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Our ongoing coverage of the NYU takeover continues here and on our twitter feed.
About sixty activists from Take Back NYU barricaded themselves into a third-floor dining facility in the Kimmel Center on Washington Square Park last night at about 10 pm, presenting a 13-point list of demands. They occupied the space without incident overnight.
The university barred students from entering the occupied area, but made no move to force the protesters, who included NYU students and others, to leave. Dining services in the building were moved to another floor.
The students at NYU barricaded themselves into the Kimmel dining facility shortly before closing time last night. They’d planned the occupation surreptitiously by Facebook, billing it as a dance party. More than sixty students participated in the initial takeover.
Not long after noon today, about twenty students rushed past university security to join the protest. A little later, protesters broke a lock and gained access to a balcony adjoining the occupied space.
A student is liveblogging the protest here. TBNYU has a twitter feed here. A short statement of justification for the sit-in and explanation of its demands can be found here.
3:30 Update: A new post from Charlie Eisenhood, liveblogging from inside the sit-in…
Here’s what TBNYU and the protesters have requested: a student rep for direct negotiations (and no go-between), permission for a group to travel to tonight student Senate Council meeting, permission for delegation of student Senators to come to Kimmel for talks, permission for food (vegan) to be brought by friends, permission to enter the balcony.
Here’s what NYU granted: Nothing. Zero zilch zip nada. They’ve also closed the 3rd floor “officially” and are only granting access to students with class in the building or students attending a specific event. They also said that Kimmel closes at 1 AM and that TBNYU has no authorization to be here after 1. And they stressed that any breaches of conduct (like breaking the door and entering the balcony) WILL have consequences.
Interesting.
6:00 Update: Coverage continues here.
Our ongoing coverage of the NYU takeover continues here and on our twitter feed.
Students at New York University took over the Kimmel Center Marketplace, a dining facility on campus, late last night.
The occupation website is here, and a list of the students’ demands follows…
Note: I’ve put up a second response to the Greenberger article, addressing the skewed demographics of the sample it relied upon, here.
A journal article by Ellen Greenberger et al, “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors,” got a big writeup in the New York Times this morning, and it’s been making a pretty serious splash online as a result.
In a nutshell, the article explores what it refers to as the “sense of entitlement” that many professors believe students today exhibit. It reports the findings of a study in which students at one California university were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with fifteen statements regarding their “expectations of special consideration and accommodation by teachers,” and examines some of the factors that may underly such expectations.
I read the study this afternoon, and I’ll have more to say about it tomorrow, but for tonight I just want to highlight one aspect of how it’s been reported. Here’s a passage from the Times article that summed up what many journalists took away from the study:
A third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.
Pretty startling, I’ll admit. But it’s a serious misrepresentation of the original article’s findings. Here’s why.
As I noted above, the folks who conducted the study asked students to respond to fifteen statements designed to determine their level of “Academic Entitlement.” Two of those fifteen statements were these:
If I have attended most classes for a course, I deserve at least a grade of B.
If I have completed most of the reading for a course, I deserve a B in that course.
For each statement, students were asked whether they strongly agreed, agreed, slightly agreed, slightly disagreed, disagreed, or strongly disagreed. The study’s authors aggregated all of the “strongly agree, agree, and slightly agree” responses into a percentage, and that’s the percentage the Times used as the basis for the passage quoted above.
Let’s set aside for the moment whether the phrase “If I have attended most classes for a course, I deserve at least a grade of B” means the same thing as “I expect B’s just for attending lectures.” I’m not certain that it does, but let that go for right now. The more important point is that the Times reporter, following the lead of the study’s authors, interpreted even slight agreement with the first statement as identical to the second.
There are other problems with the study, but this is a big one.
Quoting Amy Goodman:
An unprecedented case of judicial corruption is unfolding in Pennsylvania. Several hundred families have filed a class-action lawsuit against two former judges who have pleaded guilty to taking bribes in return for placing youths in privately owned jails. Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan are said to have received $2.6 million for ensuring that juvenile suspects were jailed in prisons operated by the companies Pennsylvania Child Care and a sister company, Western Pennsylvania Child Care. Some of the young people were jailed over the objections of their probation officers. An estimated 5,000 juveniles have been sentenced by Ciavarella since the scheme started in 2002.
High school girls in an auto repair class in Central High School, Washington DC, 1927.
The Negro History Club of Albany State College in Georgia, 1940.
studentactivism.net 
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