Greek riot police fired tear gas to disperse protesters throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails outside the U.S. Embassy on Monday during an annual march to mark the anniversary of a student uprising.
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About 10,000 people braved a thunderstorm to mark the 35th anniversary of the student uprising against the military dictatorship that ruled Greece from 1967-74. They marched to the U.S. Embassy to protest Washington's support for the junta at the time.

Students again took to the streets yesterday morning and made their way outside the US embassy in Nicosia to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the Athens student uprising against the military dictatorship ruling Greece in 1973.

The students were chanting slogans that "the people won’t forget the fascists and the tanks" and held banners with slogans "Cyprus-Polytechnic: never again fascism". The students encountered barbed wire and a strong police force.

More than 300 secondary and high schools (that is 1/6 of the national total) around Greece are currently occupied by their pupils who are demanding the reversal of several articles of the conservative educational reform that caused widespead revolt by students and university staff during the academic years of 2005-2006-2007. The renewed resistance to the law which has been rejected by the entire school and academic community and is considered to be the first step towards the abolition of student-pupil participation in management, is being faced with unprecedented measures of repression. There have been consistent efforts by the government and the local authorities to criminalise the school squats, whereas neonazi attacks against squatted schools in Athens have been reported.

Most recently, on the 17th of October, the president of the pupil's council and one more pupil of the 4th high-school of the city of Karditsa were arrested on charges of obstructing the function of a public service, after the pupils of the squatted school staged a demo against the installation of an iron fence around the premises, with the central slogan being "School is not a Prison". After the reaction of the Teacher's Union (OLME) the pupils were released.

While the repression escalates, several schools in Athens and Thessaloniki have opposed the annual election of representatives, opting for direct-democratic procedures without the realm of state-recognised legality. In the city of Peiraeus, on the 17th of October the Autonomous Coordination Squat Committee, held a protest march for "Liberatory free and public education".

The lockouts at schools have become something like the first rain in the autumn or the traditional annual strike by the General Confederation of Greek Labor (GSEE) union.

Every fall, small groups of pupils take over entire school complexes with various demands that vary from the perfectly logical to the downright absurd. There is, for example, currently a lockout at a school in Athens because children are demanding “more products in the school canteen.”

It’s a fact that many schools have problems with their buildings and equipment. But lockouts do not solve these problems. In many cases, they actually make things worse, as people from outside the schools go on the rampage and cause damage that the taxpayer ends up paying for.

The Greek education system is not experiencing its brightest period at the moment. Many people over a number of years are responsible for this but the responsibility of parents is even greater. They have to explain to their children that lockouts make the problem worse and that shortages are not solved by missing classes.

At halftime, attendees were asked to applaud the choice to join the military during a mock swearing-in ceremony held at midfield for high school students who had recently enlisted.

This encroaching militarization of American culture conjured scant resistance. The lone voice of dissent to appear in the area newspapers came from a class of '83 alumnus who attended the game. His fellow letter-to-the-editor writers -- most of whom were students -- roundly dismissed his questioning of "whether participating in the military is still the right thing to do" when "our leaders ignore international law, national and world opinion."
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As recently as 2003, Penn State ranked 48th on the Department of Defense's Research Development Technology and Expenditure Top 100 list, pulling in nearly $63 million in contract awards. But when all forms of Defense Department funding get added in -- for a number of obscure or untraceable projects -- the grand total is slightly more than $75 million.

Given that more than 50 percent of income tax dollars goes to the Pentagon, students and their parents are, in effect, helping to pay this bill.

COLORADO SPRINGS — Acknowledging that 20 years and millions of dollars spent loudly and bitterly attacking the liberal leanings of American campuses have failed to make much of a dent in the way undergraduates are educated, some conservatives have decided to try a new strategy.

They are finding like-minded tenured professors and helping them establish academic beachheads for their ideas.

These initiatives, like the Program in Western Civilization and American Institutions at the University of Texas, Austin, or a project at the University of Colorado here in Colorado Springs, to publish a book of classic texts, are mostly financed by conservative organizations and donors, run by conservative professors. But they have a decidedly nonpartisan and nonideological face.

Their goal is to restore what conservative and other critics see as leading casualties of the campus culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s: the teaching of Western culture and a triumphal interpretation of American history.

“These are not ideological courses,” said James Piereson, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, which created the Veritas Fund for Higher Education to funnel donations to these sorts of projects. The initiatives are only political insofar as they “work against the thrust of programs and courses in gender, race and class studies, and postmodernism in general,” he said.

Now, thanks in part to years of intensive lobbying by the National Association for Scholars, these projects may soon receive federal money as well. The new Higher Education Act, signed into law last month, provides grants for “academic programs or centers” devoted to “traditional American history, free institutions or Western civilization.”

The provision was “fashioned with this movement in mind,” Stephen Balch, a Republican and the founder and president of the association, said after the bill passed Congress, and “will help it gain even greater momentum.”

Scotland School for Veterans Children has made several changes for the new school year, the result of a student protest held at the end of last school year.

In late May several teenage students gathered by a clock on the lawn around the student cottages to petition for changes to certain school rules, policies, curriculum, campus conditions and dress code concerns.
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The dress code was also an important issue for students, who wanted more variety in their school uniforms. The new red polo shirt was a popular addition to student wardrobes, he said, and the boys got longer shorts to reflect a more modern style.

