-carry permits would be allowed to bring their weapons onto the campuses of the state’s public universities. The UT student government came out against the law in a lopsided vote earlier this semester.
(Via @thedailytexan on Twitter.)
Friday update: Two hundred students participated in the walkout and rally. The Daily Texan has the story.
studentactivism.net 
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