For Student Power

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Direct Action Gets the Goods

09/23/2008 - 3:00am

Here's a great example of students taking matters into their own hands, and bypassing "authorized" methods of student participation (student government/council).

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.
[...]
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 counc...

A Court Victory for Student Free Speech

09/17/2008 - 3:00am

Earlier this month, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reaffirmed the right of public school students to criticize school policies. The First Amendment Center:

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 exer...

Militarized Campuses: a Bipartisan Affair

09/13/2008 - 3:00am

rotc Last week, Barack Obama confirmed what many had hoped was a misstatement made in the primaries. Washington Post:

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."

Flash back several months:

From last night's Democratic debate, as reported by Read more >

When Academia Puts Profit Ahead of Wonder

09/09/2008 - 3:00am

I ran into a great NYTimes article describing the changing face of the hard sciences at Universities, and their tanglings with massive bio/tech corporations. It boxes in creativity and innovation, and pushes the distorting effects of the market into one more aspect of academia (and apparently is actually a money losing proposition for most schools!). And while the article doesn't bring it up, let's not forget how much this is encouraged by having the very same corporate CEOs and VPs on our Boards of Directors/Regents. From the article:

In the past, discovery for its own sake provided academic motivation, but today's universities function more like corporate research laboratories. Rather than freely shari...

Update on the Greek Student Movement

09/04/2008 - 3:00am

In prep for a presentation I'm giving at Muhlenberg College this weekend, I ran into a nice (if a bit dated - April 2008) summation of the current state of the student movement in Greece - particularly its resistance to neoliberal "reforms." (Check out our earlier coverage of the issue early last year for some background.) Apparently the joint work between students and faculty against these reforms has for the most part collapsed. It's partially understandable: faculty as a rule, nomatter how sympathetic they are to the cause, risk much more when they protest than students do.

From the SEF:

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 i...

Those Drunk on Pabst vs. Those Drunk with Power

08/26/2008 - 3:00am

Drunk vs. Drunk! Recently the classic drinking-age debate was rekindled when dozens of College and University Presidents signed onto the Amethyst Initiative, which is at this point a simple statement, which reads:

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 &ld...

4 Decades from '68, South Africa Remembers a Student Fight Against Apartheid

08/19/2008 - 3:00am

Cape Town University, South Africa The student protests and revolutions that swept across the world in 1968 and 1969 still have a powerful effect on the people and institutions we live with and within today. In Cape Town, South Africa, it is no different. From Cape Argus [emphasis mine]:

The University of Cape Town is awash with nostalgia this week as it pays tribute to a student protest that shook the campus exactly 40 years ago, after a black academic was prevented from taking up a post there during apartheid.

On Sunday a group of ex-students, now in their 60s, reunited at Bremner Building in a room that changed their lives - and the student movement in the country - in August 1968.

During this month,...

Still Forgotten?

08/05/2008 - 3:00am

The plight of American Indian communities, to average Americans, is usually either relegated to some distant past or outright ignored. If you're educated, maybe you'll remember reading about the Trail of Tears, or Wounded Knee (probably not Pine Ridge though).

But what about indigenous peoples today? They're largely broken, exiled to barren reservations, faced with an indifferent - or hostile - government, and casino-corrupted leaders.

This makes it all the more important that we sit up and take notice when they rise up and assert their collective rights, despite an almost total media blackout.

The stage is D-Q University, California's only Native College, and the only one of its kind outside a reservation. It is a two-year school, founded in 1971 as a direct ...

News Roundup: 7/28/08

07/28/2008 - 3:00am

New Zealand students offer new bounty for arrest of Condoleezza Rice for war crimes

IHT:

A group of New Zealand students offered a higher reward Saturday for the citizen's arrest of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for war crimes after another group withdrew their own bounty, accusing police of threatening them.

Canadian student faces deportation from Israel following protest

CBC:

A Canadian student who took part in a protest against the security wall Israel's building in the West Bank has been arrested and faces deportation from the Jewish state.

Victor McDiarmid, a volunteer for the International Solidarity Movement, had been living in the West Bank for nearly a month when he was arres...

Chilean students and teachers stike against LGE [UPDATED]

06/20/2008 - 3:00am

The Chilean student movement, which recently has been no stranger to fighting the government (and winning), has over the past month been organizing and demonstrating against the proposed General Education Law (LGE), a sweeping piece of legislation that will fundamentally change the way education is structured in Chile. There was no input on the bill from the people most affected by the legislation: teachers and students.