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Another tidbit for our New York readers:
The New School in Exile will be holding a teach-in at 4 pm today in the lobby of the Parsons building at 13th Street and 5th Avenue.
You can find video from their last teach-in at their website.
Take Back NYU is hosting a community forum tomorrow night at 7 to share “thoughts, criticisms, opinions, and frustrations” on last week’s TBNYU Kimmel building occupation. Here’s the info:
We came, we saw, we occupied. Now what?
Two weeks ago, NYU’s Kimmel Center was occupied for just under 40 hours. Take Back NYU! invites you to a conversation about the issues brought up by the occupation. Bring thoughts, criticisms, opinions, and frustrations to engage in a constructive dialogue about TBNYU!, their tactics, their demands, student activism, and social change.
Sponsored by Take Back NYU!
Thursday, March 5, 2009, 7-9 PM
Vanderbilt Hall, 40 Washington Square South, Room 220
Facebook event: tinyurl.com/talkbacknyu
We’ll be there. If you are too, come say hi.
For the last four years a growing movement of Harvard medical students has been working to expose and limit pharmaceutical companies’ influence on their university.
So they were perturbed, to say the least, when they discovered a representative of the giant drug company Pfizer photographing students participating in an on-campus demonstration on the issue last fall.
Pfizer admits that the photographer was one of their employees, but refuses to release the man’s name, and contends, as the New York Times paraphrased their statement, that he “photographed the students for personal use.”
At least 149 Harvard medical school faculty are on the Pfizer payroll in one way or another, and the company finances two research projects and a continuing medical education program on campus. In addition, Pfizer made donations of $350,000 to the medical school last year.
The pharmaceutical industry is already the subject of a Senate investigation of their influence on American medical schools, and yesterday Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley sent Pfizer a letter saying he was “greatly disturbed” by the the incident, which, he said, “raise[s] concerns that Pfizer is attempting to intimidate young scholars from professing their independent views on issues that they think are critical to science, medicine, and the health and welfare of American taxpayers.”
Grassley asked Pfizer to provide him with an accounting of all payments the company made to Harvard medical faculty since the beginning of 2007, and of all corporate “communications [including photos] regarding Harvard medical students demonstrating and/or agitating against pharmaceutical influence in medicine” since the beginning of 2008.
He gave them a one-week deadline to respond, and a Pfizer representative said on Tuesday that it would “fully cooperate with Senator Grassley’s request for information.”
Last April we passed on word that a student at the University of Portland had been threatened by administrators with disciplinary action after reporting a sexual assault. She and a male student had been drinking at a party in violation of university policy. She told the university he raped her in her dorm room. The university took no action.
A year later, after the student went to the campus newspaper with her story, she got a letter from the university’s judicial co-ordinator saying that the two students’ drinking had made “consent—or lack of consent … difficult to determine,” and that “there are possible violations for which [the complainant] could be charged.”
Today comes word that the university’s sexual assault reporting policies have been revised. The new policy reads as follows:
“To foster the safety and security of the entire community, the University of Portland encourages reporting of all instances of sexual assault. … To remove barriers to reporting, the University will not pursue potential policy violations of the survivor which occurred in the context of the sexual assault. Likewise, the University will not pursue potential policy violations of a person who comes forward to report sexual assault.”
This change brings Portland’s policies in line with Catholic colleges like Gonzaga, Santa Clara and Notre Dame. According to a university administrator, it brings the university’s written policies in line with “the University’s values and practices regarding sexual assault that have been in place for many years.”
Thanks to Inside Higher Ed for the heads-up. New visitors are welcome to follow us on Twitter.
“One of the many upsetting aspects to being in your forties, is hearing people your own age grumbling about “young people” the way we were grumbled about ourselves.”
That’s how British comedian and activist Mark Steel begins his op-ed column on the current wave of British student protest and the dismissive attitude that many people his age take toward the youth of today. It’s a smart, funny piece, and worth a read.
studentactivism.net 
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