Taking a bit of an end-of-semester/holiday break. I’ll be back on Tuesday, if not before. Enjoy your weekend!
The New York Times has published a major article on the University of Puerto Rico student strike, after a month of near-total silence from the American press.
The article, which notes that the strike “has crippled an 11-campus system with more than 62,000 students,” compares Puerto Rican student protests to recent student agitation at the University of California.
Not a huge amount of new information in the article, but it’s a good and thorough piece, overall, and worth reading. (I did learn one thing that I hadn’t known, too — that Ricky Martin has tweeted in support of the strike.)
A police siege of the University of Puerto Rico’s Río Piedras campus is now in its third day, as cops continue to thwart efforts to supply food and water to striking students inside.
Meanwhile, plans are moving forward for a general strike on the island tomorrow.
UPR students took over the campus nearly a month ago, amid protests against cutbacks and fee hikes. Police established positions blocking campus gates on Friday after their early-morning attempt to surreptitiously enter the campus ended in failure. Nine of the university system’s ten other campuses remain shuttered as well.
The university’s president, José Ramón de la Torre, said yesterday that negotiations with the strikers are ongoing, and the San Juan Superior Court is slated to take up the question of whether the police siege may legally continue.
A local representative of Amnesty International has called the siege “an abuse of power” whose “only aim is to intimidate and frighten and intimidate.”
More news as we get it.
Police tried to gain access to the University of Puerto Rico, now in its 25th day of student occupation, before dawn on Friday, cutting through the locked gates of the campus’s main entrance.
Students rushed to defend the gates, and the police withdrew, but they later set up a perimeter around the campus, refusing to allow or supplies to be brought in.
The police escalation of the standoff came one day after a mass meeting attended by more than two thousand people voted to continue the strike indefinitely.
University officials announced Friday that the campus is being officially closed through the end of July. No move to clear the campus itself has yet been reported.
My coverage of the situation in Puerto Rico is ongoing — click here and scroll down to see the latest news. (My previous posts on the strike can be found here and here.)
There’s recently been a flareup in the feminist blogosphere of a long-running argument about childhood misbehavior and the social obligations of parents. In a thread over at Feministe several people, on both sides of the debate, analogized childhood to disability, arguing about whether and how kids’ behavior in public spaces can be compared to that of adults with disabilities.
So I’d like to talk a little about the relationship between childhood and disability today. It’s a subject that I’ve got some familiarity with, and it’s one that’s relevant to both children’s rights and disability activism — two topics this blog has addressed in the past.
studentactivism.net 
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