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Otto Frank on Not Knowing His Daughter

January 2, 2015 in History, Quotes, Youth | by | 2 comments

This summer I took my kids to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, and while we were there I saw a clip from a television interview Otto Frank gave in 1967. In it he talked about his experience of reading the diary for the first time after his daughter’s death, and what it revealed to him about who she was.

The clip struck me powerfully when I first saw it, and it’s stayed with me. I mentioned it to a student activist I had lunch with earlier this week, and thought of it again today while talking with a friend on Facebook about the Carla Alcorn post I wrote this morning.

When I Googled it to quote it in that latter conversation, though, I discovered that no full transcript of it existed online. Snippets are quoted in various places, including John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars, but the whole thing isn’t up anywhere.

That’s fixed now.

“I knew that Anne wrote a diary. She spoke about her diary. She left her diary with me at night in a briefcase next to my bed. I had promised her never to look in. I never did.

“When I returned, and after I had the news that my children would not come back, Miep gave me the diary, which had been saved by, I should say, a miracle. It took me a very long time to read it, and I must say I was very much surprised about the deep thoughts Anne had, her seriousness — especially her self-criticism.

“It was quite a different Anne [than] I had known as my daughter. She never really showed this kind of inner feeling. She talked about many things, we criticized many things, but what really her feelings were, I only could see from the diary.

“And my conclusion is, as I had been in very, very good terms with Anne, that most parents don’t know, really, their children.”

Carla Alcorn’s Failure, and Her Loss

January 2, 2015 in Gender, Youth | by | 2 comments

My first daughter was born with hip dysplasia — put simply, her hips didn’t quite fit properly into their sockets. It’s not an uncommon condition, particularly in firstborn girls, and in some countries all babies are required to be tested for it at birth. The United States isn’t one of those countries, but Casey’s pediatrician picked up on it in the newborn exam and sent us off to see a specialist when C was just a day or two old.

IM000348If you catch dysplasia early and treat it properly, the treatment is straightforward and the prognosis is excellent. Casey was put in something called a Pavlik harness for the first couple of months of her life — the harness nudges the legs into a position that presses the hips into their sockets so that the joints grow properly. (That’s her in it on the right.) If it does what it’s supposed to, and it usually does, the hips develop normally and the child can typically expect no complications later on.

But if you don’t catch dysplasia early, or don’t treat it properly, things can turn bad in a hurry. When the hips develop without a snug fit into their sockets, the joint surfaces get bumpy and rough. Treatment progresses from the harness to a waist-to-ankles cast, and from there to surgery. If the condition is missed or mistreated in infancy, hip replacement in middle age is not uncommon.

My ex-wife and I were lucky. We had a good pediatrician, an excellent specialist, and solid insurance. Casey got the harness, we put her in it, and it did its job. Every few years we go back to make sure everything’s still okay, and every few years it is.

A lot of families, and a lot of kids, aren’t so lucky. If you go looking, you’ll find that the internet is awash with stories of kids whose doctors missed the diagnosis, or screwed up the treatment. (Double-diapering used to be a standard approach, for instance. Some docs still recommend it, even though it’s been shown to be completely ineffective.) Huge numbers of kids are facing pain, disability, and invasive surgery that in many cases could have been avoided by a simple, straightforward medical intervention.

I’ve been thinking about that today because of Leelah Alcorn. Leelah was a transgender teenager, and she killed herself this week. In her suicide note, posted to Tumblr, she said that her parents had rejected her gender identity, disrupted her social networks, and refused to support her in transition. She cited all this as a major reason — though not the only reason — for her suicide.

Leelah’s note went viral quickly, and once her parents were identified they became the target of a torrent of anger online.

That anger is by no means unjustified — it certainly appears that if her parents had been more supportive of Leelah she would likely be alive today. When Leelah’s mother Carla gave an interview to CNN on Wednesday, her comments validated much of the account in Leelah’s suicide note. Asked about her child’s transgender identity she said that she and her husband “don’t support that, religiously.” She confirmed that they had rejected Leelah’s request to start transitioning medically and that they had cut off her access to social media. Most jarringly, she referred to Leelah as her son throughout the interview.

But there was another side to her comments to CNN as well. She said that she and her husband had loved Leelah “unconditionally…no matter what,” and told her so. She called Leelah “a good kid,” an “amazing musician and artist,” an “amazing boy.” One interview can’t tell us much about a family, of course, but to me these words feel honest — the anguish of a loving mother who has lost her adored child forever.

