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Students at Anderson University in Indiana aren’t allowed to drink. Not even off campus. Not even if they’re twenty-one. Not even if they’re twenty-one and off campus.
So the day before yesterday a few of them staged an act of civil disobedience.
About twenty-five students left morning chapel services on Tuesday and walked as a group to Kroakerheads, a bar about a mile from campus. (They arrived there at about 10:30, half an hour before Kroakerheads usually opens, but they’d called ahead and asked the staff to open early.)
They entered the bar. Some ordered beers, some ordered sodas, some didn’t order anything. All were in violation of Anderson student regulations, however — the rules bar not just drinking, but also being in the presence of others who are drinking.
The protest was staged by a student group called Students for a Democratic AU. One protest organizer, Caleb Fletcher, said it was not merely about the alcohol policy, but also “how the student body, as part of the institution, has been left out of policy decisions and the decision-making process.”
According to the Anderson student handbook, disciplinary sanctions for first-offenses relations to drinking include probation, medical evaluation, notification of parents, and “educational assignment/follow-up treatment.” Sanctions for second offenses include all of the above plus a fine and loss of privileges, with suspension or expulsion for third offenses.
An Anderson security employee observed and photographed the protest, and a university spokesman told the Associated Press that the university would follow its standard disciplinary process in dealing with the students who participated.
Anderson’s student government held a forum on the alcohol policies last night, and about two hundred of the university’s 2700 students attended. At the forum, Anderson’s president, James Edwards, defended the regulations, noting that they have been in place since the university opened in 1917.
Edwards did open the door a crack to a relaxing of the rules, saying that there may eventually be changes regarding “how the community and our expectations are enforced.” Others noted that other restrictions on social activities At Anderson have recently been lifted, including bans on playing cards and holding hands.
The university’s ban on dancing was lifted in 2007.
A fifth grade class in Murfreesboro, TN learned about the civil rights movement this month by staging a protest march … against junk food.
Here’s the meat of the article:
After a two-week lesson on civil rights, the students picked their own issue, eating healthy and exercise, and marched in protest.
Parent Belinda Pate said she thought it was a good way to get the history lesson across, plus healthy eating a exercise are “what us parents are always trying to protest with our kids.”
The teachers also had the students wear different colored T-shirts – either red, green or blue – and treated the groups differently depending on what color they wore.
For example on the way to the protest, red-shirted students had to sit in the back of the bus, blue-shirts sat in the middle and weren’t allowed to talk, and green-shirts could sit in the front of the bus and talk all they wanted, student Asha Phillips explained.
The teachers also made different groups use different bathrooms at school.
This kind of thing leaves me deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, it’s great to see kids learning about activism and organizing in school, and being encouraged to think of themselves as potential activists.
On the other hand…
If you think about what would have happened if the “protest” had been about a controversial subject — gay teachers, say, or prayer in the schools — you see just how problematic the exercise is. Because you really couldn’t do an event like that. Whatever position the class adopted would be offensive to somebody’s parent, and probably go against the values of at least a few of the kids. This “protest” was only possible because it wasn’t the contemporary equivalent of a civil rights march. And that’s not even getting into the whole t-shirt thing.
I don’t want to get off on too much of a rant here. I’m sure these teachers meant well, and I give them credit for trying to bring this particular moment in history alive. But teaching about social justice movements is hard. It’s challenging. If you make it easy, you’re probably doing it wrong.
Anyway, that’s my reaction. What’s yours?
The sixth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War was marked on Saturday by a 5000-person Washington march, smaller by an order of magnitude than the last antiwar march on DC two years ago.
Calling the protest “a congregation of the radical Left,” The Sitch examines the splintered state of antiwar organizing today, and explores the decision by liberal groups to sit this march out.
“Autonomy is hard for some people to understand. It is only possible to understand when you don’t have it.”
–Anonymous UC Berkeley student, circa 1969. (Quoted in Right On: A Documentary of Student Protest, by Maryl Levine and John Naisbitt.)
Students at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur pelted the home of the Institute’s director with stones and overturned his car yesterday after the death of a student who had been seen at the Institute’s hospital.
The student, Rohit Kumar, went to the B C Roy Hospital on campus complaining of a headache, and was given pain pills and released. On his way back to the hostel he lived in, he collapsed. According to one report, the hospital then took two hours to arrange for an ambulance to transfer him to a better-equipped facility, and did not provide a medical professional to accompany him on the trip. Kumar deteriorated in transit, and was pronounced dead on arrival at Midnapore General Hospital.
The B C Roy Hospital has long been criticized as inadequate by members of the IIT Kharagpur community, and as news of Kumar’s death spread on campus, more than a thousand students gathered at the home of Institute director Damodar Acharya to express their anger. The crowd vandalized Acharya’s house and overturned his car before forcing him to sign a letter of resignation from the university.
The university announced on Monday that it would be authorizing an external inquiry into Kumar’s death. Updates on the story are being posted to Twitter with the hashtag #iitdeath.
studentactivism.net 
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