Category Archive

Back in April, I brought you the saga of a free-speech battle over the screening of sexual material at the University of Maryland. Now that story has another chapter.

This spring, the producers of a big budget porn flick were drumming up publicity by offering their film free for campus screenings, and the student programming board at UM announced plans to take them up on their offer. When word got out, conservatives in the state legislature gave the PR campaign a huge boost by threatening to cut the university’s budget if the movie was shown, and administrators banned the film from campus.

At that point a local campus group called the Student Power Party defied the ban and screened the film on campus … sort of. (They showed the first half hour of the movie, then got bored, turned it off, and talked about freedom of expression for a while.) The legislature backed down from their threat to cut funding to the university immediately, but directed UM’s regents to come up with a policy regulating “the displaying or screening of obscene films and materials” on campus. They gave them a deadline of December 1.

Which is this Tuesday.

As late as last month, the regents were widely expected to comply with the legislature’s order, even going so far as to write up a draft policy, but two weeks ago they announced that they would not be adopting it.

No other state university system in the nation regulates the display of sexually explicit material on campus, and any effort to do so would be certain to face strong constitutional challenges. The regents also concluded that adopting such a policy would “place undue financial and administrative burdens on the system’s campuses,” according to the Baltimore Sun.

It remains unclear whether legislators will punish UM for their defiance, as they had threatened to do, but at least a few are likely to try — State Senator Andy Harris, who was the engine behind the policy in the spring, is running for Congress.

Sunday Update | I have rewritten this post to reflect new information received this evening.

Ten days ago, fifty-one UC Davis students and one professor were arrested in the course of an occupation of Mrak Hall, the Davis administration building. Five days ago, students took over Mrak Hall again, demanding that criminal prosecution of those 52 be abandoned. On Friday afternoon, it looked like they had almost gotten their wish.

The UC Davis administration negotiated an end to the second takeover on Tuesday, agreeing — among other things — to urge the Yolo County DA to set aside all charges against those demonstrators. On Friday it was widely reported that the DA had agreed not to bring charges against 51 of them.

But that’s not quite what happened.

The charges against the “Mrak 51” haven’t been dropped, they’ve just been set aside, and they can be brought forward again at any time during the coming year. As the DA said in a news release, he hopes “that future student demonstrations will comply with the law and eliminate the need for the district attorney’s involvement.” If students act up again, in other words, last week’s threats of prosecution can be revived.

Meanwhile, charges are going forward against Bree Holmes, a student who was accused of assaulting a police officer during the demonstration. Holmes is said to have been slammed up against a police cruiser while being arrested, and the Davis administration has agreed to conduct a review of the circumstances of her arrest.

Supporters of the Mrak Hall activists will be holding a rally on the UC Davis quad on Monday, November 30 at 2 pm.

Posting will be light from now until Sunday, as I’m taking the opportunity presented by these next few slow news days to get some cool new site features up and running. But I’ll be here all weekend, and I’ve got some writing and links in the works, so don’t go far.

If there’s something going on that I should know about, either now or planned for next week, please feel free to leave a mention of it in comments to this post.

A new YouTube video about the University of California fee hikes:

According to the info posted at YouTube, this video was made for an intro to communication class at the University of California San Diego, and was filmed on campus at UCSD.

Today started off quietly in the University of California — for the first time in nearly a week, the day began without students hunkered down behind barricades anywhere in the UC system.

Students were still sitting in at UCSC’s Kresge Town Hall, but the mood there was hardly confrontational on either side — the university’s administration described them as “hanging out” rather than occupying. Similarly, when students returned to Mrak Hall at UC Davis, the site of 52 arrests on Thursday night, they called it a study-in, not an occupation.

Several other campuses hosted mass student meetings to debrief and plan strategy — throughout the state there was a sense that activists were pausing for a breath after the tumult of the previous five days.

That didn’t last long.

A little before three o’clock this afternoon, a crowd of more than a hundred students estimated entered the lobby of the offices of UC president Mark Yudof in Oakland, asking to speak with Yudof. Three hours later, they’re still there.

The building is scheduled to close at six o’clock — eight minutes from now, as I write this. I’ll have more soon.

6:10 pm | Multiple sources on Twitter are reporting that the students left UCOP peacefully before the building closed. An official UC Twitter feed says that a university vice president and provost pledged “to march to Sacramento with students to advocate for more higher ed funding.”