So what are we to do with this? What are we to make of it?

I don’t believe Carla Alcorn’s words exonerate her. When Leelah needed support and understanding she and her husband were unwilling or unable to provide it, and the consequences were devastating. At the same time, however, I can’t reconcile Carla Alcorn’s words with the idea that she hated her child, or turned her back on her, or sought to harm her.

Which brings us back to my daughter, and her Pavlik harness.

Some parents who fail to pursue a proper diagnosis of their children’s dysplasia are surely neglectful. Some parents who double-diaper them instead of obtaining real treatment are lazy or uncaring. But far more, I suspect, are simply unaware. They want their kids to be healthy and happy, and if they knew what to do to make that happen they would do it. But they don’t know, and they don’t have the tools to find out.

My family was virtuous when we got the dysplasia diagnosis. We followed up with the specialist. We put Casey in the harness and we kept her in it. We bathed her around it, we left it on for photos, we splayed her legs the way we were told. We were freaked out, and our fear made us conscientious.

But we were also lucky — lucky to have good doctors and good insurance and nobody whispering bad advice in our ears. Lucky to have the resources to do what we were supposed to do, and lucky to reach the desired outcome. If we hadn’t been so lucky, would it have made us worse parents? Would it have meant we loved our daughter less? I don’t know.

I don’t know what resources the Alcorn family had. I don’t know what advice they got about Leelah. But I have a hunch, and my hunch is this: That their church and their friends and the therapists they consulted let them down. That they didn’t get the support they needed to get to a point where they could give their child the support she needed. Yes, they failed their daughter, and they will live with the consequences of that failure for the rest of their lives. But what of their pastor? What of the therapists? What of the friends and acquaintances? Are they in agony right now? Are they grieving? Is their love for Leelah and their failure to save her tearing them apart?

Leelah Alcorn is dead. Carla Alcorn is the mother of a dead child. Both losses are incalculable tragedies, and both can be laid at the feet of our society’s fear, hatred, and incomprehension of trans identity. We need to do better. We need to do more. We need to save the next Leelah Alcorn from her fate.

And we need to save the next Carla Alcorn from hers.

Prayer for a New Mother

December 24, 2014 in Students | by | Leave a comment

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

Yes, Christina Hoff Sommers is a Rape Denialist

December 7, 2014 in Students | by | 34 comments

May 2015 Update | Christina Hoff Sommers has posted a rebuttal to this post on her Facebook page, and I’ve written a reply to that rebuttal. In the course of composing that reply I discovered that one claim I made in the post below was in error — I apologized for that error in the reply linked above, and I have corrected it in the blogpost here.

If you were around for the so-called Culture Wars of the mid-1990s, you probably remember Christina Hoff Sommers — her 1994 book Who Stole Feminism? was a centerpiece of right-wing attacks on mainstream feminist theory and organizing at the time. Recently Sommers has re-emerged as the “mom” — that’s literally what they call her — of #GamerGate, that weird movement of video game fans obsessed with “ethics in gaming journalism” and what they see as feminist attacks on their hobby.

I haven’t paid more than desultory attention to Sommers since the nineties, so when I somehow wound up at her Twitter feed on Saturday I was surprised to see her supportively retweeting this:

The assertions in this tweet — that Rolling Stone “invented” its recent story on an alleged gang rape and that this supposed invention single-handedly discredits broader “rape culture” arguments — struck me as even more ridiculous than I’d remembered Sommers being back in the day, so I fired off a quick tweet expressing my surprise.

Too quick, as it turned out, because when I went back to Sommers’ timeline, I saw that it was stuffed with even weirder stuff, much of it in Sommers’ own words. Mildly embarrassed by my ignorance of her current mindset, I deleted the tweet, but as I did so I noticed that several people had already responded to it, so I figured I should explain:

This second tweet wasn’t directed to her, as you can see — I didn’t include her screen name in it, didn’t @ her on it. It was a heads-up to my own Twitter folks about why the previous tweet had disappeared. But she found it anyway, and RTed it, along with a followup declaring that “Much of the data on sexual violence is flawed. Victims need good research & smart policies—not hype.”

