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Early this morning, as a thousand students and other activists protested at the capitol, New York’s state legislature passed a budget for the coming year that includes deep cuts to education — and a tax break for the wealthy.
As demonstrators chanted, yelled, and negotiated with Albany police over pizza delivery, the two houses of the legislature made their way through the long list of votes required to approve the state’s spending structure. There was no drama in the chambers to match the drama outside, and final approval came without any surprises at about one o’clock in the morning.
A fascinating breakdown and analysis of the demonstrators’ tactics can be found here.
I’m on the road right now, so full posting will have to wait for later, but students and other activists are staging an occupation of the New York State Capitol building right now.
Modeled on the recent Wisconsin statehouse takeover, and protesting new (Democratic!) governor Andrew Cuomo’s state budget plan, the demonstration aims to occupy the capitol overnight … at least.
More soon. In the meantime check out the Twitter hashtag #WeAreNY for up-to-the-minute news.
Morning Update | The budget passed early this morning amid massive protests. Here’s a wrapup of the night’s events.
Students at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities launched an “open and soft” occupation of the university’s Social Sciences Tower yesterday. Though the building was officially scheduled to close at 11 pm, they were able to stay through the night, and they seem to be consolidating and expanding their presence today.
The group has a blog and a Twitter account, both set up before the occupation. They released a list of demands this morning, and a schedule of activities for the day early this afternoon. They’re planning what one of them calls a “webcam date” with students occupying a building at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, and tonight is going to be movie night, too.
Oh, and someone in Iowa sent them pizzas for lunch. Seems like a pretty good day so far.
The students occupying a building at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities have made it through their first night, and they’ve released a list of demands:
Because we are residents of Minnesota, and because this is a public, land-grant university,
We demand the right to peacefully occupy space at our university,
We demand that the general public has reasonable access to university resources;
We demand that the university respect the rights of all workers to organize and to earn at least a living wage;
We demand tuition and fee reductions;
We demand that regents be democratically elected by the university community;
We demand that the university treat student groups fairly and equitably with respect to funding and space. We demand student groups on the 2nd floor of Coffman Union be able to keep their spaces.
In doing so, we stand in solidarity with the people of Wisconsin, and students and workers worldwide.
More soon…
This is so weird.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a new opinion piece out today in which an adjunct professor named Elayne Clift describes a class that went completely off the rails. Apparently the first session was a disaster (although Clift refuses to say what happened), and she was never able to get things back on track. In twenty years of teaching, she says, she had “never … seen such extraordinarily bad behavior in [her] students.” Even some of their classmates agreed: “I’ve never seen such disrespect for a teacher,” she quotes one of them as saying.
I get this. Sometimes you wind up wrong-footed early in the term, and things just … deteriorate. Whether it’s because a relationship with a vocal student has turned adversarial, because you’ve failed to articulate your expectations clearly, or just because you can’t quite manage to dispel an odd mood, it’s surprisingly easy to discover, a month or two in, that a class has gone weird on you.
But that dynamic isn’t what this prof wants to talk about. Executing a sharp rhetorical pivot in her fifth paragraph, Clift emerges in the sixth with this:
“The sad thing is, I’m not alone. Every college teacher I know is bemoaning the same kind of thing. Whether it’s rude behavior, lack of intellectual rigor, or both, we are all struggling with the same frightening decline in student performance and academic standards at institutions of higher learning. A sense of entitlement now pervades the academy, excellence be damned.”
Wait, what? You just said that the students’ behavior in this class shocked both you and their own peers. You just said — twice — that this group’s behavior was utterly outside your experience. This class was three semesters ago. How can it reflect a universal trend already?
The rest of the piece is standard-issue student-bashing boilerplate. Students suck these days, she says. They’re lazy and entitled. They’ve got cellphones. They cheat.
But the kicker for me is that her biggest academic complaint about this new generation — and I swear this is a direct quote — is their fondness for “unsubstantiated generalizations, hyperbolic assumptions, [and] ungrounded polemics.”
Yeah. I hate that stuff too.
studentactivism.net 
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