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No time for a full treatment of this right now, but can I just point out something?
There wasn’t a Superbowl riot at U Mass last night.
The AP story on last night’s events on campus says there were no hospitalizations, and no property damage. A university spokesperson says there were a few fistfights, but all thirteen of the student arrests were for either disorderly conduct or failure to disperse.
Why the “failure to disperse” arrests? Because fifteen minutes after students gathered in a main residential quad on campus, police told them to go home. They used horses, dogs, and smokebombs, cops to clear the area, and busted folks who wouldn’t leave. From everything I’ve seen the big drama all came from the cops.
Which is part of why I was a bit disappointed to see supporters of the Occupy movement snarking the U Mass students. No, their Superbowl party wasn’t a political act, but since when do any of us only like political parties? Occupy is about (among many other things) reclaiming public spaces, opposing police harassment, and creating community. Isn’t a mass campus gathering like the one that took place last night presumptively a good thing? Isn’t it a good thing even if we call it a riot?
A couple of years ago, Malcolm Harris — then a campus radical at UMD-College Park, now a writer and Occupy activist in New York — was present at a similar “riot” after Maryland’s basketball team beat Duke. His take on that night is well worth remembering now:
I know as an activist I’m supposed to oppose sports riots. I’m supposed to complain that students are willing to take to the streets when the Terrapin mens’ basketball team wins but not when tuition increases or black enrollment drops. Sadly, I can’t play the alienated radical role today because I was there Wednesday night, and I saw more than drunk revelers.
When students took to Route 1 after a hard-fought victory over Duke, it was with joy and celebration. We chanted “Maaarylaaaand,” and we didn’t mean the buildings or the endowment or the logo. We meant one another.
Student activism (as I wrote then) 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 inherent to student identity, and both are worth celebrating.
Go Terps.
Update | Aaron Bady passes along a fascinating piece on the role of Egyptian soccer fans in that country’s popular uprising. Here’s a taste:
I believe we are witnessing a natural development in an inevitable conflict between two parties that have found themselves following two different paradigms of life: the paradigm of the depression, control, and normalization of apathy versus the paradigm of joyful liberation from the shackles of social and institutional norms to create gratifying chaos.
The latter is what I call “the politics of fun”.
And another:
The key to understanding the Ultras phenomenon is to imagine it as a way of life for these youth. For them, becoming a football fan became a symbolic action that was both joyful and a means of self-expression. But the broader social, psychological, and cultural contexts were unable to adapt to the groups’ activities, in part by virtue of their rebellious nature and their defiance of norms.
Matt Yglesias recently linked to the above chart on college enrollment as an illustration of the huge size of the American community college student body. His thoughts on that subject are well made and worth reading, but it’d be a missed opportunity to end the discussion there.
Here’s a few other things that jumped out at me:
- American higher education is overwhelmingly public. A full 77% of American college students are enrolled at public colleges and universities.
- The for-profit sector is a tiny sliver of higher education enrollment, despite its outsized share of government grant and loan money.
- Private research universities enroll only 4% of American undergrads, just one fifth as many as public research universities do.
- Traditional non-profit private universities and colleges enroll only 15% of undergrads, and about a quarter of students in bachelors degree granting programs.
- Taking private and public institutions together, only 24% of US undergraduates are enrolled at research universities.
Yglesias is right to point out the cultural invisibility of community college students, but our myopia extends far beyond the two-year/four-year split. Americans’ image of undergraduates is based on a higher education model that hasn’t existed in reality in generations, and those distortions have far-reaching effects on public policy and public opinion.
(Note: I haven’t been able to find the source for this chart, so it’s possible that some of its figures may be off. It does seem to reflect Carnegie data, however.)
The New Yorker has published a major new article by Ian Parker on the September 2010 death of Rutgers first-year Tyler Clementi. Clementi, targeted by his roommate in a campaign of webcam spying and harassment, killed himself by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. His roommate, Dharun Ravi, will face trial next month on a long list of charges arising from the incident.
