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An anti-abortion group at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point put up a display of four thousand white crosses on a campus lawn last week, symbolizing the four thousand fetuses that they say are aborted each day. Stevens Point student Roderick King objected to the installation, saying that because abortion is a constitutional right, “you don’t have the right to challenge it. … Do not put this in front of all of us. This is not your right.” He then pulled several hundred of the crosses out of the ground before being convinced to leave peacefully.
This was by all accounts a minor event. Leaders in “Pointers for Life,” the group that put up the crosses, told the Wausau Daily Herald that their displays are often targeted by vandals. But the incident has received wide coverage among conservative blogs and media outlets, in part because King is one of nineteen members of the UWSP student senate.
The prominent conservative legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy described King as a student government official in their story on the incident. Michelle Malkin identified him as a student government senator. Many other sites called him a student government leader or simply a student leader. The group that put up the crosses has called on King to resign or be removed from his student government office.
King has written a letter to the Stevens Point Journal rejecting the calls for his resignation, and saying that he was “not acting in the name of UWSP Student Government Association, but as an individual who believes one person’s right to freedom of speech stops when it infringes on another person’s right to a secular education.”
Twenty international students at the University of Sussex in England have been banned from taking final exams because they have fallen behind in their tuition payments.
More than 150 Sussex students staged a protest against the decision late last week. The president of the university’s student union described the proposed payment schedules and the timing of the university’s action as unreasonable.
The protest follows a successful Facebook campaign on behalf of one of the students, Luqman Onikosi of Nigeria. When Onikosi’s sponsor in England died, he was unable to raise the money to pay the fees himself.
The university recently agreed to allow Onikosi to take his exams and put off payment until September.
Update: A follow-up protest is planned for this Friday, May 9.
A protester wounded in the Kent State shootings, which took place 38 years ago yesterday, remembers that afternoon.
We have received word from a commenter that there have been arrests in the UNC anti-sweatshop sit-ins. The UPI reports that five students were arrested today after they moved their protest from the building’s rotunda to the chancellor’s office.
Neither source provides details on the charges filed. As of 5:30 pm Eastern time the UNC sit-in blog had not been updated with news of the arrests.
Update: Minutes after the above was posted, the sit-in blog was updated with a detailed report on this morning’s events.
May 5 Update: The link I provided earlier has been taken down, but a fuller report and other materials have been posted. Check the sit-in blog’s main page for updates.
The anti-sweatshop sit-in at the University of North Carolina is now in day 16. Here’s what’s happened since our last update:
• UNC chancellor James Moeser traveled to Washington DC for a State Department conference on education and global development, and United Students Against Sweatshops made sure the jaunt was no vacation. A group of DC-area activists held a demonstration as delegates arrived at the conference, chanting and leafleting as Moeser walked in.
• Wireless internet access to the building the demonstrators are occupying mysteriously went down about a week ago. A unversity IT person checked on the network a few days ago, and claimed he could find nothing wrong. For now, the folks sitting in are sharing a single ethernet connection.
• In the early days of the sit-in, UNC administration took a relaxed attitude toward the demonstrators hanging signs inside and outside the building. In the wake of an Obama rally on campus, and with commencement fast approaching, that lenience may be ending.
• The sit-in has spread to Second Life.
studentactivism.net 
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