Author Archive

Maxwell Love has an interesting post up over at The SGA Blog on student power and the role of national student organizations. It’s an intro post, a starting point for a longer discussion, and I’m eager to see where he goes with it.

Love gives my dissertation a welcome shout-out, in the context of discussing the concessions campus administrators made to student activists in the late sixties and the seventies. But there’s a chunk of his argument that I’d disagree with, or at least complicate.

He writes that when administrators “made concessions to allow students some ‘power’ to assume governing roles in their institutions, a step backward in the formulation of real student power was made,” because

Administrations realized that if they gave the majority of students some right in determining appropriate college conduct, and encouraged them to think they did have real power, they could easily squash any dissent or disorderly students quicker than with ironclad rules. But please my peers; let’s not buy these bribes and illusions of power.

It’s true that campus administrators did — and do — seek to co-opt  student movements for the transformation of higher ed by granting concessions that don’t alter the fundamental relations of power in the institutions. But that doesn’t mean that a student judiciary can’t be a useful check on administration overreach, that a student seat on a faculty senate is worthless, or that there’s no benefit to a student government in moving from being slightly less to slightly more autonomous.

Incremental change may be significant change, and it may lay the groundwork for additional change in the future. It may also, of course, be meaningless “reform” that has the effect of deflating student protest. Figuring out which is which — and then communicating that distinction effectively to the campus — is a huge and crucial challenge for any student activist campaign.

“Although the First Amendment may protect CLS’s discriminatory practices off campus, it does not require a public university to validate or support them.”

–Justice John Paul Stevens brings it on his last day of work, in his concurrence in Christian Law Society v. Martinez.

The US Supreme Court is expected to rule this morning in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, a case revolving around the question of whether, as the SCOTUS Wiki described it, “a public university law school may deny school funding and other benefits to a religious student organization because the group requires its officers and voting members to agree with its core religious viewpoints,” including opposition to homosexuality and extramarital sex.

This case is a big deal for student governments and student activists from a bunch of perspectives, and it’ll have really interesting implications however it’s decided. I’ll have the results here as soon as they’re announced, and a full analysis of the opinion later today.

Update: The Court ruled in favor of the college, with all four of the Court’s conservatives dissenting, declaring that the policy requiring that all recognized student groups be open to all students was constitutional — or, as I put it on Twitter, that “campus Christian group can’t bar membership to pro-gay students.” The decision can be found here.

There are 85 pages of opinion and dissent in this ruling, and I’m printing them out right now. More when I get the chance.

Students from the University of Puerto Rico have ratified an agreement to end the strike that shut ten of UPR’s eleven campuses for nearly two months.

Some three thousand students met yesterday to approve the agreement in a mass meeting. They also voted to call another strike in January if the administration fails to keep its end of the deal or attempts to impose new fees.

Monday’s meeting, the first mass gathering of students from across the UPR system in the university’s history, capped UPR’s first-ever system-wide student strike.

I was reading this blogpost, becoming ever more shocked and appalled, but thinking that I had no reason to post about it here, until I got to the last line:

“If you’re reading this and you’re a student at Cornell: female genital mutilation is being practiced on your campus. What are you going to do about it?”

It’s an excellent question.

Pediatric urologist Dix Poppas of Cornell is a leading practitioner of infant “clitoroplasty,” the surgical reduction of the clitoris. In the surgery, performed on babies with larger than average clitorises, the clitoral shaft is excised and the head is re-attached. This surgery is purely aesthetic, and highly controversial. But what’s even more startling is Poppas’ post-surgical follow-up — at regular annual checkups, Poppas uses a vibrator to stimulate the girls’ genitals.

Two academic ethicists who have investigated Poppas’ practice report that “nearly all clinicians to whom we described Poppas’s ‘clitoral sensory testing and vibratory sensory testing’ practices thought them so outrageous that they told us we must have the facts wrong. When we showed them the 2007 article, their disbelief ceased, but they then seemed to become as agitated as we were.”