Community College Dorms and Campus Culture

April 9, 2009 in Access, Administration, Campus Protests, Dorms, Finances, History, Politics, Student Government, Student Power, Town and Gown | by | Leave a comment

According to the LA Times, more and more community colleges, responding to contracting opportunities at four-year institutions and growth in international student enrollment, are building dorms. And though the Times doesn’t speculate, this development may in turn help foster student organizing at community colleges.

Anyone who has tried to organize students on a commuter campus knows how hard it can be to get things going and keep them going. The proportion of American college students living on campus is much lower now than it was a few decades ago, and this shift is one of the factors that has made student organizing more challenging. From that perspective, a movetoward dorms at community colleges may provide a boost for student activists at those campuses.

And the benefits of dorms to organizers go beyond the students who live in them. Dorms create a 24/7 community on campus, and make it easier to schedule events outside of peak class hours — if people know that students living in the dorms will be coming out for an event, they’ll be more likely to schlep to campus to attend.

Community college student organizing has been growing in recent years. Dorms may give it an additional push.

Quick Hit: FL Students Protest U Dismissals of Women and POC

April 9, 2009 in Access, Administration, Campus Protests, Faculty, Feminism, Finances, Gender, Politics, Race, Student Power, Students | by | Leave a comment

A group of students presented a University of Florida administrator with a petition Wednesday protesting the disproportionate impact of recent university layoffs on women and people of color.

According to the group, women represent 34% of full-time UF faculty, but 61% of those fired as a result of recent budget cuts. Among people of color, the figures were 25% and 54%, respectively.

(Via UWire, on Twitter.)

Update: Here’s an article from the Gainesville Sun about other recent student organizing against UF budget cuts.

Student Kicked Out of Counseling Program Over Approach to Gay Patients Is Suing

April 9, 2009 in Administration, Civil Liberties, Curriculum, Faculty, Graduate Students, Health Care, Litigation, Religion, Sexual Orientation, Students | by | 1 comment

A former student has filed a lawsuit against Eastern Michigan University claiming that she was dismissed from a graduate program in counseling for refusing to “affirm or validate homosexual behavior within the context of a counseling relationship.”

At the start of this year, when she was nearing the end of her coursework at EMU, Julea Ward was engaged in a Counseling Practicum. Ward has religious objections to homosexuality, and when she discovered that one of her assigned clients was gay, she asked her professor whether she should see the client or have him reassigned. That question, she contends, set in motion a chain of events that ultimately led to disciplinary proceedings and her removal from the program.

The university has declined to comment publicly on the case, but in a March 12 letter the chair of her disciplinary committee said that Ward had “by clear and convincing evidence” violated ethical standards requiring that counselors “avoid imposing values that are inconsistent with counseling goals” or engage in discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

A copy of Ward’s complaint, with various documents relating to the disciplinary charges, can be found in PDF form here.

Update: We analyze Ward’s suit and the conservative blogosphere’s response.

French Students Hold Administrators Hostage, Block Traffic In Paris

April 8, 2009 in Access, Administration, Campus Protests, Finances, Politics, Student Power, Students, The Corporate University | by | Leave a comment

French students escalated ongoing protests in advance of the Easter holiday this week, occupying offices on two campuses and barricading a Paris street.

Early in the week student protesters held university administrators in Orleans, Rennes, and Strasbourg hostage for a brief time. In Rennes, the president was forced to flee his office and call for help from a stairway, and in Strasbourg more than a hundred students forced their way into a room where thirty administrators were meeting, blocking their way out for a time.

On Wednesday protesters in Paris turned the Boulevard Saint-Michel into an impromptu beach, dumping sand into the road and blocking traffic. The beach was a nod to a slogan from the May 1968 protests that shook French society: “sous les pavés, la plage” — under the cobblestones, the beach. (For a discussion of the various shades of meaning behind this slogan, click here.)

Protests against changes to French higher education policy have been going on for two months, and administrators now say that if the disruption does not end after Easter, the spring semester may be lost entirely. Click here for a Reuters article from the newspaper Le Monde on the recent demonstrations, or here for Google’s English translation.

This post was updated on April 10 with new details on the Rennes and Strasbourg protests.

Peru’s Ex-President Convicted in Political Murder of Nine College Students

April 8, 2009 in Civil Liberties, Dorms, History, Police, Politics, Students | by | Leave a comment

Before dawn on July 18, 1992, members of a Peruvian government death squad entered the dorms of Enrique Guzmán y Valle National Education University, known as La Cantuta. They rousted the students from their beds, abducting nine of them. 

La Cantuta had a long history of radical Maoist politics, and the nine students were suspected of involvement in a recent car bombing.

The death squad members took the students, and a professor who they abducted from his home, to an off-campus location. There the ten were tortured and killed. The corpses of four of those killed were discovered in an unmarked grave a year later; the other six bodies have never been accounted for.

Yesterday a Peruvian court convicted Peru’s former president, Alberto Fujimori, of having ordered the La Cantuta killings, as well as a massacre the previous year in which fifteen people were killed. Fujimori served as Peru’s president from 1990 to 2000. 

Fujimori’s daughter, Keiko Fujimori, a 34-year-old member of the Peruvian national congress, will be a candidate in Peru’s presidential elections next year. If elected, she has pledged to grant her father a full pardon.

About This Blog

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

To contact Angus, click here. For more about him, check out AngusJohnston.com.