Category Archive

Students from the team that negotiated the Quebec government’s offer to end the province’s three-month student strike say the published version of the proposal differs in major ways from what they agreed to.

The report of the negotiating team for CLASSE, the largest of the student unions involved in the process, says that government negotiators slipped the changes into a final revision of the document (link in French), which was presented as a last-minute technical revision addressing a variety of smaller issues. The students say they checked over those passages, and seeing them in order, approved the document.

They claim, however, that unbeknownst to them, the government had eliminated three important provisions of the agreement, including sections dealing with the mechanism by which cost savings would be applied to tuition reduction, the length of an agreed-upon tuition freeze, and the procedure for electing the chair of the committee.

A group of partiers on the roof of a Cornell frat house allegedly taunted black students and threw objects — including an empty Jack Daniels bottle — at them as they passed on the street.

Beverly Fonkwo, a sophomore, says she and a friend were walking home when people began throwing things at them from the Sigma Pi roof. When she confronted the crowd, she says, they threw more trash and a full beer can, saying “come on up here, Trayvon” and making other racist remarks.

The president of the fraternity, Zach Smith, told the Cornell Daily Sun on Sunday that the frat had “figured out who the perpetrator was, and will turn his name over to police.” Smith claimed that only one person was involved in the attack, and that the perpetrator was not a member of the fraternity.

Cornell’s Sigma Pi chapter was suspended for a year in early 2008 as a result of an underage drinking incident that sent four first-year students to the hospital.

A day after student riots shook a Liberal Party meeting in Quebec, there are reports of life-threatening injuries to protesters … and a possible resolution to the province’s massive twelve-week student strike.

Students from around Quebec gathered to protest at the Victoriaville meeting of Quebec’s ruling Liberal Party, chartering more than fifty buses from around the region. The students were protesting plans to raise tuition at Quebec’s colleges and universities by some $1,625 over the next five years.

Police erected crowd-control barriers far from the convention center where the meeting was to take place, but the students quickly dismantled them and surged toward the meeting site. Police and media claimed that some among the protesters through billiard balls, rocks, and chunks of concrete at police, who used tear gas and rubber bullets on the crowd.

Two students were said to have been left in comas by the violence yesterday, though it’s not clear how they received their injuries. One, Maxence Valade, is said to have lost an eye. Another, Alex Allard, reportedly has a fractured skull. Tweets from fellow activists in the last hour suggest that each has emerged from his coma.

In the wake of these events, student union leaders and government officials announced that they had reached a tentative agreement to end the strike. The details of the agreement, which would have to be ratified by votes of the groups’ membership, are set to be disclosed tonight at 8 pm.

Update | There’s still quite a bit of ambiguity about the nature of the supposed deal, but here’s what’s been reported so far. First, all of the striking student unions are said to have “signed” the agreement, but their signatures do not appear to constitute an endorsement, as the Vancouver Sun reported that “their representatives said they would not recommend acceptance or rejection of the accord.” Martine Desjardins, president of FEUQ, one of the striking unions, told a reporter that today was “not the end” of the strike, but “the beginning of the end.”

6:50 pm Update | For context, here’s the proposal released Thursday by CLASSE, the largest and most radical of Quebec’s major student unions.

7:05 pm Update | Here’s an excellent glossary of terms connected to the Quebec student strike, including the strike hashtag #GGI, which stands for grève générale illimité, or unlimited general strike.

7:45 pm Update | The student unions will announce the terms of the proposed agreement in a joint press conference scheduled to get underway in 15 minutes. If the province makes significant concessions, this could be a game-changer for student activism in Canada and beyond. Stay tuned…

8:00 pm Update | Livefeed for press conference is here: http://webtele.piczo.com/?cr=4. Select ‘canada français’ & ‘LCN’.

8:40 pm Update | Still following the press conference tweeting and livetweeting my own thoughts. Looks like the offer is a mixed bag for Quebecois students, but with significant concessions from the government. It’ll be interesting to see how the ratification votes play out, and how this qualified victory is received in the rest of Canada and elsewhere, particularly in the US. More soon.

May 8 Update: The Chronicle has discontinued Naomi Schaefer Riley’s blog and distanced itself from Amy Lynn Alexander’s tweets. Details here.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education has taken a lot of heat this week for a fatuous, obnoxious takedown of the discipline of Black Studies posted by Chronicle blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley. Riffing off the sidebar to a separate Chronicle piece, Riley attacked in-process dissertations by young Black Studies scholars as axe-grinding, politicized, and irrelevant even as she admitted she hadn’t read a single word of any of them. (Perhaps strangest of all, she dismissed 1970s housing policy and black midwifery as subjects intrinsically unworthy of academic study.)

The Chronicle has posted an editor’s note about the controversial blogpost, but has mostly stayed quiet otherwise. Last night, however, a representative of the paper appeared on Twitter to respond to the Chronicle’s critics.

It got weird pretty quick.

Amy Lynn Alexander, “Editorial Promotions Manager” at the Chronicle, is new to Twitter. Her Chronicle account was created in March, and she’d only tweeted from it a few dozen times before this week. After a couple of tweets on the Riley piece on Wednesday, she entered the online discussion with gusto yesterday evening.

As Alexander waded into the fray she festooned her tweets with sarcastic asides, random capitalization, and textspeak. When folks expressed surprise at her lack of professionalism, she added awkward, self-justifying hashtags like #PR101, #MediaLiteracy, and #LanguageMaven to the mix.

It’s an embarrassment, frankly. In one representative exchange, Alexander twice accused grad student “TressieMC,” author of the first and strongest rebuttal to Riley’s piece, of “flaking” when Alexander tried to discuss the issue with her on the phone (“I made good faith effort 2 parlay & you umm Flaked” and “Evil Ol’ AA here extended 2 @tressiemcphd a civil, adult phone talk: her reply? “Sure,” w #. When @Chronicle_Amy rang? Flakery” were the quotes), then chided TressieMC for calling her on it: “careful: no one called you a flake. Pls back read.”

All in all, Alexander tweeted nearly fifty times last night, returning on two separate occasions after saying she was done for the evening. This morning has seen two dozen more tweets so far, many of them snarky replies to academics who’ve expressed dismay at her behavior.

It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes her employer to ask her to back away from the keyboard.

A federal judge has ruled that a lawsuit brought by UC Berkeley activists who claim the they were unconstitutionally targeted for arrest in a 2009 campus protest can go forward.

Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler says the students have made a “plausible” case that the university’s police chief and vice chancellor for student affairs violated their First Amendment rights during the Wheeler Hall occupation, in which sixty-six peaceful demonstrators were arrested, cuffed, and transported two counties away for booking.

This isn’t a full victory for the students, just permission for the lawsuit to go forward — technically, a denial of the defendants’ motion to dismiss the suit. But it’s still a major vindication of the activist perspective on an event that many of us have long seen as an appalling violation of students’ rights.