Author Archive

It’s the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Students everywhere are far from their universities, celebrating the holidays with loved ones. Campuses are ghost towns. Blogs like this one are running at a tiny fraction of their usual traffic.

…And nineteen UC Irvine activists are being dragged in front of a judge.

Today is three hundred days exactly since the UC Irvine administration building takeover that resulted in nearly two dozen arrests. The county DA announced just three weeks ago — in the middle of finals — that charges would be brought, and scheduled their appearance date for tomorrow.

December 29.

Cute.

Update | And no, this is not a random artifact of the bureaucratic system. A UC Merced student who allegedly participated in the disruption of November’s UC Regents meeting — ten months after the UCI occupation — was called for a court appearance today. This is an intentional effort to both disrupt the lives of these student activists and deny them the community support that they would otherwise receive.)

Posting is likely to be light for the next few days, though I do have a couple of things in the pipeline. If you’re desperate for a StudentActivism.net fix, I’ll be putting up links to some of the year’s most interesting, popular, and neglected posts over on Twitter all week.

“There may be some well-meaning people in this audience who have never attended a woman suffrage convention, never heard a woman suffrage speech, never read a woman suffrage newspaper, and they may be surprised that those who speak here do not argue the question. It may be kind to tell them that our cause has passed beyond the period of arguing. The demand of the hour is not argument, but assertion, firm and inflexible assertion, assertion which has more than the force of an argument. If there is any argument to be made, it must be made by opponents, not by the friends of woman suffrage.”

–Frederick Douglass, 1888

“Gratuitous affection between adults is to my mind something you do not make fun of. The one thing you do not make fun of.”

–Padget Powell, Edisto

The things she knew, let her forget again —
The voices in the sky, the fear, the cold,
The gaping shepherds, and the queer old men
Piling their clumsy gifts of foreign gold.

Let her have laughter with her little one;
Teach her the needless, tuneless songs to sing;
Grant her her right to whisper to her son
The foolish names one dare not call a king.

Keep from her dreams the rumble of a crowd,
The smell of rough-cut wood, the trail of red,
The thick and chilly whiteness of the shroud
That wraps the strange new body of the dead.

Ah, let her go, kind Lord, where mothers go
And boast his pretty words and ways, and plan
The proud and happy years that they shall know
Together, when her son is grown a man.

–Dorothy Parker, 1928