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Via the blog Bitch PhD comes a link to an online Student Voting Rights Guide from the Brennan Center for Justice.
It’s an interactive guide — you specify whether you’re voting on campus or from your pre-college hometown, and it shows you the regulations on registration, residency, identification, and absentee voting for all fifty states. The rules show up as a color-coded map, and you can click through for specific information.
It’s a great resource for activists planning GOTV campaigns. Spread the word!
Back in May, we reported on an online survey that Mother Jones magazine was conducting on contemporary student activism. (At the time, we noted that the survey’s title, “Are Today’s Student Activists Lazy?”, seemed oddly hostile to student organizing.)
Well, it’s back-to-school time, and the survey results have been posted, along with a cartoon guide to the varieties of present-day campus activists and a handful of other sidebars.
We’ll be posting an annotation of their “Student Activism Firsts” timeline later this week, and we’re interested in hearing your thoughts on that and the rest of the feature — feel free to post them here, or in the comments section over there.
We met a bunch of amazing folks at the USSA Congress last week, and we’ll be passing along news about the great work they’re doing in the days to come. To start the ball rolling, here’s a blog that a student from Massachusetts clued us in to: For Student Power. It’s not updated all that frequently, but the stuff that does go up is worth the wait.
If any of our new readers (or old friends) have suggestions for links, pass them along in comments. Thanks!
In the last couple of weeks we’ve linked to three articles from WireTap magazine — a discussion of student organizing around sustainable food practices on campus, an overview of today’s student anti-nuclear organizing, and yesterday an interview with youth vote expert Michael Connery. Each of our three posts were quick heads-ups, but the articles we linked to were strong, smart, and detailed.
WireTap describes itself as a “news and culture magazine by and for young people interested in social change, and a place to “hear from young activists as they articulate their vision and describe their work that turns individual hopes into collective, political possibilities.”
They’re a great resource, and a great read. We’ve just added them to our blogroll.
WireTap magazine has a fascinating interview up on youth electoral organizing. The interviewee is blogger Michael Connery, whose new book Youth to Power: How Today’s Young Voters are Building Tomorrow’s Progressive Majority is at the top of our reading list.
We’ve added Connery’s blog, Future Majority, to our blogroll.
Last month we reported that the University of Ottawa was considering imposing a new code of student conduct governing non-academic activities.
The university has seen a wave of student activism in the last two years, and students have expressed concern that this new code may be used to clamp down on campus organizing.
Shortly after our last report, several hundred students marched in protest against the proposed code. Opponents of the code have also created a blog to aid in their organizing effort.
(The above article says that several blogs and a Facebook group have been created, but we’ve only been able to uncover the one blog linked to above. If anyone is aware of other resources created by the Ottawa organizers, let us know and we’ll update this post.)
Last week we reported about Anna Minkinow, a Tulane student who brought a complaint against a fellow student for raping her in a dorm and then mounted a campus protest when he was found guilty of sexual misconduct, but neither expelled nor suspended.
This afternoon an anonymous commenter passed along word that Minkinow has started a blog. Here’s how she describes her project:
MY NAME IS ANNA, AND, AS OF JULY 2007, I BECAME A SEXUAL ASSAULT SURVIVOR. AFTER MY ATTACKER BEAT THE UNIVERSITY JUDICIAL SYSTEM AND A WHIRLWIND OF AGONIES, POLITICS, AND LOSSES FOLLOWED, I BECAME A NEW TYPE OF SURVIVOR. THIS IS THE PROCESS BY WHICH I AM BECOMING A DIFFERENT TYPE OF SURVIVOR THAN I WAS FOR THE NINE MONTHS IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING THE ATTACK. THESE THOUGHTS, ACTIVISM PROJECTS, AND MOLTEN ENERGIES ARE HOW I WILL ENSURE THAT THERE WILL BE AN UNPRECEDENTED CHANGE NONE CAN IGNORE.
We’ll be following Anna’s blog, and we thank the commenter for passing along the link.
There’s a new addition to the “Resources” section of our blogroll this morning — SAFER Campus.
SAFER Campus is a non-profit organization that supports student campaigns to improve sexual assault prevention and response on their campuses. Founded at Columbia University in 1999 and incorporated the following year, SAFER Campus provides organizing trainings, mentoring, and publications to student activists throughout the United States.
On top of everything else, they’ve got a great blog. Check ‘em out.
An off-campus end-of-semester party turned into a melee in Middletown, Connecticut Thursday night, as Wesleyan students clashed with police.
One report contends that used pepper spray, tasers, and dogs on the students, five of whom were arrested on incitement to riot and other charges.
Before dawn, as many as sixty students converged on the police department to file complaints about officers’ tactics.
The Wesleyan student newspaper, the Argus, published a special edition on the disturbance on Friday. Wesleyan blog Wesleying has been covering the situation as it develops.
Update: Here’s an analysis of the events of Thursday night that struck me as well worth reading.
Washington University in St. Louis conferred an honorary degree on anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly today, as a significant portion of the university’s 2800 graduates turned their backs.
The move to honor Schlafly was met with protest and outrage from the start. WU chancellor Mark Wrighton apologized on Wednesday for the “the anguish this decision has caused,” but refused to reverse it.
A website created by opponents of the honor calls Schlafly “someone who has spent 40 years advocating for censorship of literature and art, railing against the teaching of evolution in schools, and thwarting equal rights for women, gays, and lesbians.”
Schlafly has described the protesters as “bitter,” “tacky,” and “a bunch of losers.”
Update: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch says about a third of the graduates turned their backs on Schlafly. A Feministing correspondent estimated that 75% did.
Twenty international students at the University of Sussex in England have been banned from taking final exams because they have fallen behind in their tuition payments.
More than 150 Sussex students staged a protest against the decision late last week. The president of the university’s student union described the proposed payment schedules and the timing of the university’s action as unreasonable.
The protest follows a successful Facebook campaign on behalf of one of the students, Luqman Onikosi of Nigeria. When Onikosi’s sponsor in England died, he was unable to raise the money to pay the fees himself.
The university recently agreed to allow Onikosi to take his exams and put off payment until September.
Update: A follow-up protest is planned for this Friday, May 9.
I’m currently reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, on organizing in the age of the internet. He doesn’t have a huge amount to say about campus activism specifically, but a lot of his general insights are relevant to the student experience, and his understanding of organizing connects up with mine in interesting ways. Once I’m done, I’ll likely post a review, or at least some thoughts.
For now, here’s a quote:
The power to coordinate otherwise dispersed groups will continue to improve; new social tools are still being invented, and however minor they may seem, any tool that improves shared awareness or group coordination can be pressed into service for political means, because the freedom to act in a group is inherently political. … We adopt those tools that amplify our capabilities, and we modify our tools to improve that amplification.
Speaking of social tools, have I mentioned that this blog has a Facebook group? Not quite sure what we’re going to use it for yet, but you’re welcome to join if you’re interested in finding out, or in helping us decide.