Sommers only has about 32,000 followers, but those two tweets unleashed a flood of responses — all, sadly, while I was on my way to my kid’s birthday party. A few of the tweets were over-the-top repulsive. Most, though, just took issue — often abusively — with my charge that Sommers is a “rape denialist.” It’s those that I wished I’d had time and space to reply to as they came in, and those that I’d like to respond to today. Because I do consider Sommers a rape denialist, and I think it’s important to say exactly what I mean.

So. Why do I say it, and what do I mean?

I mean this: Christina Hoff Sommers, in her many recent public statements about rape and sexual assault in America, understates the prevalence of rape in this country in ways that are unsupported by the evidence. She analogizes America’s rape crisis to entirely invented “crises” of the past while wildly overstating the evidence for the existence of an epidemic of false rape claims. To read her writing, watch her videos, and follow her on Twitter is to be given a wholly unrealistic impression of the scale and seriousness of rape in America. And that’s the case — and this is crucial — even if you agree with her contention that rape reporting data is seriously flawed.

Let me say that again, because this was a core claim that her supporters made on Saturday afternoon: I am not calling Christina Hoff Sommers a rape denialist because we rely on different statistical estimates of the prevalence of rape. I am calling her a rape denialist because the way she deploys even her own preferred statistics is fundamentally bogus.

Enough introduction. Let’s get down to cases.

On Saturday Sommers tweeted me a link to a video in which she critiqued a 2011 CDC study that concluded that about 1.3 million women were raped in 2010, saying that “the agency’s figures are wildly at odds with the official crime statistics, the Justice Department’s annual crime survey.” She’s referring to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which, she says, “reports that there were about 188,000 rapes and sexual assaults in 2010.”

What’s behind this discrepancy, to Sommers’ mind? Beyond unspecific methodological concerns, Sommers offers a number of concrete criticisms of the study’s questioning and statistical analysis.

None of these criticisms hold up.

To begin with, Sommers claims that “no-one interviewed” by the CDC “was asked if they had been raped or sexually assaulted,” but this claim is ridiculously misleading. The study’s core rape estimate was generated by respondents’ answers when asked whether anyone had “used physical force or threats of physical harm to make you have” anal, oral, or vaginal sex — a clear, straightforward, unambiguous description of rape. Some 620,000 of the women that the CDC reported as having been raped in the previous year — almost exactly half of the total — were the result of affirmative answers to that question.

And what about the rest? They answered in the affirmative to questions about either attempted rape or rape facilitated by drugs or alcohol. There too, Sommers dramatically misstates the statistical evidence.

As an example, Sommers makes the following claim: “Sixty-one point five percent of the women the CDC projected as rape victims in 2010 experienced what the CDC called ‘alcohol and drug facilitated penetration.'” Here she leaves the clear impression that more than three-fifths of the incidents of rape reported fell into this category, but that’s not the case. Although 61% of the women the CDC says were raped did report alcohol and drug facilitated penetration, 49% reported forced penetration, and another 41% reported attempted forced penetration. Many, in other words, reported multiple types of assault, and alcohol and drug facilitated penetration accounts for 41%, not 61%, of the reports.

But that statistical sleight-of-hand is only a small part of Sommers’ misrepresentation in this area. She suggests that the CDC counts consensual “sex while inebriated” as rape — indefensible, if true — but she does so by selectively and tendentiously quoting from the questionnaire. In fact, that section of the questionnaire — read to all respondents, but never mentioned by Sommers — states specifically that the questions within it concern sexual contact that “happens when a person is unable to consent to it or stop it from happening because they were drunk, high, drugged, or passed out from alcohol, drugs, or medications.”

Sommers knows this, but she deliberately excludes it from her writing and speaking on the topic in order to facilitate her misrepresentation of the CDC report.

Want more? Here’s more. Sommers claims that the NCVS found that there were “about 188,000 rapes and sexual assaults in 2010.” But the CDC figure of 1.3 million, as we have seen, includes both completed and attempted rape, which Sommers’ 188,000 does not. Adding together the NCVS stats for completed and attempted rape, to make it an apples-to-apples comparison with the CDC, gives us a total of a quarter million victims.

May 2015 Note | I have discovered that the above claim was erroneous. Details here.

So yes, the CDC found more sexual assaults than the NCVS, and yes, they found it by asking broader questions. (The NCVS asks about “rape, attempted rape, or other type of sexual attack.”) But the CDC’s questions are far more robust than she claims and the one category of sexual assault that she singles out for mockery is both more reasonable and a smaller portion of the whole than she would have us believe.

