Students from the University of Puerto Rico have ratified an agreement to end the strike that shut ten of UPR’s eleven campuses for nearly two months.

Some three thousand students met yesterday to approve the agreement in a mass meeting. They also voted to call another strike in January if the administration fails to keep its end of the deal or attempts to impose new fees.

Monday’s meeting, the first mass gathering of students from across the UPR system in the university’s history, capped UPR’s first-ever system-wide student strike.

I was reading this blogpost, becoming ever more shocked and appalled, but thinking that I had no reason to post about it here, until I got to the last line:

“If you’re reading this and you’re a student at Cornell: female genital mutilation is being practiced on your campus. What are you going to do about it?”

It’s an excellent question.

Pediatric urologist Dix Poppas of Cornell is a leading practitioner of infant “clitoroplasty,” the surgical reduction of the clitoris. In the surgery, performed on babies with larger than average clitorises, the clitoral shaft is excised and the head is re-attached. This surgery is purely aesthetic, and highly controversial. But what’s even more startling is Poppas’ post-surgical follow-up — at regular annual checkups, Poppas uses a vibrator to stimulate the girls’ genitals.

Two academic ethicists who have investigated Poppas’ practice report that “nearly all clinicians to whom we described Poppas’s ‘clitoral sensory testing and vibratory sensory testing’ practices thought them so outrageous that they told us we must have the facts wrong. When we showed them the 2007 article, their disbelief ceased, but they then seemed to become as agitated as we were.”

Student activists at the University of Puerto Rico, who have shut down UPR for two months in a massive strike, are declaring victory today.

The university’s board of trustees approved a settlement agreement a little before 10 pm last night.

The agreement reportedly extends tuition waivers, cancels a major new fee, and abandons a list of university privatization initiatives.

Thursday afternoon update | The Daily Sun, an English-language Puerto Rican newspaper, is reporting that the issue of university retaliation against the strikers was the last sticking point in negotiations with the trustees, and that the students prevailed on their primary demands in that area after a former president of the university intervened on their behalf in a “heated debate.”

The trustees did not agree to a blanket amnesty, and the students appear not to have asked for one. Instead, they secured a variety of procedural safeguards — no summary suspensions, speedy appeals of administrative rulings, protection of academic standing during the disciplinary process. A lawyer for the students said the agreed-upon process is one “that guarantees fairness, impartiality and legality, far beyond the current dispositions of the UPR student rules.”

The agreement was the result of a court-ordered mediation that began last Saturday, and must be approved by the students of each of UPR’s eleven campuses at mass meetings to be held within five days.

Strikers won important substantive victories as well, as discussed in the Daily Sun article. More on those in an upcoming post.

Saturday morning update | Commenter Maritza Stanchich, a professor of English at UPR, has provided links to coverage of the strike’s conclusion in news outlets ranging from the New York Times and the Miami Herald to the Huffington Post and Democracy Now!

More soon…

Embattled University of California president Mark Yudof yesterday posted, then deleted, the following tweet:

“Sitting down to a discussion with the Committee on the Status of Women. Plenty to discuss, yet the most pressing issue: Lakers or Celtics?”

Ouch.

The administration of the University of California at Irvine has moved to suspend the university’s Muslim Student Union for a period of one year as punishment for the disruption of a speech by an Israeli official this spring.

In a 14-page letter written last month — but only made public in redacted form yesterday — a university official declared that the disruption of the speech was “planned, orchestrated, and coordinated in advance” by the MSU, and found the group to have violated four provisions of the campus code of conduct. The MSU has appealed the decision, which is slated to take effect on September 1.

The Los Angeles Times called the ruling, which was issued by the university’s Senior Executive Director of Student Housing, “the first in recent memory at UC recommending the ban of a student group for something other than hazing or alcohol abuse.” In a statement, incoming MSU president Asaad Traina said the suspension would “deprive Muslim students — both current and incoming — of a place where they can develop a sense of community with one another and with the broader UCI campus community.”

The Associated Students of UCI, Irvine’s student government, has not yet made any public comment on the matter, though Victor Sanchez, president of the system-wide University of California Student Association, yesterday called it an effort to “silence dissent.”

Irvine’s move to suspend the MSU raises important questions of university governance, student government autonomy, and due process. I’ll be reporting more on this story in the days to come, and discussing it on Twitter this Wednesday at 8:30 PM Eastern Time (5:30 Pacific) as part of the weekly #sgachat.