Thanks to the latest issue of Sierra magazine I have discovered a really rad campus program called Dump and Run, where local campus groups establish a program to collect all the perfectly usable items that students throw into the dumpster at the end of the year when they move out of apartments or dorm rooms – furniture, canned food, clothing, etc. They then sell them in a big garage sale as a fundraiser for the local groups running the program. The national Dump and Run nonprofit lends the organizations its nonprofit status and helps in setting up the campus program. The pilot program at University of Richmond has been really successful, reducing the solid waste being hauled away at the end of the year by 50% within two years. Here at Auburn we’re hoping to set up a collaboration between Auburn Women’s Organization and Environmental Awareness Organization for running the program. Woo hoo! </p

The best part of all: the organization was actually created based on its’ founder’s experiences dumpster diving at Syracuse University and University of Richmond!

I laughed out loud at reading the latest riposte to David Horowitz’s BS, as David Mazel tests the free speech mettle of Right-wing campus newspapers (including the University of Alabama’s own Crimson White) by submitting an ad proclaiming in bold letters that 1) abortion is not murder and 2) God is an abortionist [Salon.com]. The results?

In an April 2 article in Salon, Horowitz wrote that his own ad had been accepted by 14 of 48 papers. His 29 percent acceptance rate is certainly nothing for the left to cheer about, but it sure beats my own paltry 9 percent.

Of course, I should be clear that I don’t think Right-wing campus newspapers should have to run left-wing outsider ads any more than neutral or Left-wing campus newspapers should have to run Horowitz’s crap. But I do love a good skewering of the Right’s hypocrisy from time to time. (Oh, damn, I’m criticizing David Horowitz, but I’m not running a David Horowitz banner ad on my page! I am such a PC thug that I am censoring his free speech!)

A coalition of stakeholders has joined forces to ensure communication and coordination between seven of the organizations that voted No Confidence in the Board of Trustees recently. This is one of the most positive developments I’ve seen in a long time. Hear Hear! award goes to Martin Olliff: When you speak with a united voice … people aren’t able to say it’s just a few malcontents. Indeed. Building a powerful network of information and self-defense between University shareholders, is the only way that the Board is ever going to be taken down.

Not to pursue my unhealthy obsession with David Horowitz further, but I found a note on IndyMedia about an excellent article on Horowitz and the Myth of the Radical University.

Thanks to conservative author David Horowitz’s recent lecture at the University of Texas, I have new hope for radical political organizing on campus.

Many of us on the faculty with left/progressive values have felt rather isolated on what we all thought was a conservative campus. But it turns out that all this time we’ve been working in a nest of left-wing radicals who have over-run the place, leaving conservatives cowering in silence.

At least that’s Horowitz’s analysis. University faculties around the country, including UT, are skewed far to the left as a result of conservative professors being systematically purged, according to Horowitz, a one-time leftist turned right-winger.

My colleagues and I are hoping Horowitz will help us find where all these radicals are hiding; more company would be nice.

After doing activist work both in a staunchly liberal small liberal arts college in Michigan, and in a big, heavily conservative university in Alabama, I can only say Amen! to someone actually taking the time to point out that, contrary to popular opine, The fact, however, is that the typical American university is dominated by centrist to moderately conservative faculty members and administrators, with steady movement to the right in the past two decades.

Reading Salon.com News: Who’s afraid of the big bad Horowitz? brings back memories of, well, just a few weeks ago, actually. Since I have myself protested an advertisement in our campus newspaper, it strikes me that many of the people writing on this topic seem to have no idea of what the real issue is here (although those who note that David Horowitz is a self-aggrandizing pig making publicity for himself on the backs of young journalists, are not far off).

This is simply not a free press issue. Horowitz was not being censored by some evil cabal of thuggish p.c. mavens, and if the so-called Human Life Alliance’s pamphlet had not been distributed in The Plainsman, they would not have been censored either. Student newspapers are incapable of denying them a forum for their views, since David Horowitz and the HLA are rather rich national figures, and Horowitz is himself a columnist in Salon. The point of a campus newspaper, however, is not to give a voice to well-positioned outsiders who have enough money to buy their way in. The whole point is to give students an open forum.

This doesn’t mean that all political advertisements from outside sources should be banned, since I recognize that student newspapers do need to make money somehow. However, it is extremely hypocritical for Horowitz to pose as some kind of martyr to censorship. Particularly when he and his colleagues are doing it in the pages of a webzine which reaches literally millions more readers than campus newspapers could ever hope to reach.

If Horowitz and the HLA really want to make their voices heard, they ought to write a damn Letter to the Editor like everyone else, or else take their commercial advertisement where it belongs: a commercial newspaper.