Category Archive

A marathon meeting of the UC Berkeley student senate has ended without taking final action on an Israeli divestment bill.

The resolution, which calls on Berkeley to divest from two corporations that do business with the Israeli military, was passed by the ASUC senate a month ago by a wide margin, but vetoed by president Will Smelko a week later.

Today’s meeting began last night and continued for more than twelve hours. The resolution was brought to a vote just before dawn, at which time the override effort failed, but supporters quickly passed a motion to reconsider and resumed debate. A few minutes after seven this morning senators voted to table the discussion until the senate’s next meeting.

The tally of the override vote, as reported on Twitter, was 12 in favor, seven opposed, with one abstention. Fourteen votes are needed for passage.

It appears that one of the bill’s supporters voted “no” in order to set up the motion to reconsider, suggesting that override proponents fell just one vote short.

The resolution became the focus of intense international attention in the weeks since it was approved by a 16-4 margin in mid-March.

It was embraced by professor Noam Chomsky, activist Naomi Klein, and South African bishop Desmond Tutu. In an open letter to the student supporters of the bill, Tutu said that they were “helping to pave [the] path to a just peace” in the Middle East, and urged them “to stand firm on the side of what is right.”

Meanwhile Jonathan Kessler, leadership development director of the conservative pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, pledged at a recent AIPAC conference that the group would “beat back” the resolution by ensuring “that pro-Israel students take over the student government.”

“This is,” Kessler continued, “how AIPAC operates in our nation’s capitol. This is how AIPAC must operate on our nation’s campuses.”

The resolution will be taken up again at next Wednesday’s ASUC senate meeting.

A UC Santa Cruz blog has posted what it says is the itemized list of charges on which the university based the $944 fines that it has assessed against students involved in last semester’s Kerr Hall occupation. (Photos of the document can be found here, with a transcript here.)

If this document is genuine, a few aspects of it seem quite significant.

First, though news reports based on administration statements have characterized the takeover as causing “nearly $34,000 in damage,” several of the line items on the list appear to be unrelated to physical damage to the building. The list includes a $1242.60 charge for the university’s lockshop to “check locks, panic bars,” a $121 charge for an “HVAC check out” that found “no damage to equip,” and a $242 charge for a check of fire alarms’ “signal history” that found “no problems.”

Second, many of the listed charges appear to refer to the cost of university employees’ labor. These entries include those listed above, as well as listings for carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and even $720 for Physical Plant manager Ron Davis‘ coordination of the cleanup. In all, only four of 19 budget lines refer explicitly to payments made to outside vendors.

Unless all of UCSC’s maintenance staff, including its managers, is being paid on a per-hour, as-needed basis, it would appear — again, if this memo is genuine — that the university is attempting to force students to reimburse it for phantom “costs” that cost the university nothing.

The blog Occupy CA reported yesterday that UCSC students are planning a Friday rally against the fines. I’ll have more as the story unfolds.

The issue of youth sexuality — who’s having it, when, what kind, how much? — is of endless fascination to adults, and despite strong evidence that teens are now becoming sexually active later and more responsibly than in the past, there’s always attention to be gotten by claiming the opposite.

Whether it’s spreading wild rumors about rainbow parties or trumpeting the latest research “proving” that young people are having wild, irresponsible hookups, youth sex sells.

Media coverage of one recent article demonstrates just how ridiculous such coverage gets. Twelve-Year-Olds Are Having Sex, blared one blog headline. The news site UPI led with US Middle School Youth Engaging In Sex, while the website Science Daily went with Middle School Youth As Young As 12 Engaging In Risky Sexual Activity.

The UPI lead set the tone:

By age 12, 12 percent of U.S. students had already engaged in vaginal sex, 7.9 percent in oral sex and 6.5 percent in anal sex, U.S. researchers have learned.

Wow. One in eight twelve-year-olds having vaginal sex? One in fifteen having anal sex? What the hell is going on?

Let’s take a look.

You don’t have to read farther than the article’s title — “Patterns of Vaginal, Oral, and Anal Sexual Intercourse in an Urban Seventh-Grade Population” — find the first problem with this coverage.

That’s right, it’s not a national study. It’s a survey of students from ten public schools in one American city. And it’s nowhere near a nationally representative sample — the group studied was mostly poor, and more than 80% black or Latino.

So does this mean that the statistics in the survey are valid for inner-city students of color in the South?

Well, no. It doesn’t mean that either.

Nearly half of the students in the surveyed schools were excluded from the sample, mostly because either they or their parents refused to consent to their being questioned about their sexual practices. So the study is further skewed on that basis.

Oh, and although the media coverage described the study as examining a sample of 12-year-olds, 45% of the students surveyed were aged 13 or 14, and the researchers found much higher rates of sexual activity in the older students. So contrary to the UPI’s claim that 12% of 12-year-olds in the sample had had vaginal sex, the study actually found that only 8.6% claimed they had.

That’s right. “Claimed they had.” The study was based on self-reporting, which is standard, but if you check out the data, you find certain suspicious trends leap out.

Take the anal sex figures, for instance. The study found that 6.5% of the sample had ever had anal sex. But if you break those figures down by gender, here’s what you find:

Nearly eleven percent of the boys, as opposed to just three percent of the girls, claimed they’d had anal sex.

That’s right. Boys were nearly four times as likely as girls to say that they’d had anal sex.

Let’s think about this for a minute. Eleven percent of seventh-grade boys answered yes when asked whether they’d ever had anal sex — specifically, whether they’d ever “put” their “penis in a partner’s anus (which means butt).” And more than a quarter of the boys who said yes to that question claimed to have put their penises in four or more butts.

Now, it’s possible, of course, that every one of these kids was telling the truth. But isn’t it also possible that some of them couldn’t resist the temptation to boast, or just to goof around?

Having once been a seventh-grade boy myself, I know which way I’d bet.

Admittedly, some high school students (including those who use drugs) are dumb. Most students, however, do not shed their brains at the schoolhouse gate, and most students know dumb advocacy when they see it. The notion that the message on this banner would actually persuade either the average student or even the dumbest one to change his or her behavior is most implausible.

This quote comes from Justice John Paul Stevens’ dissent in Morse v. Frederick, a student free speech case decided by the Supreme Court in 2007.

In Morse, a five-member Court majority found that a high school principal did not violate the the constitutional rights of student Joseph Frederick when she suspended him for unfurling a banner that read BONG HiTS 4 JESUS near school property.

Justice Stevens disagreed. He argued that the banner’s message was “nonsense,” and that even if Frederick had, as some justices argued — but Frederick himself denied — intended to promote illegal drug use, his suspension would still have been a huge First Amendment violation.

Stevens’ dissent, a ringing endorsement of students’ rights to free expression, was joined by two other justices. (Justice Stephen Breyer took no stand on the First Amendment issues raised by the case, arguing that it should have been decided on other grounds.)

Student speech is embattled in today’s society. If such speech is to be respected in America’s schools, Justice Stevens — who announced his retirement last week — must be replaced by a justice who shares his commitment to students’ rights.

Let us all know what you’re up to, what you’re planning, what you’re reading and writing! It’s a two-day smondaybration of activism!