“We forget that the necessary ingredient needed to make the past work for the future is our energy in the present, metabolizing one into the other.”
–Audre Lorde, “Learning from the 60s.”
The students’ union at England’s University of Manchester held a “Reclaim the University” march yesterday to protest the growing corporatization of university administration. Tom Skinnner, the union’s general secretary, said that
The university should be run for students and research and education and nothing else. It is now run like a business. Businesses are always asking themselves two questions: how much cheaper can we do things without losing customers and how much can we charge without losing customers? Some students are on courses where 20 years ago they would have got 200 hours a year — but now that’s down to 86.
The union has created a Reclaim the Uni Facebook group which at this writing has more than seven hundred members.
Shakesville reports on an event at The College of New Jersey in which men literally walked a mile in women’s shoes to raise awareness of rape and to emphasize male responsibility to fight sexual violence.
Shakes’ favorite part? The article that alerted her to the event was titled “OMG Shoes.”
(Good discussion in comments about the slightly iffy aspects of this action, too.)
The anti-sweatshop sit-in at the University of North Carolina that began last Thursday is now in its sixth day. About a dozen students spent Monday night outside the university chancellor’s office, and the university has so far made no move to expel them from the building.
Protest organizers have set up a blog where they are providing regular updates on the protest as it develops. That site also includes information on the sit-in’s demands, links to press coverage of the action, a roster of individuals and groups who have endorsed the Designated Suppliers Program campaign, and a series of short profiles of the members of the “occupying force.”
It also features a YouTube video of the university chancellor dancing to the protesters’ chants.
Police seized the cell phones of the nine students arrested in last week’s anti-sweatshop sit-in at the U of Montana, and have yet to return them.
According to the chief of the UM office of public safety, the phones are evidence — he says “students were using the cell phones, some to take pictures within the building, some to communicate with the rally outside, helping them and facilitating the crime of disorderly conduct.”
Protesters claim that the seizures were intended to disrupt future protests. Ella Torti, a UM sophomore and one of the nine arrestees, told the local newspaper that she believes that the police are “trying to hinder our ability to organize.”
studentactivism.net 
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