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Students, faculty and staff of the University of California, facing an unprecedented assault on their system’s funding, will be walking out of classes tomorrow, September 24. I’ll be posting more about the walkout soon, and updating during the day tomorrow, but here’s a quick intro:
Last fall’s economic collapse hit American higher education hard, and as the new academic year gets underway its effects are being felt all over the country, but the California budget crisis is in a class by itself.
California’s initiative system, and a state law that bars the legislature from raising taxes without a two-thirds vote, make it almost impossible to fund ordinary expenses in a recession. The state is in a financial free-fall, and political leaders are looking to higher education for revenue.
In the face of this assault, top administrators at the University of California are rolling over.
Last week, UC official released a proposal that would increase the cost of attendance by 15% for the winter term and another 15% in the spring — coming on top of a 9.3% increase approved in May, this would bring in-state fees to more than $11,000 a year.
As UC Berkeley’s student government president has said, “not even during the depression of the 1930’s did student fees rise as suddenly and as much as they are now proposed to rise.” And the attack on higher education isn’t limited to fee increases. California politicians and UC administrators are laying off faculty and staff and cutting employees’ pay while reducing enrollment and increasing class sizes.
Tomorrow’s walkout began as a faculty initiative, and more than a thousand UC professors have signed on, but the protest has been picking up steam among students and non-teaching staff as well. The statewide University of California Student Association has unanimously passed a resolution of support for the walkout, there are two student websites up spreading the word, and folks are sharing news via the #UCWalkout hashtag on Twitter as well.
More to come…
Dr. Terence Kealey, a top administrator at a major British university, is facing a torrent of criticism for writing that staring at female students in class is a “perk” of teaching college.
In the same article — a humor piece for the Times Higher Education supplement — Kealey (pictured at right) called the idea that student-faculty sex “represents an abuse of power” a “myth.”
He also compared classrooms to high-end strip clubs.
Olivia Bailey, the Women’s Officer of Britain’s National Union of Students, said she was appalled by Kealey’s “astounding lack of respect for women,” and commenters online have called the article a defense of sexual harrassment.
But Kealey, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, is unrepentant, saying he was merely ” employing humour to highlight the ways by which people try to resolve the dissonance between what is publicly expected of them and how they actually feel.”
I came across a blogpost this morning (via @HappyFeminist‘s Twitter feed) that asked what struck me as an interesting question, and I’d like to take a swing at answering it:
How do you teach feminism if you are not a feminist?
To answer this question, it seems to me, the first thing you need to do is to define your terms. If by “teaching feminism” you mean teaching about feminism as a movement, then you teach feminism the same way you teach Marxism, or existentialism, or surrealism — with as full and as sympathetic an understanding of the movement (and of its critics) as you can muster. If you’re going to talk about feminism in the classroom, you have an obligation to learn enough about it to talk about it intelligently, and that’s an obligation you have whether you’re a feminist or not.
In her post, Ashley says some teachers don’t teach feminism because they think they don’t know enough about it, or because they haven’t thought about teaching it, or because they don’t have time. She’s right, but those objections shift the topic a bit — from how you teach feminism to when.
So when should you teach feminism? When it’s part of the story you’re trying to tell, and when it’s part of the toolkit you’re trying to help your students assemble. More broadly, you teach about gender when it’s relevant … and when you’re talking about people, gender is almost always relevant.
You don’t need to “teach feminism” to talk about gender, of course, and you don’t need to teach from a feminist perspective to talk about gender. You do, though, need to have an understanding of how gender works. You need to have an analysis of gender, a perspective on gender. (More to the point, you need to have a considered perspective on gender, because by the time you can talk you have a perspective on gender, whether you realize it or not.) You need to know how you’re going to come at gender issues when they arise, you need to know why you’re taking the approach you’ve chosen, and you need to know how you’re going to work productively with students who are coming from a different perspective.
And of course that last paragraph applies as much to activists as it does to teachers.
October 7 update: Readers coming from Minding the Campus should know that I take issue with KC Johnson’s gloss on this post. I’ve submitted a comment to that effect over there, and written a follow-up post here as well.
In a new post this morning about last week’s Hofstra rape case — in which a student initially said she’d been raped by five men, then withdrew her allegations — Jaclyn Friedman writes the following:
There’s a widespread assumption that recanting an accusation means that you’re admitting you lied. But in reality, lots of victims recant not because they made it up, but because they come to the unfortunate realization that it will cost them more, emotionally, to pursue justice than to let it go.
We’ll probably never now what happened in this case, but it’s entirely possible that she was threatened by the accused perpetrators or their associates, interrogated by the police about her sexual history or what she might have done to “provoke” the attack, or blamed and slandered by the media or people in her community. All of these things happen all too often to rape victims who speak out. Let’s not ignore the possibility that they happened here.
This is important stuff to keep in mind, and Friedman makes other good points along the way. But I’d like to take it a step further: Even if the Hofstra student lied in her original statement to the police, it doesn’t automatically follow that she wasn’t raped.
The cultural pressures that lead women to falsely recant rape charges are the same pressures that lead women to blame themselves, or expect blame from others, when their rapes don’t follow an accepted narrative. If a woman is raped by a man she’s been intimate with before, or raped in the course of a sexual encounter that began as consensual, or raped in circumstances in which her judgment may be called into question, she can expect to be disbelieved, shamed, and attacked, and that expectation may lead a rape survivor to alter her story to make it more palatable to police, or to a jury, or even to her friends and family.
I don’t know what happened that night, and I expect that I never will. I’m not accusing any of the five men who were named of anything, and I’m not saying that the fact that they were accused means they must have done something wrong. I don’t know, and I’m not interested in speculating.
I do, though, want to say clearly that the question of what happened isn’t a binary one of “she told the truth, and they’re guilty” vs. “she lied, so they’re innocent.”
It’s possible that she lied and that some or all of them are guilty.
The long-term residency of millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States, many of whom came here as children with their families, provokes an ambivalence in American voters and politicians that’s unmatched by any other issue.
The governing board of North Carolina’s community college system, the third largest in the country, has changed its rules on the admission of undocumented students four times in the last nine years. On Friday, the board board reversed itself yet again, overturning a 16-month-old policy that had barred such students from its campuses.
The victory for such students is a limited one, however. Under the new regulations, only those who have graduated from an American high school will be eligible to enroll. They will also be required to pay tuition at out-of-state rates — more than $7,000 a year — and will be ineligible for financial aid.
The policy, which will face a final vote in the state’s General Assembly next spring, is intended to bring CC admissions procedures in line with those of the UNC system, which recently adopted a similar approach.
Nine states have passed laws allowing undocumented students to enroll in their public colleges and universities at in-state tuition rates, while only three have explicitly banned such eligibility by statute. According to Inside Higher Ed, this policy change would leave South Carolina as the only state that bars such students from higher education completely.
Policies on undocumented students are attracting new attention this fall as the DREAM Act — a federal law that would allow some undocumented immigrants to establish permanent legal residency by completing college coursework — moves forward in the US Congress.
studentactivism.net 
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