You are currently browsing the monthly archive for September 2009.
(Last week, I started posting a weekend roundup of highlights from the @studentactivism Twitter feed. Here it is again.)
Links to this blog:
Students for a Democratic Society has relaunched its SDS News wiki. Great stuff: http://bit.ly/Y1zbm
Student protests in Allahahabad, India, entering their sixth day: http://bit.ly/pi4c9
Campus budgets are getting slashed coast to coast, and students are fighting back: http://bit.ly/1YxoTh
Chomsky on student activism in the 60s & today, & on high tuition’s role in suppressing protest: http://bit.ly/3BFxi
What John Brown taught me about privilege, whiteness, and anti-racism. http://bit.ly/AsIHi
#SAFRA means better student loans, financial aid, drug rules–but it still has to pass the Senate: http://bit.ly/1s7rIc
Students fight fees around the world! Reports from South Africa, Ireland, Cyprus, and Nepal: http://bit.ly/2v3i8c
Outside links:
RT @forstudentpower: Blagojevich gives a great example of why University Trustees should be popularly elected:http://bit.ly/zewZE
Student union suspended, leadership expelled, after anti-govt campus protest in Zambia: http://bit.ly/3duy7
Bizarre, unhinged National Review rant on student activism & campus culture: http://bit.ly/2FWikB
Harvard Med School has reversed new policy regulating students’ interaction with the media: http://bit.ly/t6st0
Canada: New province-wide student association looks to build student power in Saskatchewan. http://bit.ly/10VZFi
India: Campaign for students’ rights at Allahabad U goes national. http://bit.ly/19nHqX (Background here: bit.ly/pi4c9)
Race, frats, history, and the University of Alabama student government: http://bit.ly/3QLOe0
MUST READ — U of California students & profs will walk out Sept 24. Here’s why: http://bit.ly/LYrR7 (Via @kmmcbride)
Other stuff:
When MTV replays that Kanye moment, they should splice in a shot of Mike Myers looking uncomfortable. #vmas
This ACORN story is just so incredibly bizarre. Are we seeing the birth of Borat journalism?
I hate Illinois Nazis, but I always made an exception for Henry Gibson. RIP.
Whenever someone refers to something as “the last acceptable form of prejudice,” they’re full of crap. All kinds of prejudice still thrive.
Earlier this week I posted news about student struggles for access to higher education in the US. Here’s a taste of what’s been going on in the rest of the world in the last seven days:
In Ireland, students camped outside of parliament overnight on Monday in a protest against government plans to introduce new university fees.
South Africa’s Witwatersrand University saw three days of protests this week over plans to raise tuition for the coming academic year. Demonstrations were suspended after the university threatened police action, but the country’s public university system is said to be exploring new revenue streams to alleviate student unrest over fee hikes.
Students shut down community colleges and secondary schools in Nepal for several days this week in protest against the commercialization of education, presenting a thirteen-point list of demands that included a cap on tuition charges.
A new law in Cyprus, put forward in response to student complaints, would require all public colleges in that nation to establish clear tuition rates when students enroll and prohibit increases during a student’s course of study.
SAFRA, the Student Aid and Financial Responsibility Act, passed the House of Representatives yesterday in a 253-171 vote. If passed by the Senate later this fall, SAFRA will end government subsidies to private student loan companies, move those loans federal direct loan program, and use the savings to increase aid to students and colleges by $8 billion a year.
This is a very big deal.
The House’s endorsement of loan reform is a huge step forward, but SAFRA contains another component that’s also worth paying attention to. Since 1998, the Higher Education Act’s Aid Elimination Penalty (AEP) has denied federal financial aid to students with drug convictions on their records. Commit robbery or rape and you can still receive financial aid, but if you’re busted with pot you’re out of luck.
Two hundred thousand American students have lost financial aid because of this law since it went into effect a decade ago, but in the version of SAFRA passed yesterday, the AEP has been scaled back dramatically. If the House language makes it into the final bill, AEP will now apply only those students who are convicted of selling drugs while actually receiving financial aid.
Observers are predicting a tough fight for SAFRA in the Senate, where private lenders are gearing up to protect their turf. We’ll keep you informed as the situation develops.
The landmark Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) is moving toward a vote in the House of Representatives today.
SAFRA is the most significant piece of financial aid legislation to be taken up by the US Congress in decades. You can follow the progress of the bill at the United States Student Association homepage, or by checking in on the #SAFRA hashtag on Twitter.
I’ll be spending most of today teaching, but I’ll update here when I get the chance, and post news and links at the @studentactivism Twitter feed in the meantime.
A new exhibit on the white anti-slavery activist John Brown opens today at the New-York Historical society, 150 years (minus a month and a day) after he tried to start a slave uprising at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Brown was executed in December 1859 for his role in that raid, but his actions — at Harper’s Ferry and before — helped to spark the Civil War.
I’ve got a photo on my bookshelf, in a carved wooden frame I bought at a rummage sale. The photo is actually a postcard, though it’s been trimmed down and you can’t really tell.
It’s this photo. John Brown, swearing an oath.
John Brown was an abolitionist, of course, and that’s part of why I like him. But I’ve never really been explicit about why I like him so much, why I’m drawn to him as opposed to any other white abolitionist. I think I just figured it out, though.
In 1856 John Brown went to Kansas, where pro-slavery and anti-slavery whites were fighting. He wanted to intervene on the side of righteousness, and he did. He went to Kansas and he killed a bunch of white people. He killed white people who were standing in the way of racial justice.
Three years later, with the Civil War looming, he acted again. This time he raided a federal arsenal to try to liberate weapons for a slave uprising. He was caught, and hanged.
The photo I have is of the John Brown of 1856. (By 1859 he had a huge flowing beard.) The Brown in my photo was the Brown who saw racism and went to Kansas.
Now, I’m not big on killing people. Not at all. Not even in my most ludicrous fantasies of radical action am I big on killing people. It’s never particularly been the killing people part that attracted me to Brown.
It’s more, I think, that he went into the white community first. It sounds weird, phrased like that, since his work with white people consisted of murdering them, but that’s what he did. He took his whiteness and he used it in the service of racial justice, used it to do what a black person couldn’t have done, used it in his own community.
When I look at that photo in that frame, I’m reminded that I’m white. I’m reminded that whiteness is an identity, one among many. I’m reminded that whiteness is specific, not generic. And I’m reminded that as a white man, I’ve got important work to do.
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