You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Students’ category.
As we reported yesterday, Tyler Clementi, a first-year student at Rutgers, is believed to have killed himself last week.
Authorities allege that Clementi’s roommate Dharum Ravi used a webcam to secretly record Clementi in a sexual encounter with a man in their dorm room and broadcast the footage on the internet.
New developments overnight in the case:
- Students at Rutgers staged a die-in last night, calling for the creation of safe spaces for LGBT students on campus. They say they have asked the university to create such designated spaces in the past, but have been rebuffed.
- Clementi reportedly left a message on Facebook the day he died that read, “jumping off the gw bridge sorry.”
- A body found in the Hudson river yesterday is thought to be Clementi’s. His family will meet with authorities this morning to attempt to make a positive identification.
- The website Gawker has uncovered posts to a gay community message board that may have come from Clementi. In the posts, user “cit2mo” describes a dorm room webcam spying incident and asks for advice on how to proceed.
- Students interviewed in the Rutgers Daily Targum this morning suggest that Dharum Ravi “had no intention to violate Tyler in any way” and that he only watched the webcam for a moment. Their accounts of the incident do not appear to square with Ravi’s own comments on Twitter, where he announced his plans to spy on Clementi a second time via video chat and “dared” his 148 followers to join him in doing so.
Thursday Update | New developments in this story, including a Wednesday evening protest at Rutgers, can be found in this follow-up post. Also, please read this post before commenting.
This story breaks my heart.
A Rutgers first-year reportedly committed suicide last week after his roommate used a webcam to secretly capture and broadcast video of him having “a sexual encounter” with another man in their dorm room.
The roommate, Dharun Ravi, is said to have made the video available for others to view online and then bragged about the incident on Twitter:
“Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”
Ravi posted that first tweet on a public Twitter account on September 19. On September 21 he announced that he planned to use the webcam to broadcast his roommate a second time, and invited his 148 followers to watch with him:
“Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes it’s happening again.”
(This tweet has been erroneously reported as “don’t you dare video chat me.” My text is taken from Google’s cache of the now-deleted account.)
On September 23 his roommate, who has not been publicly identified, reportedly jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge.
Ravi and his alleged accomplice Molly Wei have been charged with multiple counts of invasion of privacy, each of which carries a possible five-year prison term.
2:30 pm Update | The dead student has been identified by multiple news sources as Tyler Clementi, age 18. A representative of Clementi’s family confirms that he and Ravi were roommates at Rutgers.
2:45 Update | Early reports suggested that Ravi faced a maximum five-year prison term, but the Newark Star-Ledger now reports, he could be sentenced to as much as thirteen years behind bars if convicted on all the charges that have so far been brought against him..
3:00 Update | I’ve written before about my own small attempt to fight anti-gay violence and bullying, and about Dan Savage’s far more ambitious It Gets Better Project.
9:00 Update | Tyler Clementi’s family has released a statement:
“Tyler was a fine young man, and a distinguished musician. The family is heartbroken beyond words. They respectfully request that they be given time to grieve their great loss and that their privacy at this painful time be respected by all. The family and their representatives are cooperating fully with the ongoing criminal investigations of two Rutgers University students.”
UC Berkeley announced yesterday that it will be dropping four team sports — baseball, men’s and women’s gymnastics, and women’s lacrosse — in a cost-saving move. It also plans to drop men’s rugby from varsity to club status.
The school allocated more than $13 million to athletics last year, and it’s looking to bring that number down to $5 million by 2014. Yesterday’s cuts are expected to save the university $4 million next year.
According to the Daily Cal, Berkeley’s student newspaper, the criteria used to decide which teams to dump included
“financial impact, the team’s history of competitive success, the department’s ability to comply with Title IX and the principles of gender equity, donor impact, opportunities for NCAA and Pac-10 success, contributions to student-athlete diversity, student-athlete opportunities, utilization of support services, contributions to the Directors’ Cup, contributions to the athletic department mission and prevalence of local and regional varsity competition.”
I’m curious what y’all think. Is cutting athletics an appropriate response to the current crisis, or is it yet another example of balancing the budget on the backs of the students? And if cuts to sports are the way to go, are these criteria good ones?
In Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article “Small Change: Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” he argues that “strong-tie” relationships — bonds among people who share intense personal connections — are necessary to any serious activist project. Because online organizing builds on “weak-tie” relationships, he suggests, the world of Twitter and Facebook is unsuited to substantial, world-changing activism.
The centerpiece of Gladwell’s essay is his retelling of the story of the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960. Gladwell is right to note that the first of those sit-ins sprung from the strong-tie friendships among its student organizers at North Carolina A&T. He rightly notes as well that established activists throughout the South did much to facilitate the growth of the campaign in the weeks and months that followed. But he neglects the role that pre-internet social networking — ad hoc communication among college students connected through fraternities and sororities, loose friendship clusters, student governments, or just shared hang-out spaces — played in spreading the word and building the movement.
And if you’re looking for weak-tie organizing in the activism of the sixties, the civil rights movement — church-led, small-town-based, building on the preparatory work of decades of communal struggle — is the wrong place to start, anyway. The right place to start is the student movement centered on Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
Oak Reed is a guy. He wears the same uniform as the other guys in the school’s band. His teachers refer to him as “he.” He’s going to wear the “male robe and cap” (whatever those are) at graduation.
But his official records at Mona Shores High School in Muskegon, Michigan list him as female, and so — the school says — they couldn’t let him serve as homecoming king.
Never mind that the students of the senior class voted him in. Never mind that his peers, his teachers, his fellow band geeks think of him as a boy. Never mind that HE’S A GUY. The school overruled all that, and put someone else in the homecoming court in his place last Friday.
Jezebel has more details, and a bunch of links to places you can go to complain. They also link to the Oak Is My King group on Facebook, who write:
Oak Reed received the most votes for homecoming King. Period. Our school not only lied to students, but they also promoted transphobia. Our school has made it clear that they don’t want a transgendered student to represent Mona Shores. As students, we must stand up to assert the rights of Oak, and transgendered students everywhere.
After the craziness of Homecoming is over, students are encouraged to wear “Oak is my King” t-shirts on October 1st.
Oak is so my King, and I don’t care who knows it.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments