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Kristen Juras, the University of Montana law professor who has been campaigning to force the UM Kaimin to dump its sex advice column, appeared at a campus forum with the Kaimin‘s editor last night.
Juras called student activity fee support for the paper “government” funding, and described that funding as “a privilege.” She has in the past threatened to intervene with the university’s trustees or even the Montana state legislature to attempt to get that privilege withdrawn.
At last night’s forum, Juras said that any Kaimin sex column should be written by a “sexologist,” though she acknowledged, when pressed, that other student columns — such as those on religion — do not require such “expertise.”
Kaimin editor Bill Oram defended the column’s lackadaisical tone. “We’ll stop talking casually about sex when students stop having sex casually,” he said. “We’ll stop talking about sex in a fun way when sex stops being fun.”
Juras took a less lighthearted stance. “I’m not opposed to sex,” she said at one point. “I’m happily married and it’s an important part of our relationship.”
Hans and Sophie Scholl have long been student activist heroes of mine. The Scholls were members of the White Rose, a tiny group of German opponents of the Nazi regime. Hans was a veteran, and he and his sister were both students at the University of Munich, where they were caught scattering pamphlets on February 18, 1943. Four days later the two were tried, convicted, and guillotined, along with their friend and ally Christoph Probst, a 23-year-old father of three.
Google Alerts sent me a link to a new article on the White Rose this morning, and I figured I’d pass it along.
According to the Times of India, students at the Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University in Lucknow staged a march on campus yesterday to complain about one of their professors.
The marchers carried signs and chanted slogans accusing Kamal Jaiswal, head of the department of applied animal science, of sexual harassment, soliciting bribes, and “asking students to visit his place and work as his domestic help.”
According to the article, their complaints led the university’s vice chancellor to suspend the professor and launch an internal inquiry into their charges.
I’ve been meaning to update the list of blogs, organizations, and other student activism resources over on the left for a while now, so here’s the first installment:
The Campus Antiwar Network launched a new website in late January. The front page serves as a blog, and the site includes a contact list for CAN’s various working groups and many of its chapters, along with a forum and a resource page that are still getting off the ground. The website also links to the Wikipedia entry on the group, which is a real resource itself.
Check it out.
“Student power is not so much something we are fighting for, as it is something we must have in order to gain specific objectives. Then what are the objectives? What is our program? There is much variety and dispute on these questions. But there is one thing that seems clear. However the specific forms of our immediate demands and programs may vary, the long-range goal and the daily drive that motivates and directs us is our intense longing for our liberation. In short, what the student power movement is about is freedom.”
–Carl Davidson, National Secretary, Students for a Democratic Society, 1967.
studentactivism.net 
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