Sommers urges us to reject the CDC data as preposterous, in other words, but the arguments she puts forward against it are factually weak and intellectually dishonest.

And if her data-based arguments are spurious, what she does with them is even worse. In the video linked above she describes the “women’s crisis” portrayed by research such as the CDC’s as “manufactured,” and as “madness.” On Saturday morning she tweeted that the United States is currently in the midst of a “rape panic” analogous to the wholly invented Satanic ritual abuse scare of the 1980s, driven by a “false accusation culture on campus.” And this wasn’t just a poorly phrased tweet — in it, she linked to a Time magazine column from earlier this year in which she went on at length about the Satanic abuse panic and its “striking similarities” to the rape “panic” of today. And after she tweeted that link she went even further, approvingly retweeting two readers who likened our current dialogue around rape to the Salem witch trials.

There were no witches in Salem. There were no Satanic ritual abusers running preschools in the 1980s. But even the NCVS, which Sommers cites as the “gold standard” for such statistics, concludes that nearly a quarter of a million women experience rape or attempted rape each year. Our country’s rape crisis is real, not imaginary, and it is the millions of American women who are raped, not the comparatively tiny number of men who are falsely accused, who bear the overwhelming majority of its burden.

To claim otherwise can only be described as denial.

Note | As an anti-spam measure, the first comment on this blog from any commenter is automatically sent to moderation. (Subsequent comments are typically approved automatically.) If you comment on this post, and you haven’t commented before, be patient — your comment will go up as soon as I see it.

Update | A little more about my use of the word “denialism.” Some have claimed that since Sommers doesn’t deny that rape exists at all, she can’t fairly be called a rape denialist. I address this in the post itself, but to underscore and clarify:

If one misrepresents the true scope or scale of a real problem one can be fairly described as a “denialist” in that arena. If you admit that climate change is real, but offer cooked, false data to misrepresent its extent, you’re a climate change denialist. If you insist in the face of the evidence — as some widely-quoted pseudo-scholars do — that the Nazis “only” killed a few hundred thousand Jews, you’re a holocaust denialist. And if you continually, willfully misrepresent the statistics and scholarship surrounding rape and sexual assault in order to foster a false narrative that minimizes the extent of that crisis, then yes, you’re a rape denialist.

May 13, 2015 Update | Sommers posted a reply to this five-month-old blogpost on Facebook this morning. My response can be found here.

American Student Protest Timeline, 2014-15

December 4, 2014 in Students | by | 13 comments

What you see below is a new interactive map of student protests across the United States in the current academic year, which I launched in early December and will be updating through next June. (You can read more about the project in the lovely piece that the Village Voice ran this morning.) As I update the map I’ll also be updating the chronological list of actions that appears below it in this post. As of December 12 there are 160 protests and other events noted on the list, and the most recent 40 entries are being uploaded to the map. (Note that one action, the November 17 University of Hawaii graduate student protest, has been left off of the map for now, until I can figure out how to keep Google Maps from defaulting to cutting off the eastern United States with it included.)

Here’s the full list. Be sure to check back here or follow me on Twitter at @studentactivism for all the latest.

American Student Protest Timeline, 2014-15

August

  • Columbia Anti-Rape Project New York, August: Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz created a senior thesis project of carrying the mattress on which she was sexually assaulted around campus to protest the college’s refusal to take action against her assailant. The protest sparked waves of student organizing at Columbia and beyond.
  • #SlashThrasher, FSU Florida, August: Students at Florida State University staged a multi-pronged campaign to block the appointment of former state legislator John Thrasher to the college’s presidency.
  • Howard “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” Photo Washington, DC, August 13: Just four days after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, more than a hundred Howard University students gathered for a “hands up don’t shoot” photograph that quickly went viral on social media. http://www.hlntv.com/article/2014/08/14/ferguson-dont-shoot-howard-university
  • UIUC Trustee Meeting Disruption Illinois, August 22: Students staged a sit-in outside of a meeting of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign board of trustees after they were prevented from addressing the meeting in support of un-hired professor Steven Salaita.
  • Jefferson High Walkout California, August 25: Hundreds of students at Jefferson High School in South Los Angeles walked out of classes to protest widespread failures of the school administration, including scheduling errors that locked them out of needed classes.
  • HS Students March Against Principal’s Firing Mississippi, August 28: A hundred students at Rosa Fort High School marched from their school to administrators’ offices to protest the firing of their principal. http://www.wmcactionnews5.com/story/26393194/several-people-hold-protest-at-mississippi-high-school
  • Protesters Get College President’s Resignation Vermont, August 29: Students protesting at a meeting of the Burlington College board of trustees confronted the college president as she left the meeting, demanding her resignation. Incredibly, she gave it to them on the spot. Her exact words: “I resign. Happy? Goodbye.” http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/news/local/2014/08/29/burlington-college-students-press-presidents-resignation/14800683/

