Daily Archive

Turns out I missed the exact anniversary — it was on Tuesday — but it’s been one year since studentactivism.net went live. In honor of that milestone, here’s a list of the site’s top ten search terms ever and the posts that inspired them…

10: sds wiki

Back in January I wrote about a very cool wiki that Students for Democratic Society had set up. Unfortunately, the wiki hasn’t been functioning for a while, but I’m hoping they’ll bring it back online soon.

9: obama youth ball

I wrote six stories in January about the Obama youth inaugural ball, covering controversies over the event’s logistics and message, as well as the decision to sell exclusive television rights to MTV.

8: bill ayers

Former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers’ name pops up on the site with some regularity, but most of the search traffic he’s received here came because of a post about someone else — student activist and antiwar radical David Ifshin, who became a friend of John McCain’s after the war ended.

7: self-entitled college students

This search is for references to a recent journal article that purported to find a strong “sense of entitlement” among American students. The article has major flaws, some of which I’ve discussed here and here. (And yes, I’ve got a third post on the article planned. I’ll write it eventually.)

6: julea ward

Julea Ward’s prominence on this list, just a week after I wrote about her, is a testament not only to public interest in her lawsuit against Eastern Michigan University, but also to the effect of including an easily Googlable name in the title of a post.

5: new school in exile

Eighteen posts so far on these New York City activists, and I’m working on another.

4: tulane rape

I’ve posted on three different stories relating to sexual violence at Tulane — the university’s failure to investigate charges made by the student government relating to druggings and possible rapes at one fraternity’s parties, the mild punishment the university meted out to a student accused of committing rape in the Tulane dorms, and a case in which a student claimed he’d been sexually assaulted  by a campus police officer. 

3: hillary clinton

Last May I posted about Secretary Clinton’s relationship to the campus radicalism of the 1960s, and in December I wrote about some parallels between the story of an Obama speechwriter’s groping of a life size Clinton cut-out and that of a campus prank that took place a hundred years earlier.

2: york university strike

Although few US citizens noticed at the time, one of Canada’s largest universities was shut down for three months this winter by the third-longest higher education strike in Canada’s history. Many of the strikers were graduate students, and undergraduates were active in organizing both in support of and in opposition to the strike, so it was a natural story for this site. 

1: student activism

That’s what we’re here for. Thanks for a great year.