Monthly Archive

A big fight is looming in the Senate over SAFRA, the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act.

SAFRA is the most ambitious attempt to reform higher education lending in ages. The bill would put the federal government in charge of providing federal student loans — students would borrow money under the same terms as before, but the money that used to go to banking institutions’ overhead and profit would go to education instead.

The passage of SAFRA would provide billions of dollars in new funding to education programs: $4.7 billion this year alone. Starting next year, it would provide a big boost of cash to Pell Grants, reducing the cost of higher education for needy students. And it would simplify the student loan application process too.

SAFRA passed the House of Representatives last September, but it was put on hold in the Senate because of fears of a Republican filibuster. Here’s where things stand now:

Ordinarily, Senate minorities have the power to keep legislation from coming to a vote by filibustering — extending debate indefinitely. It takes 60 votes to end a filibuster. But an exception to the filibuster rule allows the Senate to pass a budget bill every year through a process called “reconciliation,” and that bill only requires a 50-vote majority.

Bills that have a budgetary impact can be added to the budget bill for passage via reconciliation, ao Senate Democrats are now looking to pass SAFRA that way.

But only one reconciliation vote happens each year.

And they’re also looking to pass health care reform through the same process.

It’s likely to get messy.

So that’s the situation. SAFRA is a popular bill, in the Senate and in the country at large, but its future is far from certain. What happens depends on a lot of complicated maneuvering in Congress, and that maneuvering is already well underway. I’ll be following this story as it develops, but for now here are some resources you can use to get more info and find out how to take action:

• The United States Student Association has a SAFRA fact sheet, organizing toolkit (PDF), and other materials.

• The news site Inside Higher Ed published a big, thorough SAFRA story yesterday, with a clear explanation of the bill’s prospects and a bunch of links to more information.

• The House Education and Labor Committee has a SAFRA page here.

On Wednesday night the University of Maryland men’s basketball team beat longtime rivals Duke University, and fans took to the streets. Campus radical Malcolm Harris was with them, and he’s written about what he saw in his column in the campus paper.

“I know as an activist I’m supposed to oppose sports riots,” Harris begins, but after what he saw on Wednesday night, he just can’t bring himself to. Students came together in “celebration and joy” that night, and “for a few hours, a student community existed apart from university structures.” When they chanted MARYLAND they didn’t mean “the buildings or the endowment or the logo”

“We meant one another.”

The night of revelry has been called a riot, and there was some property damage done. (Just how much is in dispute.) But the only real violence, Harris says, was perpetrated by the police who arrested twenty-three students “and beat and pepper-sprayed many more.”

Meanwhile, he says, students came together. White guys in backwards baseball caps yelled at the cops for singling out black students for arrest. When the police started banging their batons on their riot shields, the students yelled “de-FENSE!” in time with the rhythm. They made up chants and heard them spread through the crowd. They picked each other up when they fell. They connected. “Students of all stripes, shoulder to shoulder.”

Student activism has always straddled the line between politics and play, between organizing for social change and acting up for the hell of it. Either impulse can be creative or destructive, either can be deployed for positive or negative ends, but both impulses are, as Harris suggests, inherent to student agitation.

The students who swarmed onto Route 1 were, he says, remembering who they were.

“We are the students, we are not the police. This is our university, not theirs. This feeling has been in short supply … but Wednesday night the air was thick with it.”

Fill us in on an action you’ve done, a piece you’ve written, an event you’ve got coming up … or just pass along a link to the best thing you’ve read this week.

I’ve had a great time out in Wisconsin the last two days, helping out at the state student association’s annual conference. United Council‘s membership, officers, and staff have all been wonderfully warm and generous, and I’ve had a series of amazing conversations about student government, student activism, and the university that will keep me in blogposts for weeks to come.

I’m getting on a plane back home in a couple of hours, but before I go, I wanted to share something I learned about last night.

Founded in 1960, United Council is the oldest surviving state student association in America. But when it was created most American students didn’t have the right to vote. As a result it, like the SSAs that came in its wake, didn’t really start doing serious lobbying and electoral organizing until 1971, when the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution reduced the voting age from 21 to 18.

One of United Council’s first big victories as an electoral advocacy group came in 1974, when the Wisconsin state legislature passed State Statute 36.09(5). That statute reads, in part…

The students of each institution or campus subject to the responsibilities and powers of the board, the president, the chancellor, and the faculty shall be active participants in the immediate governance of and policy development for such institutions. As such, students shall have the primary responsibility for the formulation and review of policies concerning student life, services, and interests. … The students of each institution or campus shall have the right to organize themselves in a manner they determine and to select their representatives to participate in institutional governance.

Students shall be active participants in university governance and policy development. They shall have the primary responsibility for the formulation and review of policies concerning student life. And they shall have the right to organize themselves in a manner they determine.

Good stuff.

Happy 50th birthday, UC.

All throughout the day on March 4, students throughout the country tweeted updates about local actions on Twitter using the #March4 hashtag. (Hashtags are a way for posters on Twitter to find other people’s posts on a particular subject.)

I posted a bunch of #March4 stuff myself, but at the end of the day, I tweeted that I couldn’t wait for #March5. Someone asked why, I and I said “I can’t wait for #March5 because #March5 is what comes after #March4. #March5 is The Future.”

Well, the future is here.

Early in the morning of Friday, March 5, students at the University of Virginia hung a banner from a campus bridge that read “Public Education Is Under Attack — Stand Up Fight Back.”

There was no huge protest at UVA on March 4, no giant rally, no occupation. But activists on that campus are taking that day’s actions as a spur to something new. They’ll be holding a mass meeting on March 19, in conjunction with protests around a speech by Bush administration “torture memo” author John Yoo, and moving forward from there.

#March5 has arrived.