September

  • Students Support Vocal Christian Teacher Georgia, September 9: Hundreds of students marched through the halls of Sequoyah High School in response to a rumor that a popular teacher known to inject religion into classroom discussions had been fired. The teacher, John Osborne, had taken a voluntary leave of absence. https://www.accessnorthga.com/detail.php?n=279371
  • Brandeis Sexual Assault Protest Massachusetts, September 10: Fifty students staged a protest at Brandeis University in Waltham to protest the college’s handling of sexual assault. http://www.wbur.org/2014/09/11/brandeis-sexual-assault-protest
  • Confederate Flag Protested at Bryn Mawr Pennsylvania, September 15: Bryn Mawr students staged a series of protests after two white Southern students hung a Confederate flag in their dorm, then taped a “Mason-Dixon Line” on a hallway floor in response to demands that they take it down. http://swarthmorephoenix.com/2014/09/25/bryn-mawr-campus-roiled-by-confederate-flag-mason-dixon-line-in-dormitory/
  • UD Students Demand Action on Sexual Harassment Delaware, September 19: Hundreds of University of Delaware students rallied to demand transparency and accountability in the college’s sexual harassment policies after the student newspaper alleged that a sociology professor had offered a female student a high grade in exchange for sex. http://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/education/2014/09/19/hundreds-protest-uds-harassment-policy/15904149/
  • Cheltanham HS Sit-In Pennsylvania, September 19: Five hundred students at Cheltanham High School staged a sit-in against new, restrictive conduct regulations.
  • Colgate Occupation New York, September 22: Hundreds of students at Colgate University occupied the college’s admissions office for five days, protesting college policies on racial, class, and gender inclusivity, and winning a variety of concessions from the administration.
  • HS Curriculum Protest Colorado, September 22: Hundreds of students from Evergreen High School in Colorado staged a protest at a school board meeting against plans to restrict discussion of “civil disorder and social strife” in US history classes.
  • U of C March Against Rape Threat Illinois, September 24: Two hundred University of Chicago students marched in protest against an anonymous threat of rape made in response to the posting of a Tumblr list of suspected sexual predators. http://chicagoist.com/2014/09/28/university_of_chicago_students_prot.php
  • U of M Students Demand Ouster of Athletics Officials Michigan, September 30: Students at the University of Michigan staged a series of protests calling for the dismissal of the college’s athletics director and football coach after the team’s quarterback was sent back onto the field after suffering a head injury during a game. AD Dave Brandon resigned at the end of October and football coach Brady Hoke was fired in early December. http://onlyagame.wbur.org/2014/10/01/michigan-shane-morris-head-injury

