University credits for protests

Real Clear Education reports:

Anti-Kavanaugh activists were caught red-handed last week in a scheme to award academic credit at the University of Southern Maine (USM) to students who joined an effort to intimidate Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) into voting against the judge’s confirmation. On the event page posted by the university’s Community Outreach Coordinator, Gabriel Demaine, students are asked if they are “willing to get arrested” after being bussed to Washington D.C. “to join activists, political action groups and social justice organizations to meet with Sen. Collins,” and “rally up around the FBI investigation of the Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh.”

Amazing. Course credits for getting arrested at a protest.

When the story of this misuse of the public university came to the attention of the Maine Republican Party, it protested and the university president, Glenn Cummings, hastily announced that the course was canceled. President Cummings’ chief concern was that the course “was not appropriately reviewed.” He did, however, also acknowledge that “taxpayer funded institutions must be non-partisan” and “institutionally impartial.”

But the course, titled “Engaged Citizenship,” was not a strange outlier at the University of Southern Maine. Indeed there are thousands of such courses, funded by taxpayers, at public universities across the country. “Engaged Citizenship” stood out because it happened to hit at a moment of heightened public attention to political extremists twisting civic norms to seek partisan advantage. 

So there may be hundreds of courses like this. Any equivalent in NZ?