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We’ve recently reported on two sexual assault scandals at Tulane University — the school’s failure to investigate allegations of drugging and rape at fraternity parties, and the mild punishment meted out by the campus judiciary to a student it found guilty of committing sexual assault in a dorm.
Today, via SAFER Campus, we have word of two other incidents that took place at Tulane this year.
In October, a male student was allegedly sexually assaulted by a Tulane campus police officer. The officer in question was dismissed from his job, but the administration has made no public statement on the incident or on whether any further steps have been taken. As SAFER Campus notes, federal law mandates that colleges inform the student body when such crimes occur.
In April, a student wrote in the campus newspaper of being assaulted on his way home from a party by assailants who called him a “fag.” The campus police, he says, did not conduct a criminal investigation of the assault, and the university administration failed to offer him any outreach or counseling in the wake of the crime.
SAFER Campus has on these stories — and the other Tulane events we’ve been following — here.
On the heels of the news that Tulane ignored allegations of druggings and possible sexual assaults at a frat party, another disturbing story.
Last July, Tulane student Anna Minkinow brought a complaint against a fellow student for raping her in a Tulane dorm. She chose to pursue the complaint through the university judicial system, which did not hold a hearing for nine months.
When the hearing was finally held in April of this year, Minkinow says, the panel behaved inappropriately and offensively. They found Minkinow’s attacker guilty of sexual misconduct, but rejected her request that he be expelled from the university. Instead they banned him from having contact with her, barred him from entering the dorms, and mandated that he seek counseling.
One day later, she says, he approached her at a campus event. He didn’t speak to her, but he stood in close proximity to her for fifteen minutes.
Not long after that incident Minkinow and a friend staged an impromptu campus protest in which they bound and gagged themselves to symbolize the silencing of rape victims. She has since met with the university’s vice president for student affairs to pursue measures to strengthen the campus’s code of student conduct.
One reform that Minkinow has not yet won support for is a minimum punishment for students found guilty of sexual offenses. Presently, the university provides minimum sentences for only three forms of misconduct: alcohol violation, drug violations and pulling a fire alarm.
Update: More on sexual assaults at Tulane here.
Late Update: We have learned that Minkinow has started a blog.
About two dozen students at Ohio’s Ashland University have staged an overnight sit-in to protest a decision to bar students from take Ancient Greek to fulfill their foreign language requirement.
Ashland does not offer Ancient Greek, but students have the option of taking courses in the language at nearby Ashland Theological Seminary. In mid-April, the college’s faculty senate voted 19-15 that such students will have to take a modern language as well. The question is still under review by Ashland administrators.
Senior Bobby DeSeyn, a protest leader, said in a statement that the faculty senate vote reflected a “blatant de-evolution of academics” and a “disregard for student opinion.”
The sit-in was held at Ashland’s foreign language faculty offices.
An anti-abortion group at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point put up a display of four thousand white crosses on a campus lawn last week, symbolizing the four thousand fetuses that they say are aborted each day. Stevens Point student Roderick King objected to the installation, saying that because abortion is a constitutional right, “you don’t have the right to challenge it. … Do not put this in front of all of us. This is not your right.” He then pulled several hundred of the crosses out of the ground before being convinced to leave peacefully.
This was by all accounts a minor event. Leaders in “Pointers for Life,” the group that put up the crosses, told the Wausau Daily Herald that their displays are often targeted by vandals. But the incident has received wide coverage among conservative blogs and media outlets, in part because King is one of nineteen members of the UWSP student senate.
The prominent conservative legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy described King as a student government official in their story on the incident. Michelle Malkin identified him as a student government senator. Many other sites called him a student government leader or simply a student leader. The group that put up the crosses has called on King to resign or be removed from his student government office.
King has written a letter to the Stevens Point Journal rejecting the calls for his resignation, and saying that he was “not acting in the name of UWSP Student Government Association, but as an individual who believes one person’s right to freedom of speech stops when it infringes on another person’s right to a secular education.”
Twenty international students at the University of Sussex in England have been banned from taking final exams because they have fallen behind in their tuition payments.
More than 150 Sussex students staged a protest against the decision late last week. The president of the university’s student union described the proposed payment schedules and the timing of the university’s action as unreasonable.
The protest follows a successful Facebook campaign on behalf of one of the students, Luqman Onikosi of Nigeria. When Onikosi’s sponsor in England died, he was unable to raise the money to pay the fees himself.
The university recently agreed to allow Onikosi to take his exams and put off payment until September.
Update: A follow-up protest is planned for this Friday, May 9.
studentactivism.net 
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