Monday, December 15, 2008
Campus evangelism - a crime?
Here is a link to the following free speech story.
The so-called "free-speech code" of Yuba Community College District is under federal court scrutiny.
"A campus police officer came over and told him that if he continued to do so without a permit that he would be possibly expelled or arrested, and so Ryan stopped immediately," she explains.
Hacker says Dozier thought the case was closed, but he was apparently mistaken. "Three weeks later he got a certified letter from the president of the college stating that his actions were the subject of a campus crime report," she adds. "Last time I checked, sharing your faith on a public college campus was not a crime."
But the letter informed him he could face expulsion if he shared his faith on campus again. ADF filed suit, and a federal judge has ordered the college to suspend enforcement of its highly restricted free speech policies until the lawsuit is resolved
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Campus crime headlines
Police are investigating what officials at Kutztown University have said may have been a hit-and-run that seriously injured a student on a parking lot of the school's South Campus in Berks County early this morning. We're told a university police officer found Christine McGhee, 20, lying in a parking lot.
Court to decide if campus evangelism is a crime
California student, Ryan Dozier, decided to spend some time on campus sharing his faith and handing out tracts to fellow students, generating conversations about Christianity. Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) attorney Heather Hacker comments on the situation.
“A campus police officer came over and told him that if he continued to do so without a permit that he would be possibly expelled or arrested, and so Ryan stopped immediately,” she explains.
Hacker says Dozier thought the case was closed, but he was apparently mistaken. “Three weeks later he got a certified letter from the president of the college stating that his actions were the subject of a campus crime report,” she adds. “Last time I checked, sharing your faith on a public college campus was not a crime.”
The Daily Campus has a new police blotter policy: questionable timing
As of last Sunday, The Daily Campus has enacted a new policy regarding its weekly police blotter. The policy, which has not been announced to the paper’s readers, dictates that the popular weekly feature will be removed from the paper’s website after it has been up for a week (previous policy dictated that the story stay up indefinitely).
In theory, the move, which was approved by the paper’s editors, is okay. Proponents of the change would argue that having arrest information online can haunt someone years down the road, when potential employers google their names. Opponents would say that the blotter is simply a factual record of an arrest, and it is not a newspaper’s responsibility to babysit people’s reputations.
However, that argument does not interest me. What does interest me is that the DC made the decision to take the blotter off the web the week after a close friend of its editor-in-chief was arrested. More after the jump.
Sexual assault more prevalent than reported
Sexual assault is three times more common at Yale than the University’s official crime statistics reflect, according to a new report issued by the campus sexual offense resource center.
The report from the Sexual Harassment Assault Resources & Education Center records the number of calls to the center’s response line in the 2007-’08 school year. By that count, there were 24 reported incidents of sexual assault at Yale last year.
The University Report on Campus Security, however, lists just eight alleged forcible sex offenses in 2007.
In response to allegations that Yale was underreporting sexual offenses, the U.S. Department of Education began investigating the University for its compliance with federal reporting requirements in 2004. Since then, the University has reviewed and reformed its protocols for handling reports of sexual crimes.