Category Archive

The ACLU of Northern California is harshly criticizing UC Santa Cruz’s treatment of students accused of participating in the occupation of UCSC’s Kerr Hall last November. Citing UCSC’s “failure to provide notice of specific factual allegations” and “its imposition of significant financial restitution payments without a hearing,” the chapter declared its belief that the students constitutional rights have been violated.

In a seven-page letter to the university’s chancellor and the chair of its academic senate, the chapter detailed the improprieties and inadequacies of the disciplinary process currently in effect, and urged UCSC to take immediate steps to remedy the legal and constitutional deficiencies of its current approach.

The chapter sent a letter to Berkeley’s administration earlier this month alleging similar deficiencies in that university’s treatment of student protesters. About a week ago, more than a hundred Berkeley faculty signed a petition echoing those charges.

The letter to UCSC has not yet been made available online. When it is, I’ll update this post with a link and a more detailed discussion of its contents.

The saga of the UC Berkeley student government’s Israel divestment resolution continues this evening, in the final student senate meeting of the academic year.

Meanwhile, students at the University of California San Diego, inspired by the Berkeley example, will be bringing a vote on a similar resolution to their own student government for the first time tonight.

Neither of the two resolutions call for divestment from Israeli businesses. Instead, each urges divestment from General Electric and United Technologies, companies that have contracts with the Israeli military.

4 am California time | The UCSD resolution was referred to committee several hours ago in a 13-10 vote. Debate at Berkeley, which began at 10:30 last night, is still going on. You can follow the discussion at the #ucbdivest hashtag, or at supporters’ new @ucbdivest Twitter account.

4:15 am | The Berkeley fell one vote short of overriding the veto a few minutes ago. Tonight was the last meeting of the semester.

Saying that “current disciplinary procedures are so badly flawed that they should be abandoned at this time,” more than a hundred Berkeley professors have signed a petition asking administrators to suspend disciplinary proceedings against students who participated in campus protests on November 20 and December 11, 2009.

Citing specific inadequacies in the campus code of conduct and “flagrant instances of bad judgment on the part of those conducting the inquiries,” the petitioners argue that “no just outcome can emerge from these procedures in their current form.” In closing, they ask the university to re-affirm its commitment

to rights of free speech, which include rights to peaceful protest.  If these rights are arbitrarily suspended or abandoned without reflection or if they are restricted without clear justification and communication, we will have dishonored the tradition of free and open expression that has distinguished this campus for decades.  Let us not accept a situation where arbitrary power makes a mockery of those fundamental and enduring rights that we are surely bound to honor and protect.

Signatories to the petition include numerous senior and distinguished faculty.

Tens of thousands of New Jersey high school students walked out of classes yesterday in what the New York Times called “one of the largest grass-roots demonstrations to hit New Jersey in years.” The protests were a response to school funding cuts by New Jersey’s new governor, and to the rejection of school funding measures in ballot initiatives across the state last week.

The walkouts were the result of a Facebook call-to-arms posted weeks ago by Michelle Ryan Lauto, an 18-year-old college first-year and 2009 graduate of Northern Valley Regional High School in Old Tappan.

Governor Christopher Christie belittled the protests in a statement, expressing the “firm hope that the students were motivated by youthful rebellion or spring fever and not by encouragement from any one-sided view of the current budget crisis in New Jersey.”

Lauto’s first student activism came in seventh grade, when she organized a (failed) protest against a new school dress code.

This one’s a few days old, but it’s worth mentioning, particularly in light of recent developments in Arizona.

Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) have written to Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano asking her to put deportations of students who would be eligible for legal residency under the DREAM Act. The DREAM Act, now working its way through Congress, would provide a path to citizenship for certain college students who were brought to the United States as children without proper documentation.

As previously noted on this blog, current immigration law puts students who have been American residents since early childhood at risk of deportation. There is no consistent policy for dealing with such students’ cases, and though several have recently won reprieves, they have done so at significant expense and emotional turmoil. Moreover, as senators Durbin and Lugar point out, such deportation proceedings represent “an inefficient use of [the] limited resources” of the DHS.