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In Wednesday’s edition of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Royal Purple, managing editor Michael Daly slammed the “preferential treatment” some athletes consider their due, and “the coaches and administrators who send the message it’s acceptable to behave how you want because you can run fast or jump high.” As an example, he cited a recent incident in which police had to be called to the campus campus weight room to deal with an athlete who refused to show ID on entry.
Whitewater football coach Lance Leipold wasn’t happy.
“This is fucking bullshit,” Leipold told Purple sports editor Christopher Kuhagen (see note below). In an email, he said the paper would “no longer have access to student-athletes or coaches in the football program,” and in a phone call he told Kuhagen to “go cover soccer.”
After the Purple published a story on Leipold’s outbursts, however, he quickly issued an apology by email. “I want to sincerely apologize for my recent behavior,” he wrote. “Some of the language I used with you was inappropriate and I am very sorry. You, UW-Whitewater campus community and alumni expect and deserve better from me as the Head Football Coach and the example I need to set for our program. I am open to meeting with you anytime to discuss this further.”
He and his team would, he said, continue to make themselves available to the Purple‘s reporters.
Note: In the Purple article on Leipold’s tirades, the expletive before “bullshit” was deleted. It’s possible, but unlikely, that it was something other than “fucking.”
“You are not a committed anti-racist until you can look at the ugliness of racism without flinching.”
—Womanist Musings. (Go read the whole post.)
The student government at the University of Florida is in a bind.
The university is saying that two student services programs — the Multicultural and Diversity Affairs program and the Center for Leadership and Service — are may be eliminated in the upcoming academic year. To save them, some students are proposing that students foot the bill with an increase to the campus Activity Fee.
MDA houses UF’s Institute of Black Culture and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Affairs, while CLS supports volunteering and student leadership development programs on campus.
University administrators are always eager to find ways to dump student affairs expenses out of their operating budget and into student fee-based funding mechanisms, and student governments across the country have learned to be wary of such proposals.
But the threat to shut down these programs may not be an empty one. The university is facing a possible a ten percent cut in its Student Affairs budget for the coming year, and a UF administrator says MDA and CLS, which cost a combined $508,000 annually, are the only budget lines in Student Affairs that aren’t mandated by state law.
Student governments have to tread carefully in these situations. It can be very difficult to separate fact from fiction in administrators’ claims. Even when the threat to a program is real, a short-term crisis often leads to a permanent shift in revenue streams.
We’re going to be seeing a lot more of these dilemmas in the months and years to come. How student governments respond to them will be a major test of their ability to advocate effectively for students’ interests.
A dispute over a controversial issue of a conservative student newspaper is boiling over at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
The March-April issue of The Minuteman, a right-wing UMass student publication, contained both an investigative article on the budget of a campus group called Student Bridges and an insipid humor piece that ridiculed the appearance of one of that group’s leaders.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has distributed a video in which, it claims, “hundreds of copies of The Minuteman are stolen out of the hands of a student intending to distribute the paper.” The student holding the video does not appear to resist or object when other students take copies of the paper from him, however, and in one of the few clear pieces of audio in the footage a conservative student is heard saying, with amusement, “This is amazing. This is amazing footage, I’ve gotta say.”
Subsequent to that videotaped confrontation, the UMass student government association passed a resolution calling upon the Silent Majority, publishers of The Minuteman, to apologize for what it characterized as “slanderous defamation of character,” and raising the possibility of the suspension of the group’s charter if it didn’t comply.
At the next week’s meeting of the SGA, this past Wednesday, a member of the student government was ejected in the wake of a dispute over whether a second resolution, rescinding the first, could be placed on the agenda.
This story doesn’t look like it’s done yet. Check back for more in the days to come.
Students and faculty at the University of Texas at Austin are going to walk out of classes at 11:30 this morning and march to the Texas State Capitol in protest of a bill to allow guns on campus.
Today is the second anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre, in which a student shot and killed 32 people before committing suicide.
Under the terms of a bill under consideration in the state legislature, Texas residents with concealed-carry permits would be allowed to bring their weapons onto the campuses of the state’s public universities. The UT student government came out against the law in a lopsided vote earlier this semester.
(Via @thedailytexan on Twitter.)
Friday update: Two hundred students participated in the walkout and rally. The Daily Texan has the story.
studentactivism.net 
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