The Observer, April 11, 2008
Volume XL, Issue 24
Outside the Circle
Judge rejects ban on alcohol ads
Last week, a federal judge ruled Virginia's alcohol board violated the First Amendment protections of two student newspapers that challenged a ban on alcohol advertising.
Judge M. Hannah Lauck ruled in the decision that the state board failed to provide adequate evidence for the need to regulate the newspapers. In the decision, the judge recognized there was no evidence that the regulations had curbed alcohol abuse by students, that the advertisements were specifically geared toward under age drinkers, or that the regulation had any type of substantial impact (given the wide exposure of students to alcohol advertising elsewhere).
Student papers at the University of Virginia challenged the ban with support from the American Civil Liberties Union based on the 2004 rejecttion of the Pennsylvania law that prohibited student newspapers from accepting payment for running alcohol advertisements.
If you text in class, this prof will leave
While some professors look the other way when students text during class, Laurence Thomas of Syracuse University will leave the classroom if he catches a student texting or reading a newspaper in class. It doesn't matter if it's one text or a few. If you text, he will leave.
That's what happened last week during a large lecture: a student in the front row sent a text message, and Thomas followed through on his threat (as he had done only days earlier). Afterwards, he sent an e-mail to the university's chancellor, dean, and all the students in the class explaining his actions and frustration with the "brazen" disrespect he had received. He also made sure to comment on the ethnicity of the violator and previous violators: Cuban and Latino.
Thomas expressed frustration that – especially as a minority scholar himself – he would be treated with such disrespect. "One might have thought that for all the talk about racism and the good of social equality, non-white students would be particularly committed to respecting a black professor," Thomas wrote.
Thomas then followed with a second e-mail that addressed the complaints of parents. "Everyone has to understand that respect is a two-way street. I respect you as I endeavor to do, and you respect me. My experience has been that confronting students directly and asking them to stop has virtually no effect. I walk out to underscore the importance of what this means to me," he wrote.
The e-mail went on: "Now, I do not know how this will unfold. But I will either not teach the course PHI 191 in the future or I will simply resign from Syracuse University. But what I will not do is tolerate such brazen disrespect for me. I am an old fashion (sic) individual in that I believe in principles of right and wrong that transcend every race/ethnicity and sexual identity."
The incident has prompted much campus-wide debate regarding what steps are appropriate for an instructor to assure respect during class. Thomas is an award-winning professor and has many fans around campus, but many are disturbed by the incidents that took place last week.
One student criticized, "We the students are the customers, the consumers, the ones who make the choice every day to pay attention or not. I pay approximately $30,000 to go here, whether I text in class or not. Laurence Thomas gets paid whether his students text in class or not. Does he think that this is the first time this has happened on any college campus? Had he acted like nearly 100 percent of the other college professors in this country, he would have shrugged it off and continued with his lecture, which he is getting paid to do. His deterring of the class and exit from the lecture only serves to highlight his own selfishness, as he will get paid while his paying students are having their time and money wasted. He needs to get over himself here."
One person sympathetic to Thomas posted on the website of the student paper The Daily Orange: "You have no idea what it's like trying to teach people and do something positive for them only to have them completely ignore you and disrespect your work by sending text messages or playing tic tac toe during class. It's ridiculous. Not only is it clearly affecting this man's work, but it is affecting the students that he is trying to teach as well."
A spokesperson for the university said Syracuse would not comment on the situation. And Thomas does not fear losing his job. He said that he hasn't been approached by any of his superiors and doesn't expect to be sanctioned. "Since I'm a tenured professor, you'd have to show criminal behavior or gross negligence," he said.
Court win for student downloaders
A group of students at Boston University won an early round in an effort to slow down the recording industry's crackdown on illegal downloading on campuses nationwide, The Boston Globe reported. A federal judge ruled last week that Boston University cannot reveal the names of student downloaders to recording companies until she can review the university's Internet service agreement in order to see what privacy protections it affords. She also demanded to review the names of the students who might have been using the electronic addresses sought by the recording companies. A lawyer representing the recording industry told The Globe that the judge's decision was merely procedural and that the recording industry recognized the privacy rights of students.
