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Yesterday I tweeted a link to a photo of a 1967 sit-in at Duke University, but it wasn’t until just now that I followed up to see the story behind the protest.
Wow.
In the fall of 1967, the Duke student government proposed a regulation that would have barred student organizations from patronizing segregated off-campus establishments. The regulation was put to the Duke student body in a referendum … and it failed by a 60-40 margin.
In response to the vote, members of the campus Afro-American Society staged a sit-in in the hallway outside the offices of the university president, and the university senate quickly agreed to impose the ban that the students had rejected.
The Civil Rights Act banned discrimination in public accommodations in 1964, but Duke had not enrolled its first black undergraduate students until the fall of 1963, and the university did not hire its first black professor until 1966, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the college’s white student majority would still be so hostile to integration in 1967.
Shocking, perhaps, but not surprising.
The New York Times’ new columnist is a 29-year-old conservative named Ross Douthat. Ross was a columnist for the Harvard Crimson and a staffer (eventually editor) for the conservative Harvard Salient as an undergrad in the late ’90s and early 2000s, and Campus Progress has dug up some of his more … pungent writing. Here’s a taste, from an April 2001 Crimson column:
“If I really wanted to offend Harvard Asians, I might sit down and write an article in which I was, well, a tad critical of the Asian community. For instance, I might suggest that there was, let’s say, a slight trend toward ethnic self-segregation, or a slight proclivity for the sciences over the humanities among Asian-Americans. And I might, if I were so inclined (not that anyone would be), get downright nasty and suggest that a large chunk of these self-segregated, math-and-science types are self-absorbed, clannish and downright weird.”
Check out the whole rundown here.
The folks behind the Take Back NYU protests have come in for a lot of abuse in the last week, and though some of it has been on-target, quite a bit has fallen wide of the mark. I’ll be posting my own take on the occupation itself soon, but before I do that I want to explore a few of the critics’ more telling errors and misstatements.
More drama for York University, attempting to rebound from its recent three-month shutdown. Students on the campus are organizing a recall of the five officers of York’s student government, the York Federation of Students.
The impetus for the recall is YFS’s support for striking faculty in recent months, but Middle East politics has come to play a role as well — many YFS leaders are outspoken critics of Israel, and many of those who are seeking to remove them from office are defenders of Israeli policies. Tensions flared between the two groups at an event on Wednesday.
Saturday Update: Here’s a new article on the dispute from the Toronto Star.
A gay first-year student at Jacksonville State University in Alabama claims that he was rejected by the Pi Kappa Phi fraternity because of rumors about his sexual orientation. On one level, this is an unsurprising story. But on another, as Pam Spaulding notes, it’s very interesting indeed.
Steele Jackson says Pi Kappa Phi blackballed him when rumors that he was gay began to circulate, but chapter president Chris Stokes denies it, saying the frat doesn’t “discriminate based on … any kind of orientation.” In that, Stokes is following the mandates of the fraternity’s national body, which bars discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
So Jackson, a gay student at an Alabama state college, was willing to say so publicly. The president of the local chapter of the fraternity he pledged denied explicitly that the frat discriminates against gay pledges. And they both made their statements in an article in their campus newspaper.
As Spaulding says, “this particular story has a lot to offer in terms of observations about life in Red State America and the changes that are under way.”
studentactivism.net 
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