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Police seized the cell phones of the nine students arrested in last week’s anti-sweatshop sit-in at the U of Montana, and have yet to return them.
According to the chief of the UM office of public safety, the phones are evidence — he says “students were using the cell phones, some to take pictures within the building, some to communicate with the rally outside, helping them and facilitating the crime of disorderly conduct.”
Protesters claim that the seizures were intended to disrupt future protests. Ella Torti, a UM sophomore and one of the nine arrestees, told the local newspaper that she believes that the police are “trying to hinder our ability to organize.”
I find this YouTube video of a “Freeze” action at the University of Vermont last Friday interesting for a couple of reasons.
First, I’m fascinated by the connections between contemporary Improv Everywhere style “actions” and pre-internet campus pranks and playfulness, and this blends those traditions in a compelling way.
Second, the freeze commemorated a 1988 administration building takeover — that a protest from that era is what’s being memorialized gives us yet another reminder that today’s activists have far more on their minds than the sixties.
As I noted yesterday, three anti-sweatshop sit-ins have ended in arrests in the last week, but the Chancellor of UNC, where the most recent protest is still ongoing, is taking a different tack, at least for now. When he left his office yesterday evening, he went so far as to clap along with the chanting protesters, and wish them a “nice weekend.”
The Charlotte Observer has made an interesting response to the UNC protest — on Friday it posted an extended excerpt from the US Supreme Court’s 1969 Tinker v. Des Moines decision on its website. Tinker overturned a local school district’s ban on the wearing of black armbands to protest the Vietnam War, and is, as the paper notes, one of the court’s most important students’ rights rulings.
Here’s a quote from the Tinker ruling, snipped from the excerpt posted at the Charlotte Observer site:
In our system, state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism. School officials do not possess absolute authority over their students. Students in school as well as out of school are “persons” under our Constitution. They are possessed of fundamental rights which the State must respect, just as they themselves must respect their obligations to the State. In our system, students may not be regarded as closed-circuit recipients of only that which the State chooses to communicate. They may not be confined to the expression of those sentiments that are officially approved.
The full text of the Tinker decision and an audio file of the oral argument in the case can be found here.
In the wake of a series of campus protests, the administration of the University of Ottawa is circulating a draft code of student conduct that defines a new class of “non-academic” infractions. The last two years have seen an unusual upsurge of activism at Ottawa, with students organizing around issues ranging from “high tuition fees to language rights and campus safety. The most recent protests have concerned the corporatization of the campus and the elimination of “a controversial course on social activism” taught by a physics professor.
The vice president of the Ottawa student government is described as concerned that the university is “trying to push through the code of conduct while students are preoccupied with exams and anticipating the summer break.”
May 24 Update: A follow-up report on the code struggle appears here.
studentactivism.net 
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