Happy Birthday, Hugh Thompson.

April 15, 2009 in History, Media, Politics, Youth | by | 1 comment

Today would have been Hugh Thompson’s 66th birthday.

Hugh Thompson was a 24-year-old helicopter pilot in the US Army in March 1968 when he flew a mission over the town of My Lai in Vietnam.

Providing aerial support to American troops operating in My Lai, Thompson and his crew discovered evidence that US soldiers were massacring unarmed villagers, including children and the elderly. When Thompson spotted a group of eleven unarmed people — including several children — fleeing American soldiers, he landed his helicopter between them and the troops. As he got out of the helicopter, he ordered his gunner to shoot the American soldiers if the soldiers opened fire on the civilians.

Thompson was able to secure the evacuation of those eleven, and as he was flying back to base to report on what he had seen, his gunner spotted and rescued an eight-year-old boy from a drainage ditch in which as many as a hundred people — including his mother and his younger sister and brother — lay dead.

When Thompson returned to base, he was able to convince a high-ranking officer to order a cease fire. 

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Concealed Carry Laws and School Safety: Evidence from the 1940s and 1950s

April 14, 2009 in Administration, Civil Liberties, Guns, High School, History, Media, Middle School, Police, Politics, Students, Town and Gown, Youth | by | 2 comments

The campus concealed-carry debate is heating up in several state legislatures right now, and I’m trying to get up to speed, so I’ve just started reading “Pretend ‘Gun-Free’ School Zones: A Deadly Legal Fiction” — an article by David Kopel that argues that laws prohibiting faculty and adult students from carrying guns on school campuses are “irrational and deadly.” (I found the article through the National Review‘s Phi Beta Cons blog, here.)

Kopel says that for most of America’s history “it was not uncommon for students to bring guns to school.” He cites a column in which John Lane reminisces about his youth in the 1940s and 1950s, and says that he “attempted to find a ‘school shooting’ from that era,” but “came up empty.” On the following page Kopel goes further, passing on the claim that “before the 1990 [Gun-Free School Zone Act], there had been only seven shootings at an American school in the previous 214 years,” and that “in the 17 years following the GFSZA, there were 78 such incidents.”

Each of these claims — that one might search for school shootings in the 1940s and 1950s and find no examples, and that there were only seven shootings at American schools before 1990 — struck me as unlikely, so I decided to check them out.

I fired up the search engine for the archives of the New York Times, looking for articles published between January 1, 1940 and December 31, 1959 that included the words “shot” and “school.”

The search returned 4,940 results.

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Case of Middle-Schooler Strip-Searched Over Ibuprofen Goes to Supreme Court Next Week

April 14, 2009 in Administration, Civil Liberties, Drug Policy, Gender, Litigation, Middle School, Politics, Students, Youth | by | Leave a comment

The United States Supreme Court will hear arguments a week from today in the case of a 13-year-old who was strip-searched by school officials who suspected she had brought ibuprofen to school.

Savana Redding was an eighth grader in Safford, Arizona in the fall of 2003. On October 8 of that year, an administrator discovered that one of Redding’s classmates had high-strength ibuprofen pills in her possession. (Ibuprofen is the active ingredient in the headache medicine Advil.) Under questioning, that student said she had gotten the pills from Redding.

Redding had no history of disciplinary problems, but school officials made no attempt to confirm the classmate’s story. Instead, they pulled Redding from class, and after a search of her bookbag turned up no pills, she was taken to the school nurse’s office. There she was told to strip to her underwear and pull her bra and underpants out from her body, exposing her breasts and pubic area.

No ibuprofen was found. 

An appeals court ruled last year that this search violated Redding’s constitutional rights, as well as “any known principle of human dignity.” The Supreme Court will rule on that question, as well as the issue of whether Redding has the right to sue the assistant principal who ordered the search.

Redding is now an undergraduate at Eastern Arizona College, majoring in psychology.

Campus Press: The Duke Lacrosse House

April 13, 2009 in Administration, Campus Press, College Sports, Gender, Litigation, Media, Race, Sexual Violence, Students, Town and Gown | by | Leave a comment

Nobody has lived at 610 North Buchanan Boulevard in Durham, North Carolina since March 2006, when police began investigating charges that members of the Duke University lacrosse team had raped a woman there. 

Three years later, the criminal charges against the players have long since been dropped, but the house remains padlocked and vacant. Duke owns the building, and wants to tear it down, but lawyers for members of the team are insisting that it be preserved as evidence in a possible lawsuit.

The Duke Chronicle, the university’s student newspaper, has the story.

Media Frenzy Over ASU’s Obama Snub

April 13, 2009 in Administration, Campus Press, Financial Aid, Media, Politics, Student Bashing, Students, The Corporate University | by | Leave a comment

Arizona State University has a big commencement speaker, and a big PR problem.

Last Wednesday the State Press, ASU’s student newspaper, broke the story that the university would not be giving President Obama an honorary degree when he speaks at their commencement next month, and ASU has been scrambling ever since.

A university spokesperson told the State Press that honorary degrees are bestowed on the basis of a lifetime of achievement, and that “because President Obama’s body of work is yet to come, it’s inappropriate to recognize him at this time.” Since then, however, research has revealed that ASU has given honorary degrees in the past to humorist Erma Bombeck, Phoenix Suns owner Jerry Colangelo, and a long list of the university’s major donors.

On Friday ASU president Michael Crow offered a new explanation for the honorary degree decision. In an email to students, he said that the university does not grant honorary degrees “to sitting politicians, a practice based on the very practical realities of operating a public university in our political environment,” but criticism continued to mount.

Crow tried a new tack the next day, announcing that one of the university’s scholarship programs would be renamed the “President Barack Obama Scholars program.” Crow’s statement also declared that the program would be expanded, but as the State Press reported, it “did not say how much the scholarship program will be expanded or when it will begin.”

In an editorial to be published in tomorrow’s paper, the State Press notes that the university’s decision has sparked a round of ASU-bashing in the national media, with students bearing the brunt.

“ASU has been labeled,” it says, “a school where students go to get ‘a master’s degree in lawn-mowing.’ It has been labeled a second-rate university. It has been labeled a racist party school.” All because of a “decision made by a six-person committee.”

A decision, the State Press is too modest to point out, that the nation only learned about because of the intrepid work of the university’s student journalists.

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StudentActivism.net is the work of Angus Johnston, a historian and advocate of American student organizing.

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