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The University of Vermont student activists who occupied their university’s administration building last week have issued a revised list of demands.
When the activists of Students Stand Up occupied the UVM admin building on Wednesday, they presented the president with thirteen demands, each of which related to budgetary and labor issues. In a news release last night, however, they replaced those thirteen demands with just four.
They call those four demands “the core concerns that are the base of our campaign and our new understanding of what is feasible.”
The first two demands on the new list are substantively the same as the first two on the old list: SSU wants UVM to reverse all dismissals and non-reappointments that it has announced, and cancel all plans for new layoffs. The third new demand is in essence the same as the eleventh from the original list — SSU wants “a democratic process by which students, staff, and faculty have decisive roles in decisions regarding the budget.”
(We’ll get back to that third demand in a subsequent post. It’s a big one, and an important one.)
The fourth demand is a revised version of the eighth demand on the old list — SSU is calling for administrative compensation at UVM to be cut, in order to “save as many positions as possible.” Instead of firing faculty and staff, in other words, make administrators take a pay cut.
There’s a fifth demand in their new statement, though it’s not included in the numbered list. They want UVM President Daniel Fogel to resign. By calling in police to arrest demonstrators last Wednesday instead of talking with them in good faith, they say, Fogel acted in a “disturbing and callous” way. Because of that lack of respect for dialogue and university community, they say, “we are issuing a call for his immediate resignation.”
For updates on Students Stand Up’s next moves, check out their Twitter feed. Also very much worth reading is this SSU member’s dissection of a budget memo released by UVM’s vice president on Friday.
In an article on the weekend’s student rioting at Kent State, the Associated Press makes the following claim:
“It was the first clash between Kent State students and police since 1970, when four students were killed by Ohio National Guard troops during a campus protest of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia.”
Ouch. That’s really really not true.
First, as Kent State’s student newspaper reported in the fifth paragraph of its article on the weekend riots, 81 Kent students were arrested when Halloween parties in and around the campus got out of hand last year. That’s less than six months ago.
Also, as the AP itself notes, the 1970 “clash” wasn’t between students and police, since National Guard troops aren’t cops. Finally, there have been lots of student protests where students clashed with cops at Kent State since 1970 — a two-minute Google turned up this page about a series of 1977 protests on campus that led to about two hundred arrests.
Student protest and student rowdiness are both common on American campuses — they were common before the sixties, and they’ve been common since. An AP reporter really shouldn’t have to be told this.
Update: Dear Volokh Conspiracy, if you’re going to make the title of a blog post a question, you really should enable comments.
Student parties turned into riots at two American colleges last night.
At the University of Minnesota, an off-campus student party associated with the campus’s Spring Jam got rowdy when a fire was built in the middle of a street. Bottles and rocks were reportedly thrown at police, who retaliated with tear gas, pepper spray, and “foam rounds.”
Here’s commenter Sun from the Minnesota Daily website with a first-hand perspective:
“I wouldn’t call this a riot as much as a large get-together that was slightly out of hand. People were not hurting each other or raiding houses. There was a strong communal understanding of respect, however, there was some bottle smashing and fire starting. If you were there you know what I’m trying to get at … the majority of the activity was allotted to mere standing and conversing with occasional sing-a-longs.”
Standing and conversing with occasional sing-a-longs, bottle smashing, and fire starting. Got it.
Only four people were arrested in the UM incident, but KentNewsNet is reporting that police made 125 arrests in the course of an off-campus confrontation at Kent State. There, participants suggest that the party turned into a riot because of police action.
I’ve just added Age of Reason, the National Youth Rights Association blog, to the blogroll. Enjoy!
Xavier University, the nation’s only historically black Catholic college, has invited Donna Brazile to speak at their commencement, but the Archbishop of New Orleans says he won’t be there.
Brazile, the campaign manager of Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign — and a one-time student activist with the United States Student Association — is a black Catholic, and a native of the New Orleans area. But she’s also pro-choice, and that’s not sitting well with Archbishop Alfred Hughes.
studentactivism.net 
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