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Students at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur pelted the home of the Institute’s director with stones and overturned his car yesterday after the death of a student who had been seen at the Institute’s hospital.
The student, Rohit Kumar, went to the B C Roy Hospital on campus complaining of a headache, and was given pain pills and released. On his way back to the hostel he lived in, he collapsed. According to one report, the hospital then took two hours to arrange for an ambulance to transfer him to a better-equipped facility, and did not provide a medical professional to accompany him on the trip. Kumar deteriorated in transit, and was pronounced dead on arrival at Midnapore General Hospital.
The B C Roy Hospital has long been criticized as inadequate by members of the IIT Kharagpur community, and as news of Kumar’s death spread on campus, more than a thousand students gathered at the home of Institute director Damodar Acharya to express their anger. The crowd vandalized Acharya’s house and overturned his car before forcing him to sign a letter of resignation from the university.
The university announced on Monday that it would be authorizing an external inquiry into Kumar’s death. Updates on the story are being posted to Twitter with the hashtag #iitdeath.
The last few months have seen a wave of campus organizing in Britain, with students at more than two dozen colleges and universities staging protests and sit-ins. Now student organizers are calling for a national meeting of campus activists to discuss where the new movement goes next.
Here’s a write-up of the meeting plans from the group’s Facebook page:
After the wave of occupations against Israel’s war on Gaza and the national demonstration against fees; as Vice Chancellors and the government declare their intention to double fees; as cuts and redundancies rip through our campuses; and as the NUS fails to relate to any of these issues or give leadership to students – it’s clear that the student movement is at a turning point.
The thousands of students who are being drawn into campaigns need to co-ordinate our actions nationally: we need a national, fighting student movement!
A group of activists from the university occupations, student union officers and activists from a range of groups including Education Not for Sale have called a national meeting on the 18th of April to discuss the way forward and co-ordinate our actions.
We will hear speakers from the student movements in Europe and a speaker from the UK workers’ movement – but this meeting won’t be about listening to endless top table speakers: we want an open discussion from the floor, between student activists, to decide on what to do next and hopefully create a permanent co-ordination, network or federation of fighting student unions and activists.
We want the organising process to be open and transparent – all are welcome to take part! Get in touch
at studentcoordination@gmail.com studentcoordination@googlegroups.com
Watch this space for updates; and check the blog: http://studentcoordination.wordpress.com/
April 10 update: This morning at five o’clock New School students occupied a building on campus. Follow that story here.
Spring break ends tomorrow at the New School, a New York City university that has seen ongoing student protest in recent months. Two recent messages from The New School In Exile, the group behind many of the recent demonstrations, suggest that the next few weeks are likely to be lively ones.
That New School In Exile is planning more protest has long been a given. In February they announced that they would shut down the New School if university president Bob Kerrey didn’t resign by April 1.
As of today, Kerrey is still in office with just ten days left on the clock.
In an open letter posted to their website early this morning, NSIE declared that a loose group of thirty to sixty students has been meeting regularly this semester to prepare for April 1. The letter says their grievances can only be “addressed … through the removal of those who have systematically obstructed channels of reform,” and calls the April first deadline “an opportunity for all students to come together and take back their university.”
Just hours before spring break began, an NSIE activist was arrested for allegedly spray-painting “Bye Bob” on the door of Kerrey’s Greenwich Village residence. A message that appeared on the NSIE blog shortly after that arrest declared that “the New School and any other forms of authoritarian structure imposed upon us … will never jeopardize our movement through crack-downs and other inhospitable actions.”
“We will win,” it continued, “because We stand together no matter what befalls us … you can punish us as individuals as much as you like, but you cannot break our collective will!”
Stay tuned.
March 30 update: Still no action, but a new post on their website promises that April 1 will be a day to remember.
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.”
A Vietnamese university has cancelled a 19% tuition hike in response to student protest.
Students arrived at Hong Bang University in Ho Chi Minh City on Wednesday morning to discover that their fees for the upcoming semester had been raised with no notice. Several hundred of them rallied all day in 95-degree heat at the university gates, snarling local traffic.
College officials met with student representatives at the end of the day, and emerged with an agreement to drop the tuition increase.
The increase was announced at a time of rising unemployment in Vietnam, as the worldwide economic crisis depresses the country’s exports.
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