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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.
Louisiana State University has one reason to be pleased about yesterday’s 21-0 loss to Alabama in the BCS championship game — the defeat saved the school from a six million dollar outlay.
LSU football coach Les Miles made $3.75 million in salary this year, plus another $400,000 in bonuses for winning the SEC championship and qualifying for the BCS. But he missed a huge payday by losing yesterday, since his contract has a clause guaranteeing him an automatic salary hike to $1,000 more than the highest-paid public university coach in the SEC if he ever wins a national championship.
That highest paid coach happens to be Alabama’s Nick Saban, who made $4.7 million this year (plus $400,000 for beating LSU yesterday). Over the six years remaining on Miles’s contract, that bump would have worked out to exactly $5,706,000.
The LSU system raised tuition some $14 million this year, with plans for another $38 million in 2012-13. Miles’s salary hike would have amounted to $40 per student per year.
Whew.
See updates at bottom of post.
In 1998 Jerry Sandusky, a prominent assistant coach on Penn State’s top-ranked football team — and a possible successor to Joe Paterno as the team’s head coach — groped an 11-year-old boy in the team’s showers. The boy’s mother learned of this incident, she reported it to Penn State police. Sandusky later admitted to police that he had hugged the boy naked in the showers.
No charges were brought, and Sandusky retired the following year, retaining emeritus status at Penn State, an office in the university’s football building, and full access to the team’s facilities.
In 2000 Penn State janitors witnessed Sandusky performing oral sex on a male child in the football team’s showers. They reported the incident to their supervisor, who took no action. The janitors, fearing that they would lose their jobs if they took the matter forward, made no formal complaint about the incident.
In 2002 a Penn State graduate coaching assistant witnessed Sandusky anally raping a ten-year-old boy in the team’s showers. He told coach Joe Paterno, and then Penn State Athletic Director Tim Curley and Vice President for Finance and Business Gary Schultz, the latter of whom had authority over the university’s police. None of these officials reported the allegations to any police agency, nor did Penn State president Graham B. Spanier when he was notified.
Sandusky continued to have access to Penn State facilities, and to travel with the team, until his arrest Saturday on 40 counts of sexual abuse, allegations involving eight victims and incidents stretching from 1994 to 2009. Curley and Schultz have been indicted on perjury and failure to report charges stemming from the 2002 incident. Schultz has retired, and Curley has been placed on administrative leave, while Spanier and Paterno remain in their positions.
Spanier has said he has “complete confidence in how” Curley and Schultz “handled the allegations.” The university is paying the two men’s legal bills.
Paterno has more victories than any football coach in NCAA Division I history. His salary stands in excess of one million dollars a year, making him the highest-paid employee at Penn State.
Update | A statement from NCAA president Mark Emmert Monday evening condemned the sexual abuse of children but made no reference to the alleged Penn State coverup of Sandusky’s behavior.
Second Update | Paterno just canceled his weekly press conference, less than an hour before it was to begin.
Third Update, 12:20 pm | The New York Times is reporting that Penn State officials have decided that Paterno will not remain at Penn State, and that his departure could come “within days or weeks.”
Fourth Update, 1:25 pm | Now the Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that support for Paterno and Spanier is “eroding” on the Penn State Board of Trustees, and that the board could vote to remove both as soon as Thursday.
Fourth Update, Wednesday 9:30 am | A thousand Penn State students marched in response to the ongoing crisis last night, many of them supporters of Coach Paterno. Some called for the resignation of President Spanier, while others simply declared their support for Penn State itself.
Fifth Update, Wednesday 10:10 am | The Associated Press is now reporting that Paterno will retire at the end of this season. Penn State’s trustees met last night by phone and will meet again this evening — they are expected to announce the formation of a committee to investigate the scandal on Friday.
“Student fees in state universities are usually confined to minor charges for matriculation, gymnasium, laboratory materials, and breakages, etc., which rarely amount to more than $50 a year for undergraduates. With the exception of Vermont none of the institutions in this group charges a regular tuition fee to residents of their respective states except in the professional departments, and in a few cases in engineering colleges. … The total revenue from student fees in 1910-1911, excluding board and rental of rooms, exceeded $100,000 in only six of the state universities — California, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin, Michigan leading with $339,000. … The University of Washington, with half as many students as Michigan, but with only 277 professional students out of 2142, received from student fees $15,000. In contrast to these figures of the revenues from student fees, should be placed those of Harvard, $651,000, Chicago, $581,000, and Columbia, including the Teacher’s College and Summer School, $1,164,000.”
—A Cyclopedia of Education, edited by Paul Monroe, 1913.
Youth culture scholars Danah Boyd and Alice Marwick have a thought-provoking op-ed in today’s New York Times, one that challenges a lot of the assumptions teachers and parents bring to bullying discussions.
High school students, they’ve found, rarely use the word bullying to describe even the most obvious examples of such behavior. Instead, they — particularly girls — dismiss it as “drama.”
Dismissing a conflict that’s really hurting their feelings as drama lets teenagers demonstrate that they don’t care about such petty concerns. They can save face while feeling superior to those tormenting them by dismissing them as desperate for attention. Or, if they’re the instigators, the word drama lets teenagers feel that they’re participating in something innocuous or even funny, rather than having to admit that they’ve hurt someone’s feelings. Drama allows them to distance themselves from painful situations.
Adults want to help teenagers recognize the hurt that is taking place, which often means owning up to victimhood. But this can have serious consequences. To recognize oneself as a victim — or perpetrator — requires serious emotional, psychological and social support, an infrastructure unavailable to many teenagers. And when teenagers like Jamey do ask for help, they’re often let down.
No student wants to be identified as a victim. And so…
Antibullying efforts cannot be successful if they make teenagers feel victimized without providing them the support to go from a position of victimization to one of empowerment. When teenagers acknowledge that they’re being bullied, adults need to provide programs similar to those that help victims of abuse. And they must recognize that emotional recovery is a long and difficult process.
Boyd and Marwick highlight a fundamental contradiction in anti-bullying campaigns. Adult rhetoric treats bullying as serious business, but adults in positions of power in such environments rarely exercise that power in ways that back up that rhetoric.
Adults: think back to the worst example of bullying you experienced or witnessed in high school. Now imagine that behavior taking place in a workplace, an adult social setting, a college classroom. Imagine how it would be addressed in such a context. The gap between what you imagine and what you saw in high school is the gap between society’s rhetoric on bullying and students’ reality. And in most cases that gap is vast.
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