The administration was quick to emphasize to students the importance of the student council, Cramsey said, as the protest last school year could have been avoided if students had realized they could approach their peer representatives. [Full article here]

A three-judge panel agreed that school officials in Watson Chapel, Ark., violated the constitutional rights of three students in 2006 who were disciplined for wearing black armbands or wristbands to school to protest a new policy enforcing school uniforms, and for handing out a flier objecting to the policy.

The administrators agreed in court that the student protest did not disrupt classes or order at the school.

The 8th Circuit panel said that despite restrictive decisions since it was handed down, including the 2007 Supreme Court decision in the so-called "Bong Hits for Jesus" case, "Tinker remains good law." Students in both Tinker and the Watson Chapel case were exercising a right of protest against a government policy — something officials in every school ought to celebrate by example, not denigrate.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) took the occasion to chide Columbia for its lack of on-campus ROTC. "I don't think that's right," Mr. McCain said. "Shouldn't the students here be exposed to the attractiveness of serving in the military, particularly as an officer?" Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) readily agreed, calling Columbia's anti-ROTC stance a "mistake." 

From last night's Democratic debate, as reported by The Hill:

Obama and Edwards both said that they supported withholding funding from higher education institutions that do not provide ROTC programs to students. Clinton initially said she would enforce laws to stop funding but later said of prominent schools that do not have ROTC programs that "there are ways they can work out fulfilling that obligation."

What they were talking about is the Solomon Amendment — a law passed in 1996 (and upheld unanimously by the Supreme Court) that allows the Secretary of Defense to strip a college or university of all Federal funding if the school bans/prohibits ROTC or any other military recruitment on campus.

"Don't ask, don't tell" is a misguided policy. For the time being, though, it is the law of the land, and we see no sign that the Ivies' protest is having any impact on it. Meanwhile, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines defend all Americans, gay or straight.

In the past, discovery for its own sake provided academic motivation, but today's universities function more like corporate research laboratories. Rather than freely sharing techniques and results, researchers increasingly keep new findings under wraps to maintain a competitive edge. What used to be peer-reviewed is now proprietary. "Share and share alike" has devolved into “every laboratory for itself."

In trying to power the innovation economy, we have turned America's universities into cutthroat business competitors, zealously guarding the very innovations we so desperately want behind a hopelessly tangled web of patents and royalty licenses.

What makes this period so critical is that the only way to guarantee that none of these reforms will be carried out is to struggle for the complete cancellation of the new laws. Moreover, an ‘exemplary inner regulation’, which is supposed to impose the application of all recent authoritarian and neo-liberal laws, has been introduced 2 months ago by the Ministry of education. The majority of students stand clearly against all these reforms. The movement and its achievements have made them more self-confident.

On the other hand two seasons of strikes have inevitably caused remarkable fatigue. During this season there have been only a few minor mobilizations (besides, the chief front has been held against the reform of the insurance system, which consists an explicit attack of the government against all working and young people). The major part of students’ effort are now directed towards forcing (by any means, including boycotting) university administrative organs to declare that they are not going to accept any aspect of the law-frame or the exemplary inner regulation (a means that has proved rather, but not absolutely, effective).

This way, the students’ movement is opposed to a large part of the university teachers, who are not willing to fight against the reforms, even if they disapprove of them. It is obvious that a common front between students and teachers is much more difficult to build than it used to be a year ago.

It’s time to rethink the drinking age

In 1984 Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which imposed a penalty of 10% of a state's federal highway appropriation on any state setting its drinking age lower than 21.

Twenty-four years later, our experience as college and university presidents convinces us that...

Twenty-one is not working

A culture of dangerous, clandestine “binge-drinking”—often conducted off-campus—has developed.

Alcohol education that mandates abstinence as the only legal option has not resulted in significant constructive behavioral change among our students.

Adults under 21 are deemed capable of voting, signing contracts, serving on juries and enlisting in the military, but are told they are not mature enough to have a beer.

By choosing to use fake IDs, students make ethical compromises that erode respect for the law.

How many times must we relearn the lessons of prohibition?

We call upon our elected officials:

To support an informed and dispassionate public debate over the effects of the 21 year-old drinking age.

To consider whether the 10% highway fund “incentive” encourages or inhibits that debate.

To invite new ideas about the best ways to prepare young adults to make responsible decisions about alcohol.

We pledge ourselves and our institutions to playing a vigorous, constructive role as these critical discussions unfold.

Health and safety experts have reacted with dismay, because raising the drinking age has saved many lives. In 2001, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reviewed 49 studies published in scientific journals and concluded that alcohol-related traffic crashes involving young people increased 10 percent when the drinking age was lowered in the 1970s and decreased 16 percent when the drinking age was raised. The retreat from a lower drinking age translates into some 900 lives saved each year among 16- to 20-year-olds.
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The college presidents are right about binge drinking. Each year, some 1,700 college students die from causes related to alcohol use; there is also the toll of injuries and sexual assaults fueled by alcohol. But where is the logic of solving the underage drinking problem by lowering the age even more? Henry Wechsler, the Harvard expert whose studies of binge drinking popularized the phrase, put it best, comparing lowering the drinking age to "pouring gasoline to put the fire out."

Work by experts such as Mr. Wechsler, as well as the experience of college officials committed to solutions, shows that strong steps to enforce the law and change the culture can produce results. Instead of talking about lowering the drinking age (and thereby shifting the problem to high schools), colleges should be working to develop better enforcement methods, expand education and counseling, and end pricing practices that make alcohol more accessible and attractive. Then, too, college officials can stop winking at fraternity bashes that, whether they are willing to admit it or not, add to the allure of going off to college.