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A hundred students and faculty sat in silence outside last Thursday’s meeting of the College of DuPage board of trustees — some with black tape covering their mouths — to protest the far-reaching changes in university governance the board has proposed.
Glenn Hansen, president of the College of DuPage Faculty Association, said the proposals “usurp” the legitimate powers of other campus constituencies, and threaten the college’s accreditation.
Carol Elliott, Treasurer of New Hampshire’s Grafton County, was defeated in a bid for re-election this month by a twenty-year-old Dartmouth undergrad. And she’s not happy about it.
Elliott, a Republican who lost by five hundred votes to Democrat Vanessa Sievers, a Dartmouth junior, told a local newspaper that “it was the brainwashed college kids that made the difference” in the election. “I’m concerned for the citizens of Grafton County,” she said. “You’ve got a teenybopper for a treasurer.”
Sievers, a history and geography major, has experience as a bookkeeper and had worked on various New Hampshire political campaigns before running for office herself.
Elliott said she’s considering a run for the NH state legislature, so that she can “change the law” that allows college students to run for public office.
“Simpson said the movement was sparked by conversations among several members of Princeton’s performing groups.”
The nine members of the American River College student government who voted to endorse California’s anti- same-sex marriage Proposition 8 have survived the recall vote that attempted to remove them from office.
The vote in the recall election was nearly seven times as high as the vote that brought the student government to office — 3,531 votes, as opposed to about five hundred — but still amounted to only nine percent of the ARC student body. Each of the student government members received about 53-54% of the vote in the recall.
With the presidential election shaping up as an Obama blowout in California this year, the biggest issue on the November ballot there is Proposition 8, a measure that would overturn the state court’s recent ruling in favor of same-sex marriage.
Polls show California voters equally divided on Prop 8, and the campaign is dividing the students at American River College (ARC), a Sacramento-area community college, as well.
On September 30, the ARC student government voted 8-3 to endorse Proposition 8, and anti-8 students immediately set to work gathering signatures for a recall election to remove the pro-8 representatives from office. The recall election was held earlier this week, and votes are still being counted.
The recall highlights low voter turnout in student government elections. According to one source, only 300 students voted in the last election at ARC, a college of over 37,000 students.
Five of the representatives facing recall are Christian students from the former Soviet Union, and controversy has arisen over dual-language flyers distributed during the recall effort on behalf of those students.
One blogger had the Russian text of a flyer translated, and found that where the English-language side of the handout asked “Does responding to Student requests by passing a resolution endorsing Prop 8 (Marriage Protection Amendment) make them ‘incompetent’ or unqualified for Office?”, the Russian-language side bore this message:
Stop homosexuals! They want to silence the voices of the believers and the Slavs in our college and they want to take the light from everyone who supports marriages!
studentactivism.net 
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