Politicians Go After CUNY Funding In Israel-Palestine Speech Row

February 6, 2013 in Students | by | Leave a comment

Opposition to a panel on Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians scheduled to take place at Brooklyn College tomorrow has led a surprisingly long list of New York City politicians to threaten funding to that CUNY college, and though some are backing down in the face of criticism from supporters of free speech and academic freedom, others are stepping up their attacks.

In a January 29 letter to Brooklyn College president Karen Gould, ten members of the New York City Council said that the event — a discussion of the pro-Palestinian Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) movement — was not “what the taxpayers of this city … want their tax dollars to be spent on.” Though they “believe in the principle of academic freedom,” the signatories declared, “we also believe in the principle of not supporting schools whose programs we, and our constituents, find to be odious and wrong.”

This barely-veiled threat to public funding for the City University of New York was greeted with shock and outrage by many members of the university community. Gould subsequently re-iterated her support for the panel’s campus sponsors, while CUNY chancellor Matthew Goldstein said that although he was “appalled by the aims of the boycott, sanctions, and divestment movement,” he was “committed to the expression of the full complement of perspectives on critical issues,” and urged those who had not yet shown their support for Gould and Brooklyn College “to stand up and be heard.”

In the days that followed, two of the ten signers of the city council letter withdrew their endorsement of it, and a third is rumored to be ready to follow. Just yesterday, however, State Assembly member Dov Hikind declared that he had “reached out to individual Brooklyn College trustees and major donors in an effort to convince Brooklyn College President Karen Gould of her grave error.”

With the panel now just thirty hours away, and the top officials of the college and university on record in staunch support of its being held as scheduled, prospects for cancellation or alteration seem remote. If the event is held as scheduled, the politicians who have threatened CUNY’s funding will need to decide whether they are actually willing to harm New York City’s most important higher educational institution over a political dispute.

Expelled Student Activist Wins $50K Court Judgment Against University President

February 4, 2013 in Administration, Civil Liberties, Governance, Litigation, Student Power | by | 1 comment

An environmental activist expelled from Georgia’s Valdosta State University (VSU) has won a $50,000 award in a lawsuit against the university president who kicked him out of school in 2007. In a dramatic rebuke to President Ronald Zaccari, the federal jury that heard the case found Zaccari personally liable for violating Hayden Barnes’ due process rights.

The case emerged from a dispute over a planned parking structure that Barnes considered a waste of money and an environmental blight on the campus. At least three times Zaccari reached out to Barnes to complain about his organizing against the garage — which included flyering about other uses to which the money could be put and calling members of the VSU board of regents to urge them to reject the proposal —  and when Barnes posted a collage on Facebook that called it the “Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage,” Zaccari claimed it was a threat to his safety and expelled him without a hearing.

Zaccari’s conclusion that Barnes posed a threat of violence was contradicted by campus mental health officials and Barnes’ own therapist, and his decision to expel Barnes without due process violated university policy. The University of Georgia System’s board of regents reversed the expulsion the following year, and Zaccari took an early retirement from the university as the scandal around his actions grew.

When college administrators violate students’ rights they are generally protected from personal liability by a legal principle known as qualified immunity. Under qualified immunity, a government employee who acts wrongfully may only be sued as an individual if his or her behavior violates “clearly established law” of which a reasonable person would have been aware.

In this case, however, a federal jury found Friday that Zaccari’s actions were so egregious that he could be held personally responsible for them, and that his position as a government employee did not shield him from individual liability. Zaccari was told to pay Barnes damages of $50,000 plus attorneys’ fees, which will be assessed at a later date.

A separate lawsuit against the VSU board of regents is currently pending.

Barnes was represented in his lawsuit by FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Though I’ve clashed with FIRE on some issues in the past, they got this one exactly right and won a very important victory.

College and university administrators need to know that if they wantonly violate students’ rights they run the risk not only of damaging the institutions they serve but also of facing personal legal consequences.

As a result of Friday’s decision, such administrators have new reason to tread carefully.

A Turning Tide? U of Puerto Rico Rolls Back Student Fees

January 27, 2013 in Access, Tuition and Fees | by | Leave a comment

The University of Puerto Rico announced that it will roll back a huge fee increase that sparked years of massive student protests throughout the island, as Puerto Rico’s new governor pledged to increase funding to the university.

