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The shooting death of a 20-year-old student at Yemen’s Sana’a University has sparked massive protests against the militarization of the campus.
Saleh al Houti, 20, was shot by a soldier acting as a guard at the university gate on Tuesday as he drove onto campus. As word of the shooting spread, student protesters swarmed around the car of a university official, pelting it with shoes and bottles and breaking its windows. Armed kinsmen of the victim blocked all entry and exit from the university until Yemen’s minister of higher education arrived on campus making personal assurances that the shooter had been arrested.
Thousands of students marched on the Yemeni parliament the following day, demanding an end to armed guards on campus grounds.
Ridhwan Masood, the head of the university’s student union, said that students would “continue to organise protests inside the university campus and in front of the cabinet and parliament, using all legal means to kick out these soldiers and intelligence agents who repress our activities and abuse us out of the university … The government should stop militarising the university life. This is an academic institution and not a security compound.”
A Vietnamese university has cancelled a 19% tuition hike in response to student protest.
Students arrived at Hong Bang University in Ho Chi Minh City on Wednesday morning to discover that their fees for the upcoming semester had been raised with no notice. Several hundred of them rallied all day in 95-degree heat at the university gates, snarling local traffic.
College officials met with student representatives at the end of the day, and emerged with an agreement to drop the tuition increase.
The increase was announced at a time of rising unemployment in Vietnam, as the worldwide economic crisis depresses the country’s exports.
It’s been almost two weeks since the University of North Carolina became the twenty-first campus this year to break with Russell Athletic over labor violations. No other schools have dumped Russell since then, but the campaign against the apparel manufacturer is still going strong.
A few highlights of the last two weeks’ organizing:
- Activists at the University of Minnesota are building on their victory there — now that UM has axed Russell, they’re pressing for the university to join the Worker Rights Consortium’s Designated Suppliers Program.
- Villanova University’s athletics program has announced a temporary freeze in purchasing from Russell while they investigate the situation, and the campus newspaper published an editorial last Thursday calling on the university to break with Russell permanently.
- A member of Kansas University Students Against Sweatshops wrote an op-ed for the Daily Kansan urging KU to cut its Russell ties.
- The Student Coalition Against Labor Exploitation held a Russell Athletics teach-in at the University of Southern California.
- Campus activists attended last Friday’s Associated Students UCLA meeting to press the case for dumping Russell.
Meanwhile, Russell Athletic is inviting the presidents of the colleges and universities that have cut their ties with the company to visit Honduras on an RA-hosted “fact-finding trip.”
March 20 Update: USAS is tweeting that the Montana State University Bozeman has become the 22nd campus to drop Russell in 2009. Also, there’s a major story on the campaign going out over the AP wire. Also, USAS reports that MSU-Bozeman and Santa Clara University have both dumped Russell. That makes 23 campuses.
May 1 Update: Boston College and the University of California make FIFTY-SEVEN campuses. Wow.
Yesterday I tweeted a link to a photo of a 1967 sit-in at Duke University, but it wasn’t until just now that I followed up to see the story behind the protest.
Wow.
In the fall of 1967, the Duke student government proposed a regulation that would have barred student organizations from patronizing segregated off-campus establishments. The regulation was put to the Duke student body in a referendum … and it failed by a 60-40 margin.
In response to the vote, members of the campus Afro-American Society staged a sit-in in the hallway outside the offices of the university president, and the university senate quickly agreed to impose the ban that the students had rejected.
The Civil Rights Act banned discrimination in public accommodations in 1964, but Duke had not enrolled its first black undergraduate students until the fall of 1963, and the university did not hire its first black professor until 1966, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the college’s white student majority would still be so hostile to integration in 1967.
Shocking, perhaps, but not surprising.
From the New York Times, March 19, 1959:
Calcutta Students Protest
CALCUTTA, India, March 18 (Reuters) — Thousands of students here attacked examination officials today, smashed furniture and tore up answer papers in protest against a stiff question in an intermediate chemistry examination. The trouble broke out simultaneously at all examination centers except two. About 15,000 to 18,000 students were involved.
studentactivism.net 
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