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The week since the New School occupation has seen a lot of action. There was a protest on Friday night, a roving anarchist happening on Sunday afternoon, an emergency campus assembly on Monday, a courtyard sit-in on Wednesday, and another major street protest on Thursday.
The protesters released a statement on Monday, by the way, and both the New School In Exile website and the occupiers’ blog have been active all week. (Both sites carry the text of a wide variety of statements on the occupation from bodies inside and outside the New School, along with their other coverage.)
And this afternoon some very interesting news came in via Twitter.
The New School provost has announced that all students suspended in last week’s occupation will be allowed “to complete their academic work this semester.” His statement calls this a “modification” of their suspensions, but unless there’s some hidden catch, it sounds very much as if their suspensions have in fact been lifted.
Disciplinary actions against the students are ongoing, and this announcement isn’t an amnesty, by any stretch. But given recent history of the New School’s attitudes toward the occupiers — president Bob Kerrey told the New York Post a week ago that he did not “consider them students” — this is a major shift.
Update: A kind reader has passed along the entire text of the announcement from the provost on the “modification” of the suspensions. (It’s the first comment on this post.) Thanks!
Turns out I missed the exact anniversary — it was on Tuesday — but it’s been one year since studentactivism.net went live. In honor of that milestone, here’s a list of the site’s top ten search terms ever and the posts that inspired them…
10: sds wiki
Back in January I wrote about a very cool wiki that Students for Democratic Society had set up. Unfortunately, the wiki hasn’t been functioning for a while, but I’m hoping they’ll bring it back online soon.
9: obama youth ball
I wrote six stories in January about the Obama youth inaugural ball, covering controversies over the event’s logistics and message, as well as the decision to sell exclusive television rights to MTV.
8: bill ayers
Former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers’ name pops up on the site with some regularity, but most of the search traffic he’s received here came because of a post about someone else — student activist and antiwar radical David Ifshin, who became a friend of John McCain’s after the war ended.
7: self-entitled college students
This search is for references to a recent journal article that purported to find a strong “sense of entitlement” among American students. The article has major flaws, some of which I’ve discussed here and here. (And yes, I’ve got a third post on the article planned. I’ll write it eventually.)
6: julea ward
Julea Ward’s prominence on this list, just a week after I wrote about her, is a testament not only to public interest in her lawsuit against Eastern Michigan University, but also to the effect of including an easily Googlable name in the title of a post.
5: new school in exile
Eighteen posts so far on these New York City activists, and I’m working on another.
4: tulane rape
I’ve posted on three different stories relating to sexual violence at Tulane — the university’s failure to investigate charges made by the student government relating to druggings and possible rapes at one fraternity’s parties, the mild punishment the university meted out to a student accused of committing rape in the Tulane dorms, and a case in which a student claimed he’d been sexually assaulted by a campus police officer.
3: hillary clinton
Last May I posted about Secretary Clinton’s relationship to the campus radicalism of the 1960s, and in December I wrote about some parallels between the story of an Obama speechwriter’s groping of a life size Clinton cut-out and that of a campus prank that took place a hundred years earlier.
2: york university strike
Although few US citizens noticed at the time, one of Canada’s largest universities was shut down for three months this winter by the third-longest higher education strike in Canada’s history. Many of the strikers were graduate students, and undergraduates were active in organizing both in support of and in opposition to the strike, so it was a natural story for this site.
1: student activism
That’s what we’re here for. Thanks for a great year.
Students and faculty at the University of Texas at Austin are going to walk out of classes at 11:30 this morning and march to the Texas State Capitol in protest of a bill to allow guns on campus.
Today is the second anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre, in which a student shot and killed 32 people before committing suicide.
Under the terms of a bill under consideration in the state legislature, Texas residents with concealed-carry permits would be allowed to bring their weapons onto the campuses of the state’s public universities. The UT student government came out against the law in a lopsided vote earlier this semester.
(Via @thedailytexan on Twitter.)
Friday update: Two hundred students participated in the walkout and rally. The Daily Texan has the story.
The campus concealed-carry debate is heating up in several state legislatures right now, and I’m trying to get up to speed, so I’ve just started reading “Pretend ‘Gun-Free’ School Zones: A Deadly Legal Fiction” — an article by David Kopel that argues that laws prohibiting faculty and adult students from carrying guns on school campuses are “irrational and deadly.” (I found the article through the National Review‘s Phi Beta Cons blog, here.)
Kopel says that for most of America’s history “it was not uncommon for students to bring guns to school.” He cites a column in which John Lane reminisces about his youth in the 1940s and 1950s, and says that he “attempted to find a ‘school shooting’ from that era,” but “came up empty.” On the following page Kopel goes further, passing on the claim that “before the 1990 [Gun-Free School Zone Act], there had been only seven shootings at an American school in the previous 214 years,” and that “in the 17 years following the GFSZA, there were 78 such incidents.”
Each of these claims — that one might search for school shootings in the 1940s and 1950s and find no examples, and that there were only seven shootings at American schools before 1990 — struck me as unlikely, so I decided to check them out.
I fired up the search engine for the archives of the New York Times, looking for articles published between January 1, 1940 and December 31, 1959 that included the words “shot” and “school.”
The search returned 4,940 results.
The United States Supreme Court will hear arguments a week from today in the case of a 13-year-old who was strip-searched by school officials who suspected she had brought ibuprofen to school.
Savana Redding was an eighth grader in Safford, Arizona in the fall of 2003. On October 8 of that year, an administrator discovered that one of Redding’s classmates had high-strength ibuprofen pills in her possession. (Ibuprofen is the active ingredient in the headache medicine Advil.) Under questioning, that student said she had gotten the pills from Redding.
Redding had no history of disciplinary problems, but school officials made no attempt to confirm the classmate’s story. Instead, they pulled Redding from class, and after a search of her bookbag turned up no pills, she was taken to the school nurse’s office. There she was told to strip to her underwear and pull her bra and underpants out from her body, exposing her breasts and pubic area.
No ibuprofen was found.
An appeals court ruled last year that this search violated Redding’s constitutional rights, as well as “any known principle of human dignity.” The Supreme Court will rule on that question, as well as the issue of whether Redding has the right to sue the assistant principal who ordered the search.
Redding is now an undergraduate at Eastern Arizona College, majoring in psychology.
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