The article provides the fullest and clearest account to date of the circumstances that led to Clementi’s suicide, and it’s well worth reading. But it bungles some important elements of the story, and bungles them in ways that serve to obscure important questions.
Here’s a crucial passage debunking the received wisdom about the incident:
“It became widely understood that a closeted student at Rutgers had committed suicide after video of him having sex with a man was secretly shot and posted online. In fact, there was no posting, no observed sex, and no closet.”
Well, sort of.
I wrote about the Clementi suicide on the day it broke, and on a number of occasions afterward, and I don’t particularly recognize this “widely understood” narrative. In fact, each of the three supposed debunkings muddies the waters on complex issues.
First there is the question of whether Clementi was “closeted.” Clearly he was openly gay in some circles. But as Parker himself reports, he had come out to his parents less than a month before he died, just three days before he started school at Rutgers. He had not been out in high school, and Ravi only learned he was gay by uncovering anonymous message board posts associated with Clementi’s email address. “Out” is not a binary concept, and it’s not at all unreasonable to describe Davi’s actions — telling his friends Clementi was gay and posting the news on a public Twitter account — as “outing.”
Second, there’s the question of whether Ravi saw Clementi having sex while he was spying via webcam. Ravi says he didn’t, and there’s no evidence to refute his claim. At the time Ravi boasted on Twitter of having seen Clementi “making out,” and from Parker’s account that does seem like the most accurate description. But to say there was “no observed sex” remains problematic. Setting aside the possibility that Ravi saw more than he claims, the fact is he attempted to spy on Clementi having sex and tweeted that he had caught him in the act.
Immediately after the first incident, Ravi’s friend Molly Wei, who had spied on Clementi with him, IM’ed a friend “OH MY FKING GOD … he’s kissing a guy right now … like THEY WERE GROPING EACH OTHER EWW.” Given that context, the question of how much skin the two saw, and in what exact configuration, seems somewhat beside the point.
Finally, there is the issue of whether the video was “posted online.” Here Parker is on stronger ground, as initial reporting did suggest that the webcam footage was broadcast, when in fact it was not. On the one occasion in which Ravi was successful in spying on Clementi, the stream only went as far as Wei’s dorm room, and was neither distributed nor archived.
But — again, as Parker himself reports — when Clementi asked for the dorm room again days later, Ravi announced on Twitter that he would share the stream with “anyone with iChat” who was reading his feed. Ravi described the event as “a viewing party,” and solicited friends to watch both in person and online. It’s only because Clementi was surreptitiously monitoring Ravi’s Twitter account that he knew to turn off Ravi’s computer before anything could be broadcast that night.
So no, Ravi didn’t share the stream. But he did try to, and he tried to share it widely.
Parker isn’t wrong about any of these things, not exactly. But in each case his rush to correct the record winds up understating Ravi’s bad acts. Even if Clementi wasn’t “closeted,” Ravi still outed him inappropriately, multiple times. Even if Ravi didn’t spy on Clementi having sex, he still violated his privacy by snooping on intimate sexual acts. And if he didn’t broadcast those acts to a wide audience, it wasn’t for a lack of trying.
And Parker’s habit of obscuring through nitpicking extends to the more basic issue of what the hell Ravi was up to in the first place. Parker returns again and again to the question of whether Ravi’s act rises to the level of the bias crime of anti-gay intimidation with which he has been charged, at one point suggesting that the charge represents an “attempt to criminalize teen-age odiousness by using statutes aimed at people more easily recognizable as hate-mongers and perverts.”
But this is a false dichotomy, and a bizarre one. There is no question as to whether Ravi was anti-gay — he expressed his revulsion at Clementi’s orientation repeatedly and gleefully. That this wasn’t the vicious bigotry of the “hate-monger” is hardly a defense of his actions.
