Category Archive

Syrian forces fired live ammunition into crowds protesting the government at the Aleppo University campus Wednesday night, killing at least four. The BBC reports:

One student in Aleppo, Thaer al-Ahmed, said there was panic and chaos as security forces personnel and members of the Shabiha militia fired live rounds and tear gas to disperse a protest by about 1,500 people outside their dormitories on Wednesday night.

“Some students ran to their rooms to take cover but they were followed to their rooms, beaten up and arrested,” he told the Associated Press. “Others suffered cuts and broken bones as they tried to flee.”

Activists say the killings followed a shift in government tactics at Aleppo, a city that the Associated Press says “has remained largely loyal to President Bashar Assad and has been largely spared from the violence that has plagued other Syrian cities.” Until a few days ago used only tear gas and batons against protesters at the university.

Some two hundred students are said to have been arrested yesterday, and new protests against the violence are taking place today.

Quebec’s ten-week student strike, now the longest in the province’s history, is reaching a critical point.

Although government officials continue to reject students’ demand that they reverse a planned tuition increase, Quebec education minister Line Beauchamp said Sunday that she is willing to meet with student leaders to discuss demands for reform in university governance. That concession was echoed the next day by Quebec’s premier, Jean Charest. Both insisted, however, that they would not meet with representatives of CLASSE, the group which represents the largest share of the striking students.

Various acts of vandalism and disruption have taken place in connection with the student strike in recent days, walls spray-painted and windows broken at a government minister’s office and the placing of bags of bricks on subway tracks. There have also been allegations, so far unconfirmed, that unused molotov cocktails were found at one minister’s office during the investigation of an act of vandalism.

Meanwhile, the length of the strike is raising questions as to whether the current semester will be able to be completed. Some Quebec campuses have closed their doors during the strike, while others have continued to hold classes. Students at some closed campuses have requested court injunctions forcing the universities to reopen. At campuses that haven’t closed, activists have asked university officials to make accommodations for striking students.

At McGill University in Montreal, where the final exam period for the current semester began today, activists blocked four campus entrances for an hour this morning.

The United States Student Association’s Legislative Conference is not a place where you expect people to get arrested. Each year several hundred students from across the country, many of them elected representatives of their campus student governments, gather in a DC hotel for a weekend of speeches and workshops on federal legislative issues. On Monday they head to the capital to make their case to members of Congress in one-on-one sit-downs.

This year was a little different.

The student government leaders were there as always. There were the lobby role-plays and the legislative fact sheets and the mediocre hotel food with the worse than mediocre vegetarian options. But at this, the first USSA national gathering of the Occupy Wall Street era, there was something else as well.

Workshops on campus organizing took up more of the conference schedule than they have in the recent past, and even panels on electoral work carried titles like “Occupy the Ballot.” A workshop on “radicalism in the student movement,” led by a new USSA staffer, drew a large and passionate crowd. In formal sessions and in the hallways, a newly activist mood was palpable.

That shift in mood reflects the shift that has taken place in the country and in American higher education in the last five months. Occupy didn’t begin with Occupy Wall Street, and in fact some of USSA’s most prominent campuses in recent years have been the UC schools where the current wave of campus occupations began in the fall of 2009. But the spirit of Occupy was more broadly felt this weekend than at USSA’s recent conferences.

USSA has always been ideologically diverse, and that hasn’t changed. The students at the conference included conservatives, moderates, liberals, and radicals. And in fact the shift that took place more a shift in focus than a change in ideology — a new interest in direct action, a new sense of possibility for student empowerment, a new sense of crisis and urgency.

The Monday of the long Legislative Conference weekend is always a lobby day, and this year as in years past hundreds of students took to the Capitol building to meet with their hometown legislators. But yesterday the trip to Capitol Hill included a detour — a visit to student loan giant Sallie Mae. USSA’s students were denied entry at the corporation’s headquarters, so they sat down in front of the building, some blocking the street. Ultimately three dozen activists were arrested, including USSA’s president and the heads of the student governments of several major universities.

For a street demonstration in the age of Occupy, this was relatively restrained — an act of polite civil disobedience rather than a defiant occupation. But it was a dramatic departure for USSA, and the participation of many of the organization’s most visible leaders indicates the extent to which it reflects an ongoing shift not only for the organization, but for American student activism more generally.

This bears watching.

At 7:24 last night, a Twitter account called @WeLoveTrayvon sent its third tweet:

“R.I.P. Trayvon Martin. For every RE-TWEET this tweet gets, $1 will be donated to the TrayvonMartinFoundation, which helps counteract racism.”

In the eighteen hours since, that tweet has been retweeted tens of thousands of times.

Unfortunately, it’s a hoax. There’s no such thing as a “Trayvon Martin Foundation.” Google shows no hits on the phrase other than ones relating to the tweet. And the @WeLoveTrayvon account, which originated the claim, includes no contact info, no website link, no nothing. The account was created less than 24 hours ago, and has only tweeted eight times — each time including a RT request.

It’s made up. It’s meaningless. There’s no foundation, and no pledge to match RTs with cash.

Some newer versions of the tweet claim that Will Ferrell is putting up the money, apparently on the basis of a RT from the @RealFerrellWill twitter account. But that account is unverified, it only has 25K followers, and its most recent tweet as I write this is a racist joke. It’s not really Will Ferrell.

Embarrassingly, the Toronto Sun and other newspapers were taken in by the hoax, which was repeated as fact in an article distributed by the British entertainment website WENN. But it’s a hoax nonetheless. You’re not providing anyone with any money by RTing.

Sorry.

George Zimmerman, the 28-year-old Floridian who shot and killed teenager Trayvon Martin a month ago, has been suspended, or perhaps expelled, from Seminole State College as a result of the shooting.

The reasoning behind what university officials are calling a “withdrawal” remains unclear. In a statement yesterday, they said this:

“Due to the highly charged and high-profile controversy involving this student, Seminole State has taken the unusual but necessary step this week to withdraw Mr. Zimmerman from enrollment. This decision is based solely on our responsibility to provide for the safety of our students on campus as well as for Mr. Zimmerman.”

At least in published reports, officials did not specify the nature of this perceived threat to the ” safety of [their] students” or whether they believed that this threat was posed by Zimmerman or by others.

It’s that ambiguity, rather than the suspension itself, that I find troubling. If the college removed Zimmerman because of legitimate, specific concerns about his actions, that’s one thing. But if they “withdrew” him simply because he has become a controversial and notorious figure, that’s very different.

And it turns out that Seminole State College has pretty much complete discretion to suspend any student for any reason at any time. The college’s code of conduct states that students who engage in “conduct … deemed improper and detrimental to the College” are “subject to disciplinary action.” The college president (“or designee”) may suspend any student they consider guilty of a “serious violation of College policies, regulations, or local, state, and federal laws where the students continued presence might threaten the welfare of an individual or the College.”

Not hard to see how that kind of policy could be abused.