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A detailed overview of student anti-nuclear organizing in the United States today, from WireTap magazine.

A major police operation on the San Diego State University campus led to the arrest of 75 students on drug charges yesterday. Fifty pounds of marijuana and four pounds of cocaine were seized in the sting, which involved seven SDSU fraternities.

The arrests were the culmination of six months of undercover work in SDSU’s frats, initiated after a 19-year-old student died of a cocaine and alcohol overdose last year. All of those arrested were men, and approximately twenty were charged with drug sales rather than possession.

On Tuesday SDSU suspended six fraternities — Lambda Chi Alpha, Phi Kappa Psi, Phi Kappa Theta, Theta Chi, Sigma Alpha Epsilon and Sigma Alpha Mu — that were implicated in the case. All of the arrested students have been suspended, and those who lived in campus housing are being evicted.

Richard Peltz, a professor at the University of Arkansas Bowen School of Law, has filed a lawsuit against two students who called him a racist.

The lawsuit names Valerie Nation and Chrishuana Clark, both third-year law students who have been involved with the school’s Black Law Students Association, along with Eric Spencer Buchanan, president of the W. Harold Flowers Law Society. The organizations are also named in the suit.

In the fall of 2005, Peltz gave a lecture in his constitutional law class that March 2007 letter circulated by the Black Law Students Association later described as a “hateful and inciting speech … used to attack and demean the black students in his class.” In light of this and other incidents, the BLSA asked that Peltz be reprimanded by the law school, barred from teaching required courses “where Black students would be required to have him as a professor,” and made to attend diversity training.

In his lawsuit, Peltz contends that these and other “false accusations of racism damaged plaintiff’s reputation, character and integrity in the Arkansas legal community.”

Last Thursday an attorney for Clark filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, contending that “an accusation by a plaintiff that a defendant has called him a racist, in the context of public discourse at a law school,” will not “support a claim for defamation.” The motion contends that Peltz “has embarked on a personal vendetta against two black law students and two predominantly black organizations based on what he perceives as their opposition to him or to his political views and legal theories.”

Mother Jones magazine is looking for information on campus activism in the 2007-08 academic year for a roundup to be published in the fall. It’s not clear why they titled their blogpost Are Today’s Student Activists Lazy?, though.

(Here’s a link to last year’s report.)

 

After a couple of weeks of experimenting and working out the kinks, we’ve finally gone public! Thanks for stopping by!

I’ll be putting up a lot of new content in the next few days, and doing a big publicity push starting on Monday. In the meantime free to poke around, and you can leave any suggestions you may have in comments to this post. 

About This Blog

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StudentActivism.net is the work of Angus Johnston, a historian and advocate of American student organizing.

To contact Angus, click here. For more about him, check out AngusJohnston.com.