Category Archive

The suspension of the UC Irvine Muslim Student Union wasn’t the only disciplinary decision handed down at Irvine in the run-up to the new semester — earlier this week the Occupy CA blog reported that UCI had imposed punishments on thirteen students who participated in a sit-in on campus in February.

According to documents obtained by the blog, all thirteen were found to have violated multiple sections of the school’s code of conduct. All thirteen were placed on probation and told to pay restitution to the college, while one was also suspended.

It is not clear whether any of these students are appealing the judgments in question, or why the single suspension was issued.

The University of California at Irvine has reduced the length of its suspension of the campus Muslim Student Union from a year to a single quarter, while increasing the length of their probation from one year to two.

The MSU was suspended after a spring incident in which Irvine students disrupted an on-campus speech by an Israeli official.

I recently named the Irvine MSU case number ten in my list of student activism stories to watch in the coming year, saying that the suspension presented Irvine’s administration with a dilemma:

If the ban is rescinded, expect national attention from the media and the right-wing blogosphere. If it’s kept in place, look for Muslim students at Irvine and beyond to seek ways to circumvent its restrictions.

In reducing the length of the suspension, administrators have moved to avoid the pitfalls inherent in either of the courses of action I laid out — by keeping the suspension in place, they have placated potential critics on the right, but by cutting it to a single semester, they may have lowered the likelihood that Muslim students on campus will try to subvert it. In addition, the suspension itself, whatever its length, sets a precedent for future disciplinary action against chartered groups.

The MSU’s lawyer called the suspension a “tremendous disappointment” and a threat to students’ constitutional rights. The group’s vice president said the MSU had not ruled out filing a lawsuit against the university or attempting to charter a new group.

Saturday Morning Update | The blog Occupy UCI has the text of the university’s email announcing the suspension and other sanctions (including a requirement that MSU representatives complete one hundred hours of community service before applying for reinstatement). Occupy UCI has also posted MSU’s response, in which they say that the decision will have “a dangerous chilling effect for all students at American universities.”

I recently sat down with Laura Flanders of GritTV to discuss the current crisis in higher education and how students are fighting back. Joining me on the show was Christian Ragland, student government president at Pennsylvania State University. Check it out:

“Democrats losing edge among young voters.”

“The college vote is up for grabs.”

“Far fewer 18-to-29 year olds identify themselves as Democrats.”

“Right now it seems like Republicans just care a lot more than Democrats.”

All these quotes — from a New York Times article titled “Fewer Young Voters See Themselves as Democrats,” out today — depict young people as moving dramatically in the direction of the GOP, risking “lasting or permanent damage” to the Democratic Party.

But it isn’t until the article’s twenty-first paragraph that we learn the magnitude of this “profound” shift:

Five points.

Yep. According to the Pew Research Center, youth Democratic Party identification is down just five points from its mid-2008 high, and now stands at fifty-seven percent. What’s more, youth Democratic identification has actually risen in recent months, leaving the Dems with a healthy twenty-point advantage over Republicans.

Also unmentioned in the Times piece is the fact that this small decline in youth identification with the Democrats since 2008 almost precisely mirrors the decline in Democratic party identification in the electorate as a whole.

And despite the article’s claim that youth party affiliation is soft right now because young voters identified more with Obama than the Democrats in 2008, multiple polls show that youth support for the Democrats has actually declined less than their support for the President.

That last bit is really important, so I’ll say it again.

Since inauguration day, youth support for the Democratic Party has declined less than youth support for Obama.

“Youth” is an ambiguous concept in politics and polling. Gallup defines it as the 18-29 cohort in some polls, as the 18-34 group in others. Today’s Times piece defined it as voters born after 1980. (It should be noted that treating the “youth vote” and the “college vote” as synonymous, as the Times did in this piece, is a common, and huge, mistake.)

But however you define “youth,” the facts are clear:

• Young people in America today are more likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans, by a wide margin.
• Young people identify as Democrats at a higher rate than any other age group.
• The slippage in youth support for the Democrats in the last two years has been small and inconsistent.
• That slippage is in line with a decline in support that the Dems have seen in the electorate as a whole.
• Youth identification with the Democratic Party is more stable than youth support for President Obama.

A group of students briefly occupied a classroom building at the University of New Orleans yesterday morning, then staged a larger walkout that culminated in a confrontation with university police.

Local media reported that eight students staged the occupation of UNO’s Milneburg Hall, which appears to have begun overnight. Campus cops forced their way into the building at about 8:30 am, removing the occupiers but making no arrests. University officials said that the students did no damage to the building, and “helped clean everything up” as they left, while an activist blog claims that the removal was conducted by “violent, angry campus cops wielding batons and pepper spray.”

After the occupation, some 150 students walked out of classes and made their way through the campus carrying banners that read OCCUPY, STRIKE, and RESIST. University officials had set up microphones for a rally at an amphitheater, but the students instead marched on the administration building.

Two protesters were arrested in the course of the day’s events, and video from the scene shows several physical altercations between protesters and campus police. UNO chancellor Tim Ryan later said that the campus police chief suffered a twisted ankle while trying to prevent students from gaining access to Ryan’s office.

More than $14 million has been cut from UNO’s budget since early 2009. Yesterday’s protesters intended, the blog Occupy Louisiana said, to “to take back control of their university from big business and little bureaucrats.”

Thursday Afternoon Update | The arrested students — one grad student and one undergrad — have been released from jail on their own recognizance. They face felony charges of resisting arrest and battering a police officer. Campus police say each of them punched two cops while attempting to gain access to the chancellor’s office.