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The entire editorial staff of the Oregon Daily Emerald, the University of Oregon student newspaper, went on strike yesterday morning.
The background to the strike is somewhat convoluted, but it has its origins in a power struggle between the paper’s student staff and its board of directors, a body that includes students, faculty, and others. In recent weeks, the board has moved to hire a non-student “publisher” to oversee the paper’s operations, and the process of filling the position has left the staff believing that their editorial independence has been compromised.
At a board meeting on Tuesday night, the Emerald staff demanded that the board rescind a job offer made to a candidate for publisher last month, that it open up a national search to fill the position, that it bar anyone who serves as publisher from being simultaneously employed by the university, and that it establish the publisher and the paper’s editor as “equals in the organization,” rather than granting the publisher supervisory power as the board had planned.
After the meeting, board chair Jeanne Long sent editor-in-chief Ashley Chase an email declaring that the board would not “be bullied and blackmailed,” and that an acceptance of the demands “would essentially dissolve the structure of the corporation.” At six o’clock the next morning the staff published what it said was “the last edition of the Emerald we will publish until the board meets the four demands,” and declared itself on strike.
The university’s student government, which provides a portion of the paper’s funding, has released a statement in support of the staffers’ demands, and the Emerald website reports that the board and staff will be meeting on Thursday morning in an attempt to resolve the dispute.
Update: The striking staff of the Emerald has a blog up. As they note, the newspaper’s board has published a non-student edition of the Emerald this morning, with editorial content drawn almost exclusively from the AP wire. We’ll be following this story as it develops, both here and on our twitter feed.
March 6 update: The Emerald staff has ended their strike, and is going into mediation with the board.
Four pieces of news this morning in the student campaign against Russell Athletic:
- The University of Montana has become the 20th campus to cut ties with Russell. In a letter to the company, UM Executive Vice President Jim Foley said, “We believe that your actions constitute a violation of our vendor code of conduct, which we implemented together with faculty, students and staff on our campus and we expect as a licensee for you to uphold.”
- Students in England protested Russell at the UK headquarters of RA’s parent company, Fruit of the Loom, on Tuesday. One group of protesters staged a die-in as others dressed as the “Fruit of Doom” mock-trampled them.
- In an effort to blunt the effect of United Students Against Sweatshops’ Rein In Russell blog, which is located at reininrussell.blogspot.com, Russell Athletic has apparently purchased the domain reininrussell.com, which it is operating as a mirror of its “Social Responsibility Resource Site.”
- Russell’s critics have found their way to the Russell Athletic facebook fan page.
May 1 Update: FIFTY-SEVEN campuses. Wow!
Another tidbit for our New York readers:
The New School in Exile will be holding a teach-in at 4 pm today in the lobby of the Parsons building at 13th Street and 5th Avenue.
You can find video from their last teach-in at their website.
Take Back NYU is hosting a community forum tomorrow night at 7 to share “thoughts, criticisms, opinions, and frustrations” on last week’s TBNYU Kimmel building occupation. Here’s the info:
We came, we saw, we occupied. Now what?
Two weeks ago, NYU’s Kimmel Center was occupied for just under 40 hours. Take Back NYU! invites you to a conversation about the issues brought up by the occupation. Bring thoughts, criticisms, opinions, and frustrations to engage in a constructive dialogue about TBNYU!, their tactics, their demands, student activism, and social change.
Sponsored by Take Back NYU!
Thursday, March 5, 2009, 7-9 PM
Vanderbilt Hall, 40 Washington Square South, Room 220
Facebook event: tinyurl.com/talkbacknyu
We’ll be there. If you are too, come say hi.
For the last four years a growing movement of Harvard medical students has been working to expose and limit pharmaceutical companies’ influence on their university.
So they were perturbed, to say the least, when they discovered a representative of the giant drug company Pfizer photographing students participating in an on-campus demonstration on the issue last fall.
Pfizer admits that the photographer was one of their employees, but refuses to release the man’s name, and contends, as the New York Times paraphrased their statement, that he “photographed the students for personal use.”
At least 149 Harvard medical school faculty are on the Pfizer payroll in one way or another, and the company finances two research projects and a continuing medical education program on campus. In addition, Pfizer made donations of $350,000 to the medical school last year.
The pharmaceutical industry is already the subject of a Senate investigation of their influence on American medical schools, and yesterday Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley sent Pfizer a letter saying he was “greatly disturbed” by the the incident, which, he said, “raise[s] concerns that Pfizer is attempting to intimidate young scholars from professing their independent views on issues that they think are critical to science, medicine, and the health and welfare of American taxpayers.”
Grassley asked Pfizer to provide him with an accounting of all payments the company made to Harvard medical faculty since the beginning of 2007, and of all corporate “communications [including photos] regarding Harvard medical students demonstrating and/or agitating against pharmaceutical influence in medicine” since the beginning of 2008.
He gave them a one-week deadline to respond, and a Pfizer representative said on Tuesday that it would “fully cooperate with Senator Grassley’s request for information.”
studentactivism.net 
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