Saying that “current disciplinary procedures are so badly flawed that they should be abandoned at this time,” more than a hundred Berkeley professors have signed a petition asking administrators to suspend disciplinary proceedings against students who participated in campus protests on November 20 and December 11, 2009.

Citing specific inadequacies in the campus code of conduct and “flagrant instances of bad judgment on the part of those conducting the inquiries,” the petitioners argue that “no just outcome can emerge from these procedures in their current form.” In closing, they ask the university to re-affirm its commitment

to rights of free speech, which include rights to peaceful protest.  If these rights are arbitrarily suspended or abandoned without reflection or if they are restricted without clear justification and communication, we will have dishonored the tradition of free and open expression that has distinguished this campus for decades.  Let us not accept a situation where arbitrary power makes a mockery of those fundamental and enduring rights that we are surely bound to honor and protect.

Signatories to the petition include numerous senior and distinguished faculty.

Tens of thousands of New Jersey high school students walked out of classes yesterday in what the New York Times called “one of the largest grass-roots demonstrations to hit New Jersey in years.” The protests were a response to school funding cuts by New Jersey’s new governor, and to the rejection of school funding measures in ballot initiatives across the state last week.

The walkouts were the result of a Facebook call-to-arms posted weeks ago by Michelle Ryan Lauto, an 18-year-old college first-year and 2009 graduate of Northern Valley Regional High School in Old Tappan.

Governor Christopher Christie belittled the protests in a statement, expressing the “firm hope that the students were motivated by youthful rebellion or spring fever and not by encouragement from any one-sided view of the current budget crisis in New Jersey.”

Lauto’s first student activism came in seventh grade, when she organized a (failed) protest against a new school dress code.

This one’s a few days old, but it’s worth mentioning, particularly in light of recent developments in Arizona.

Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) have written to Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano asking her to put deportations of students who would be eligible for legal residency under the DREAM Act. The DREAM Act, now working its way through Congress, would provide a path to citizenship for certain college students who were brought to the United States as children without proper documentation.

As previously noted on this blog, current immigration law puts students who have been American residents since early childhood at risk of deportation. There is no consistent policy for dealing with such students’ cases, and though several have recently won reprieves, they have done so at significant expense and emotional turmoil. Moreover, as senators Durbin and Lugar point out, such deportation proceedings represent “an inefficient use of [the] limited resources” of the DHS.

Police are reporting that a 27-year-old transgender student at CSU Long Beach was slashed in a men’s room on campus earlier this month.

Although the attack took place ten days ago, the university only made it public this Friday.

The student’s assailant addressed him by name before the attack, asking him whether he was that person. The victim of the assault did not recognize his attacker, but was able to provide police with information enabling them to create a sketch.

Police have not said whether they are investigating the incident as a hate crime. The Long Beach Post has, however, reported that a Facebook entry on the incident claimed that the attacker carved the word “IT” into the victim’s chest.

The attacked student was treated for his injuries in a local hospital and released that evening.

Cal State Northridge Economics professor Kenneth Ng has shut down his website Big Baby Kenny in the wake of the site’s outing in the media, but the pages live on in Google’s cache.

The site, which promised to show readers “how to get banged better, cheaper, and more efficiently in the Thailand Girl Scene,” has been known to university administrators for months. Ng was initially defiant when approached by reporters last week, but backpedaled in the face of public outrage. University provost Harry Hellebrand released a statement on Friday thanking Ng “for his reflection and removal of the site.”

Although Ng now says he “never encountered any child prostitution” in Thailand, and denies that his site was a sex tourism guide, his own writings, now deleted, reveal these claims to be lies. In his website, Ng not only made a number of clear references to encountering girls whom he believed to be underage at places of prostitution, he provided his readers directions to, and GPS coordinates of, those locations.

Warning: The excerpts provided below include depictions of child prostitution and the physical abuse of women.

Pages that have been taken down include…

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