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We’ve recently reported on two sexual assault scandals at Tulane University — the school’s failure to investigate allegations of drugging and rape at fraternity parties, and the mild punishment meted out by the campus judiciary to a student it found guilty of committing sexual assault in a dorm.
Today, via SAFER Campus, we have word of two other incidents that took place at Tulane this year.
In October, a male student was allegedly sexually assaulted by a Tulane campus police officer. The officer in question was dismissed from his job, but the administration has made no public statement on the incident or on whether any further steps have been taken. As SAFER Campus notes, federal law mandates that colleges inform the student body when such crimes occur.
In April, a student wrote in the campus newspaper of being assaulted on his way home from a party by assailants who called him a “fag.” The campus police, he says, did not conduct a criminal investigation of the assault, and the university administration failed to offer him any outreach or counseling in the wake of the crime.
SAFER Campus has on these stories — and the other Tulane events we’ve been following — here.
On the heels of the news that Tulane ignored allegations of druggings and possible sexual assaults at a frat party, another disturbing story.
Last July, Tulane student Anna Minkinow brought a complaint against a fellow student for raping her in a Tulane dorm. She chose to pursue the complaint through the university judicial system, which did not hold a hearing for nine months.
When the hearing was finally held in April of this year, Minkinow says, the panel behaved inappropriately and offensively. They found Minkinow’s attacker guilty of sexual misconduct, but rejected her request that he be expelled from the university. Instead they banned him from having contact with her, barred him from entering the dorms, and mandated that he seek counseling.
One day later, she says, he approached her at a campus event. He didn’t speak to her, but he stood in close proximity to her for fifteen minutes.
Not long after that incident Minkinow and a friend staged an impromptu campus protest in which they bound and gagged themselves to symbolize the silencing of rape victims. She has since met with the university’s vice president for student affairs to pursue measures to strengthen the campus’s code of student conduct.
One reform that Minkinow has not yet won support for is a minimum punishment for students found guilty of sexual offenses. Presently, the university provides minimum sentences for only three forms of misconduct: alcohol violation, drug violations and pulling a fire alarm.
Update: More on sexual assaults at Tulane here.
Late Update: We have learned that Minkinow has started a blog.
The national organizations of the Young Democrats of America and College Democrats of America will each send two superdelegates to the Democratic National Convention this summer.
Until now, all four of those superdelegates have remained uncommitted, but today YDA’s Crystal Strait announced for Obama.
<b>Correction, May 19:</b> YDA has three superdelegates. Two of the three have endorsed — Strait chose Obama, as noted above, and Francisco Domenech endorsed Clinton in January. YDA president David Hardt has announced that he will make no endorsement before the end of the primaries.
About two dozen students at Ohio’s Ashland University have staged an overnight sit-in to protest a decision to bar students from take Ancient Greek to fulfill their foreign language requirement.
Ashland does not offer Ancient Greek, but students have the option of taking courses in the language at nearby Ashland Theological Seminary. In mid-April, the college’s faculty senate voted 19-15 that such students will have to take a modern language as well. The question is still under review by Ashland administrators.
Senior Bobby DeSeyn, a protest leader, said in a statement that the faculty senate vote reflected a “blatant de-evolution of academics” and a “disregard for student opinion.”
The sit-in was held at Ashland’s foreign language faculty offices.
Administrators at the University of New Hampshire at Manchester have suspended the school’s Student Government Association without notice, locking student government officers out of their offices and cancelling elections planned for this week.
The administration claims that the SGA was allowing students to run for office in violation of eligibility requirements, and that its chartering documents may not have been properly filed sixteen years ago. UNH-M dean Kristin Woolever was also quoted as saying that she “wasn’t comfortable” with proposed revisions to the SGA constitution.
SGA leaders say that the student government has recently moved from an emphasis on “event planning” to advocacy for students. They also contend that the administration is seeking to assert control over SGA’s activity fee, which was raised by $65 per student per semester — from $10 to $75 — earlier this year.
We’ll be following this story as it develops.
studentactivism.net 
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