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A new report in the Chronicle of Higher Education finds that the enrollment of poor students at America’s wealthiest colleges and universities is on the decline.
According to the Chronicle, just 13.1% of students at private colleges and universities with endowments of $500 million or more received Pell Grants in 2006-07, down from 14.3% two years earlier. At the wealthiest public institutions, enrollment of Pell Grant recipients fell from 19.6% to 18% in the same period.
Pell Grants are awarded to students with family incomes of less than $40,000.
Berea College in Kentucky had by far the highest Pell Grant enrollment of the schools studied, at 77.4%. The highest among public institutions, and the second highest overall, was UCLA, at 35.2%. Only six of the 114 colleges and universities studied saw an increase in Pell recipient enrollment between 2004 and 2006.
The administration of Evergreen State College has suspended that school’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society.
In February, students and others clashed with campus police after a Dead Prez concert in the university gym, overturning and vandalizing a police car. After that incident, the university declared a moratorium on on-campus concerts. In March, SDS held an anti-war folk music performance in defiance of the ban.
The chapter has been suspended for the remainder of the academic year and placed on probation until January 2009. According to an SDS press release, “the suspension means that SDS has lost its budget and office, can no longer hold meetings, book events, or use school facilities and equipment.”
An interview with two members of the suspended SDS chapter has been posted at the Dissident Voice.
“We forget that the necessary ingredient needed to make the past work for the future is our energy in the present, metabolizing one into the other.”
–Audre Lorde, “Learning from the 60s.”
The students’ union at England’s University of Manchester held a “Reclaim the University” march yesterday to protest the growing corporatization of university administration. Tom Skinnner, the union’s general secretary, said that
The university should be run for students and research and education and nothing else. It is now run like a business. Businesses are always asking themselves two questions: how much cheaper can we do things without losing customers and how much can we charge without losing customers? Some students are on courses where 20 years ago they would have got 200 hours a year — but now that’s down to 86.
The union has created a Reclaim the Uni Facebook group which at this writing has more than seven hundred members.
Shakesville reports on an event at The College of New Jersey in which men literally walked a mile in women’s shoes to raise awareness of rape and to emphasize male responsibility to fight sexual violence.
Shakes’ favorite part? The article that alerted her to the event was titled “OMG Shoes.”
(Good discussion in comments about the slightly iffy aspects of this action, too.)
studentactivism.net 
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