Undergraduate applications to New Orleans colleges are spiking, driven by out-of-town students who want to lend a hand with post-Katrina recovery.
The increase is highest at Tulane University, with a record 40,000 applications for just 1,500 seats.
Many Tulane applicants say they have visited New Orleans as part of volunteer relief projects. “They get exposed to the city,” the college’s registrar said. “They get exposed to the university.”
A British student wonders what I’ve been wondering: Why aren’t the UK student protests over Israel’s Gaza policies getting more ink?
Last semester, Brenda Councillor was a student senator at Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas, and a vocal critic of university president Linda Sue Warner.
This semester she’s an alumna.
And she’s still not quite sure how it happened.
Councillor had one required course left to take as the fall semester ended. She was enrolled for the spring, and settled into her dorm room. But over the holidays, the registrar called her to congratulate her on her graduation.
The university was waiving her final required course and refunding her spring tuition and fees. They were also locking her out of her dorm room, shutting down her student email account, and mailing her a (misspelled) diploma.
When Councillor, who had circulated a petition in the fall demanding President Warner’s removal, wrote to the university’s vice president for academic affairs to ask why she had been involuntarily graduated, he blew her off.
“My priority is working with current Haskell Indian Nations University students,” he wrote. “Your concerns as a recent graduate of Haskell Indian Nations University in American Indian Studies will not be considered at this time.”
Ouch.
11:40 am Update: Linda Sue Warner, the president of Haskell Indian Nations University, has been summoned to Washington DC for a meeting with her university’s regents and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
I haven’t had the chance to read it yet, but I’m passing it along anyway. Here’s a collection of three essays by participants in last semester’s occupation/protest at the New School in NYC — a “list of lessons and thoughts,” as the introduction puts it.
The link is to a 25-page PDF.
The National Union of Students, Britain’s main national student organization, is calling for an end to the nation’s wave of student sit-ins protesting Israeli policies toward Gaza.
“The protesters need to find new ways to campaign vocally without causing disruption to students on campus,” NUS president Wes Streeting told CNN.
studentactivism.net 
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