What’s obvious from Parker’s reporting, but which seems to have escaped Parker himself, is the particular kind of asshole Ravi is. No, he’s not a hate-fueled homophobe. He’s not a basher or a zealot. He’s just a garden-variety douchebag. He’s the kind of guy who, on learning that his assigned college roommate is gay, posts about it on Twitter along with a link to that roommate’s postings on a gay message board. He’s the kind of guy who tries to trick his friends into installing monitoring software so he can turn their bedroom computers into spycams. He’s the kind of guy who texts his friends to say that he hates poor people and that January is “a gay month.”
Parker thinks his portrayal of Ravi raises hard questions about the government’s prosecution, but I have to admit that I fail to see what those questions are. The qualified defenses he offers for Ravi’s character are ones I addressed in a blogpost the day after this story first broke in 2010, and the lessons I gleaned then are the ones I glean now:
Dharun Ravi acted like a jackass in the first month of his first year of college. He behaved with casual cruelty and lack of concern for Clementi’s well-being. He gave no thought to the consequences of his actions for himself or others. And now Clementi is dead and Ravi’s life is ruined, and there’s no question at all that Ravi set those two calamities in motion.
Dharun Ravi acted like a jackass in the first month of his first year in college, and it ruined his life.
The trial of Dharun Ravi, who as a first-semester Rutgers student in the fall of 2010 allegedly drove his gay roommate to suicide with anti-gay harassment, may be televised on cable.
Ravi is said to have spied on Tyler Clementi twice via webcam while Clementi and another man hooked up in the two students’ dorm room, and to have livestreamed the feed online, encouraging his Twitter followers to tune in. Clementi sought help online and from his RA before committing suicide by jumping off the George Washington bridge a day later.
At a hearing on Friday, neither prosecutors nor defense attorneys raised objections to televising the trial, which is likely to begin in March. The judge in the case indicated that he would allow the broadcast to take place if the camera’s operation was unobtrusive within the courtroom.
I was recently asked a really interesting request from a Canadian student activist, and I’ve received permission to share it, and my answer, with you all.
His question:
I’ve been looking into starting graduate school in 2013. I found myself naturally drawn to [a private college in New England] but after some basic research I get the feeling that despite their claims of championing social justice & democracy, there does not seem to be a legitimate accredited representative student body on campus. I find myself doubting that I will ever be able to truly enjoy my educational experience at a school that doesn’t have progressive/radical student representation.
So my question to you is: do you have a basic list of some schools in the states that have such representation? I know the Student Union model varies quite intensively between Canada and the USA, but I’m still hoping there may be a few schools out there that have the sort of Union I’m looking for.
My response:
It’s a good question, and not one that has a really straightforward answer. Instead, some general thoughts.
The basic unit of campus representation of students in the US is generally the student government, sometimes called the student association or something similar. (Graduate students and undergrads are typically organized separately.) Student governments range from very weak to fairly strong, with a few general trends visible.
First, and probably most importantly, student governments at public colleges are usually more robust than those at private institutions. Public universities are responsive to political pressure in ways that privates aren’t, and they tend to be more likely to have policies in place ensuring a measure of student autonomy and representation in campus governance. When student activists fought for university reform in the late sixties and after, it was in the public universities that they had the most success, and those successes are still visible on some campuses today.
A second indicator of the strength of student government is the existence of a statewide student association, or SSA. SSAs are most often constituted as federations of student governments within a public university system, and they tend to be established outside the control of the university itself. (In contrast, campus student governments generally exist within the university governance system, and are subject to administrative interference.)
The presence of an SSA in a university system is an indication that the student governments within that system have a history of students’ rights organizing. Many SSAs also foster a culture of student engagement with university governance issues while representing a check on administrative meddling in student affairs. Similarly, campuses that are members of the United States Student Association are generally at least a bit more likely to have activist student governments.
Looking beyond the student government world, some sites of institutionally significant student organizing to keep an eye out for are graduate student employees’ unions, Occupy-affiliated mobilizations, and chapters of groups like Students for a Democratic Society. These groups aren’t directly embedded in university governance like the ones discussed above, but they often represent a pro-student force in campus struggles.
So. That’s what I came up with. I’m eager to hear from y’all on this — I suspect that some of you may have different and better advice than I do.
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