Notre Dame Campus Paper Sees Students Supporting Obama

March 28, 2009 in Campus Protests, Politics, Religion, Reproductive Freedom, Students | by | Leave a comment

The Observer, the University of Notre Dame’s student newspaper, says its student readers strongly support the selection of President Obama as ND’s 2009 commencement speaker.

Of the 282 letters it has received from students on the subject, the Observer says that nearly three-quarters — 73 percent — support the decision to invite the president. Among graduating seniors, the core audience for the speech, a full 97 support are supportive. Alumni opinion on the address is a near mirror-image of student views, however, with 70 percent of 313 alumni correspondents opposing Obama’s presence at commencement.

On Wednesday, a coalition of Notre Dame student groups announced their “deepest opposition” to the decision to invite Obama. That coalition included Notre Dame Right to Life, The Irish Rover Student Newspaper, Notre Dame College Republicans, The University of Notre Dame Anscombe Society, Notre Dame Identity Project, Militia of the Immaculata, Children of Mary, Orestes Brownson Council, Notre Dame Law School Right to Life, Notre Dame Law St Thomas More Society, and The Federalist Society at Notre Dame Law School.

Exit polls show that President Obama won the Catholic vote in November by a nine-point margin, two points greater than his victory in the electorate as a whole.

Former Mexican President Cleared in 1968 Massacre of Student Protesters

March 28, 2009 in Campus Protests, Civil Liberties, History, Police, Politics, Students | by | Leave a comment

An appeals court in Mexico has found that there is insufficient evidence to prosecute former Mexican president Luis Echeverria in the 1968 mass killings of student protesters in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco Square. Echeverria was the head of the federal police at the time of the massacre.

Federal agents fired on a peaceful pro-democracy protest in Tlatelolco Square on the evening of October 2, 1968, days before the start of the Mexico City Olympics. Five thousand students and others were participating in the rally, and estimates of the number of dead range into the hundreds. (The official government tally was just thirty.)

The killings provoked an appalled response from Mexico’s citizens, and helped to spur a new resistance to the country’s repressive government. Mexico’s current president, Ernesto Zedillo, has called 1968 “the watershed of the country’s political life, when a real public outcry began for a more democratic country.”

Echeverria served as president of Mexico from 1970 to 1976. Since 2006 he had been held under house arrest in connection with the Tlatelolco Square killings.

A statement from Amnesty International yesterday called the court’s ruling “a symptom of the failure of successive Mexican governments and legislatures, as well as the courts and prosecutors, to live up to Mexico’s international human rights commitments.”

New School In Exile: Final Push

March 27, 2009 in Administration, Campus Protests, Student Power, The Corporate University | by | Leave a comment

As we’ve noted before, the New School In Exile, a student activist group at New York City’s New School university, has pledged to shut the school down on April 1 if university president Bob Kerrey doesn’t resign. With that deadline now just five days away and Kerrey still ensconced in the president’s office, NSIE is preparing for a showdown.

The group has held several events this week, including a co-sponsored student-faculty forum at NYU, a staged reading of a short satirical play about Kerrey (now online), and a party late yesterday night.

They’ve scheduled a “student gathering and planning meeting” for six o’clock Sunday evening, though they’re tight-lipped about just what it is that’s being planned — their calendar for next Wednesday reads as follows: “[insert your action here], lots of fun, anarchy and playfulness. Don’t miss it.”

MIT Campus Cops Caught Tossing Student Paper

March 27, 2009 in Administration, Campus Press, Civil Liberties, Police, Students | by | Leave a comment

Two campus police officers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been suspended without pay after they were caught dumping several hundred copies of the MIT student newspaper.

The March 17 issue of The Tech carried a front-page article reporting on the arrest of an MIT campus cop on charges of trafficking prescription painkillers. That officer, Joseph D’Amelio, had been arrested three days earlier in possession of nearly a thousand OxyContin Roxicodone tablets.

On March 18 two MIT police officers came forward to admit that they had been removed three hundred copies of the previous day’s edition of The Tech from stands in the university’s student center, depositing them in a recycling bin outside the building.

The two officers have each been working at MIT for more than a decade, and the Executive Editor of The Tech has been quoted as saying that he does not wish to see them fired over the incident.

April 4 update: The Tech reports that one of the two officers has been fired, and the other remains under suspension. MIT refused to comment on the reason for the difference in punishment, and has not released either officer’s name.

Study: Dropping the SAT Increases Campus Diversity

March 27, 2009 in Access, Administration, High School, Politics, Students | by | Leave a comment

Quick hit, via Inside Higher Ed:

“A new research study … has found that ending the [SAT] requirement would lead to demonstrable gains in the percentages of black and Latino students, and working class or economically disadvantaged students, who are admitted.”

About This Blog

n7772graysmall
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.