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This post is the seventh in a series of twelve counting down the top dozen student activism stories that will be making news on the American campus in the new academic year. Follow Student Activism on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with all these stories and many more!

During the last great wave of student direct action in the United States, the nation’s student body still tended to be disproportionately drawn from the country’s elites, and the nation’s private universities were — or were at least seen to be — at the forefront of the action.

In the intervening four decades, though, higher education in America has grown steadily larger and more representative. There are far more working-class students, poor students, students of color, female students, older students on the country’s campuses than there were then. Public colleges and universities enroll a much larger portion of the whole, with the greatest growth coming in the least elite sectors of the academy. The current crisis in public higher education, moreover, has sparked a level of organizing at such campuses that far outstrips anything seen at private institutions.

The effect of all this is that students at the country’s most activist campuses in 2010 are far more likely to be drawn from the same communities as the non-academic labor force on those campuses. (Indeed, changes in graduate education and university hiring have changed the complexion of the professoriate as well, though not to anywhere near the same degree.)

Radical students in the late 1960s struggled to find common ground and common cause with campus workers. But for the students and workers of today, such alliances come far more naturally.

Last year two union workers joined a student hunger strike at Berkeley, while several service employees were among those arrested at a sit in at UC Irvine. In the March 4 demonstrations that swept the nation, professors and other university workers participated from coast to coast.

These are just a few examples of a growing trend of students and campus workers joining together in protest against university policies and conditions. Look for it to continue — and to garner increasing attention — this year.

Rice University has negotiated a secret deal to sell its campus radio station, KTRU, for nearly ten million dollars. The sale was not disclosed to the campus community or to the radio station staff until it was complete.

KTRU was founded in 1971, and has been operating as a student-run station ever since, but its broadcast license and transmitter are owned by the university, not the students. The announcement of the pending sale was made in mid-August, while most students were away from campus.

The station’s buyer, the University of Houston, already operates a radio station — an NPR affiliate. That station is not managed or programmed by UH students. The new station, with a classical music format, wouldn’t be either.

Some two hundred Rice students and alumni staged a campus protest after word of the sale got out, and opposition to the sale is continuing to be expressed on campus.

The proposed sale has divided the University of Houston community as well. The campus’s governing board split 5-3 on the decision, with many on campus questioning the wisdom of spending $10 million on a radio station in a time of fiscal crisis. UH’s student body also includes a number of KTRU listeners, who oppose the shuttering of the free-form station.

See the website SaveKTRU.org for more on this dispute.

I was poking around Google this morning when I stumbled across a pamphlet, published in India in March of this year, called “The Student as a Worker.”

It strikes me as one of the better explications of that (often problematic) argument that I’ve read, so here are some excerpts:

The university is a workplace, where students, teachers and the karmcharis work. What is work about? It is about production – human beings are creative, and we create in our workplace. As creative beings we find fulfilment in what we create; what we create is an extension of ourselves, through which we reach out to others who are also part of society. In the university knowledge is produced; we study, teach, research and discuss. As creative beings involved in the production/creation of knowledge it is through the knowledge we produce that we put forth ourselves, our identities to the world. To truly find fulfilment, to be happy in other words, we would like to determine what we create, how we create and with what we create…

In this framework of ‘those who work’ in the university, students are an uncomfortable fit. When the teachers view them, or the administration, the students are either consumers or products. They are paying for a commodity, education, which they should get – so if teachers go on strike, they break the producer-consumer pact. Or it is the task of the teachers to prepare students for the market, so if they go on strike, they are hindering production. When individuals situated in the university, as subjects, look at the university, they see that while for those who “work” here it is the permanent site of labour, for the majority of the students, it fails to have any connotations of finality. Studenthood is a temporary state, a purgatorial interlude that precedes entry into the heaven of work and salaries. When one tries to “politicize” this space, one of the main problems one faces is that students do not feel that they have much to gain by its improvement – “I’m here only for one more year.”

A substantial number of professors have been cribbing about the semester system, but there is not much they can do. They are afraid to go on strike, because they themselves feel that by hindering production and by breaking the consumer pact they will be ‘harming careers’ and might bring the wrath of the ministry on them. On there own, they cannot stop these developments. They need to communicate with the students, establish a bond altogether different from the pedagogic one that exists right now. They need to be able to think about students differently, students as part of the same continuum as they, working in the university, desiring fulfilment, affected by what affects the teachers…

It doesn’t matter if some students come from rich households, if some will go on to become factory owners, or vice chancellors, at the moment of studenthood they are part of the collective worker. Professors and students are part of the same continuum. They together occupy the university, and in fighting for self-determination they are essentially on the same side. So in opposition to the student as a consumer, and the student as a product, is the student as worker…

Anyhow, we need self-determination for happiness, and for self-determination we have to fight. The tribal in Chhattisgarh might need to fight the police, multinationals, and the armed forces for self-determination, the factory worker will need to fight the factory owner, we have to fight the administration, the vice chancellor for instance. If students, teachers and Karamcharis work in the university, what right has any random person to determine what will happen here? The Vice Chancellor and his pals are not elected representatives; they come in through mechanisms in which we have no say. Today we might be fighting the semester system, or the service regulations, or against the attendance rule, fee-hike or for timely payment of karamchari salaries, but we also need to fight the arbitrariness with which these problems impose themselves upon us. It is not enough to say that the vice-chancellor should not bring in the semester system, we have to ask why the vice-chancellor should do anything at all? If there has to be an administrative body, then we should elect it, and have the power of immediate recall, if what we don’t want to happen happens. Of course all this is a long way off, but are we even ready to think our problems through?

The suspension of the UC Irvine Muslim Student Union wasn’t the only disciplinary decision handed down at Irvine in the run-up to the new semester — earlier this week the Occupy CA blog reported that UCI had imposed punishments on thirteen students who participated in a sit-in on campus in February.

According to documents obtained by the blog, all thirteen were found to have violated multiple sections of the school’s code of conduct. All thirteen were placed on probation and told to pay restitution to the college, while one was also suspended.

It is not clear whether any of these students are appealing the judgments in question, or why the single suspension was issued.

The University of California at Irvine has reduced the length of its suspension of the campus Muslim Student Union from a year to a single quarter, while increasing the length of their probation from one year to two.

The MSU was suspended after a spring incident in which Irvine students disrupted an on-campus speech by an Israeli official.

I recently named the Irvine MSU case number ten in my list of student activism stories to watch in the coming year, saying that the suspension presented Irvine’s administration with a dilemma:

If the ban is rescinded, expect national attention from the media and the right-wing blogosphere. If it’s kept in place, look for Muslim students at Irvine and beyond to seek ways to circumvent its restrictions.

In reducing the length of the suspension, administrators have moved to avoid the pitfalls inherent in either of the courses of action I laid out — by keeping the suspension in place, they have placated potential critics on the right, but by cutting it to a single semester, they may have lowered the likelihood that Muslim students on campus will try to subvert it. In addition, the suspension itself, whatever its length, sets a precedent for future disciplinary action against chartered groups.

The MSU’s lawyer called the suspension a “tremendous disappointment” and a threat to students’ constitutional rights. The group’s vice president said the MSU had not ruled out filing a lawsuit against the university or attempting to charter a new group.

Saturday Morning Update | The blog Occupy UCI has the text of the university’s email announcing the suspension and other sanctions (including a requirement that MSU representatives complete one hundred hours of community service before applying for reinstatement). Occupy UCI has also posted MSU’s response, in which they say that the decision will have “a dangerous chilling effect for all students at American universities.”