This is big.

Students shut down ten of eleven UPR campuses for two months in the spring of 2010 in an effort to stop the fee hike, but university administrators later reneged on a pledge to withdraw it. Dozens of students were arrested and beaten in January 2011 as the fee went into effect, as police occupied UPR’s Rio Piedras campus for the first time in more than three decades.

The 2011 protests led to the resignation of UPR’s president, but failed to stop the hike, and the student movement went into decline after a widely publicized assault on the Rio Piedras chancellor. The UPR budget cuts, fee, and protests damaged the reputation of governor Luis Fortuño, however, and in November Fortuño was defeated for re-election by Alejandro García Padilla, a UPR graduate whose brother served as president of the university prior to Fortuño’s 2009 election.

During the campaign García Padilla pledged to roll back the $800 fee, which had raised the cost of attending UPR by as much as fifty percent. As García Padilla took office early this month UPR student leaders called on him to keep his promise, and on Saturday the university’s board of directors announced that he had promised them the funding to do just that.

Canadian Student Expelled After Discovering Security Flaw In College Database

January 22, 2013 in Administration, Campus Life, Civil Liberties, Faculty | by | 2 comments

A computer science undergrad at Montreal’s Dawson College was recently expelled after stumbling across — and reporting — a coding flaw that compromised the security of the personal information of the college’s students.

Ahmed Al-Khabaz, 20, found the security leak while working on a mobile phone app for students. Thanks to “sloppy coding,” he says, anyone with basic skills could have accessed “personal information of any student in the system, including social insurance number, home address and phone number, class schedule, basically all the information the college has on a student.”

Al-Khabaz reported the flaw to Dawson’s Director of Information Services and Technology on October 24, and was assured that the college and Skytech, the company that had written the software, would take immediate action to plug the leak. Several days later he ran a test of the system from his home computer to see whether the students’ information — including his own — had in fact been secured.

Within minutes Al-Khabaz received a phone call from Edouard Taza, president of Skytech. (He had made no attempt to conceal his identity while running the probe, he says.) Taza accused Al-Khabaz of launching an attack on the system, and demanded that he sign a non-disclosure agreement covering the incident. (Skytech later declared that Al-Khabaz’s test had compromised the responsiveness of its site.)

Not long afterwards, Al-Khabaz was called into a meeting with top college officials, after which — with no notice to Al-Khabaz and without hearing his side of the story — the faculty of his department voted 14-1 to expel him. Two attempts to overturn the decision were rejected, and now Al-Khabaz is out of college with a semester’s worth of failed classes and a dismissal for academic misconduct on his transcript.

Since this story broke in the National Post on Sunday, however, Al-Khabaz has seen his fortunes begin to change. His plight was featured in Boing Boing, the Twitter hashtag #HamedHelped began to blow up, and the Canadian — and global — media began to knock on his door.

A large portion of this attention came from the Student Union at Dawson College, which set up a website providing resources relating to his case, a petition calling for his reinstatement, and assistance to media looking to talk with Al-Khabaz. At this writing, 7,763 people have signed the Student Union petition, with tens of thousands more visiting the site.

More recently, Edouard Taza has offered him a full scholarship to complete his studies elsewhere, while the number of job offers he’s received in the wake of the scandal have reached double digits.

Dawson College, however, shows no signs of backing down. A statement posted to their website asserts that “the reasons cited in the National Post article for which the student was expelled are inaccurate.” In an interview yesterday, Dawson director general Richard Filion called Al-Khabaz’s actions “a criminal act,” though the college has not contacted police about the incident.

Compare and Contrast

January 16, 2013 in Students | by | 2 comments

From Notre Dame’s official statement on the apparent hoaxing of their star player by a woman pretending to be his online girlfriend:

“While the proper authorities will continue to investigate this troubling matter, this appears to be, at a minimum, a sad and very cruel deception.”

From Notre Dame’s football coach’s official statement on the suicide of a nineteen-year-old who had nine days earlier reported being sexually assaulted by a member of his team:

“I am not going to get into the specifics.”

You can read the full statements by Notre Dame and their football coach on the death of Lizzy Seeberg here. Neither expresses sorrow, regret, or anger at her death.

The player alleged to have sexually assaulted Seeberg was never disciplined by the team or the school. He remains on the team today, and played in its national championship game last week.

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

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