October

November

  • Syracuse Occupation New York, November 3: Students staged an 18-day sit-in of an administrative building on campus. The students, who were protesting a variety of administration policies, ended the occupation voluntarily after winning a number of concessions.
  • UPR Solidarity With Mexican Students Puerto Rico, November 5: Students at the University of Puerto Rico held a day of action in solidarity with the 43 Mexican student activists who disappeared in September. The students are believed to have been kidnapped and killed by local police and drug traffickers.http://dialogodigital.upr.edu/index.php/La-UPR-se-solidariza-con-los-estudiantes-mexicanos-desaparecidos.html
  • Colorado Test Rebellion Colorado, November 6: More than five thousand Colorado high school seniors refused to take statewide standardized tests, and hundreds staged walkouts and other protests against the tests. http://www.cpr.org/news/story/thousands-students-protest-colorado-standardized-tests
  • Iowa Students Stand Against Yik Yak Bigots Iowa, November 6: Dozens of students at the University of Northern Iowa rallied in support of students on the campus who had recently been targeted by racist, sexist and homophobic posts on the anonymous social media site Yik Yak. http://www.northern-iowan.org/news/view.php/855710/UNIted-we-stand
  • HS Students Press for Better Sex Ed Nevada, November 12: Clark County high school students staged a protest at a school board meeting to demand more effective, specific, and comprehensive sexual education classes. http://www.8newsnow.com/story/27381921/students-speak-out-about-sex-ed-curriculum-at-ccsds-board-meeting
  • CSU Students Protest Mandatory Fees California, November 13: Dozens of California State University students protested the planned imposition of new mandatory fees in the CSU system. http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/CSU-Students-Protest-Student-Success-Fees–282613091.html
  • Hawaii Grad Student Protest Hawaii, November 17: Graduate students at the University of Hawaii at Manoa erected tents on campus in a multi-day protest against planned budget cuts.https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2014/11/20/grad-students-u-hawaii-protest-rumored-cuts
  • Virginia Students Protest Racist Tweet Virginia, November 17: A dozen students walked out of classes at Booker T. Washington High School in Norfolk to protest a tweet by an assistant principal that called interracial prom dating “every white girl’s father’s worst nightmare.” http://wavy.com/2014/11/17/norfolk-students-protest-principals-offensive-tweet/
  • U of So Maine Budget Protest Maine, November 17: Students at the University of Southern Maine took over a meeting of the university’s board of trustees to protest plans to eliminate programs and cut faculty lines to close a budget deficit.
  • UCR Tuition Protest California, November 18: Hundreds of students at the University of Calfornia, Riverside protested a system-wide tuition hike, occupying a hallway outside of the university president’s office for several hours.
  • #LiabilityOfTheMind, U of Chicago Illinois, November 18: Students at the University of Chicago launched a Twitter hashtag campaign to highlight institutional bigotry at the university. http://feministing.com/2014/11/19/uchicago-students-speak-out-against-institutional-failures-with-trending-liabilityofthemind-hashtag/
  • UCLA Student Govt Supports Israel Divestment California, November 18: The UCLA student government voted 8-2 to call on the University of California to divest from companies with financial ties to the Israeli military and the occupied territories. http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-ucla-divestment-israel-20141119-story.html
  • Davis Mrak Hall Occupation California, November 18: Twenty students occupied Mrak Hall on the UC Davis campus in protest of the UC system trustees’ planned tuition hike vote, which took place the following day. http://fox40.com/2014/11/19/students-occupy-administration-building-to-protest-tuition-hike/
  • Berkeley Occupation California, November 19: Students at UC Berkeley occupied a building on campus for seven days in protest over a system-wide tuition hike. They abandoned the sit-in before Thanksgiving break, though a handful of students maintained an encampment outside the building afterwards.
  • Valier HS Sit-In Montana, November 19: Fifty students at Valier High School in Vailer, Montana staged a sit-in during school hours in support of a school staff member who had been suspended. The staffer was later reinstated. http://www.krtv.com/news/valier-high-school-staff-member-back-on-the-job-after-student-sit-in-/
  • UCLA Tuition Protest California, November 20: UCLA students protesting a system-wide tuition increase surrounded the site of a planned bonfire to mark an upcoming football game against the University of Southern California, forcing the bonfire’s cancellation.
  • West Bend HS Hall Pass Protest Wisconsin, November 20: A hundred students at West Bend High School staged a roving protest against new, larger hall passes that they say treat them like children. Police were called after students tore down posters and turned on water fountains, and one student was arrested.
  • HS Students Silently Protest Missouri Governor Missouri, November 20: A group of students rose and silently took up a “hands up don’t shoot” stance during a school assembly at the Lincoln College Preparatory Academy while Missouri Governor Jay Nixon was addressing the student body. The students, who were protesting the police killing of Mike Brown in the state and the government’s response to it, left the room peacefully when asked. http://www.kshb.com/news/local-news/students-protest-ferguson-shooting-during-governor-nixons-speech-at-school-assembly
  • WA Students Rally for Mexican Activists Washington, November 20: Three dozen students at Central Washington University rallied in solidarity with 43 Mexican student activists who disappeared in September. http://www.dailyrecordnews.com/members/cwu-protest-raises-awareness-of-disappearance-in-mexico/article_a6234720-71a9-11e4-9b39-b7b5c5be9a30.html
  • CA CC Students March For Mexican Activists California, November 20: Students at San Diego Community College marched in solidarity with 43 Mexican student activists who disappeared in September. http://www.sdcitytimes.com/news/2014/12/10/city-students-rally-for-the-missing-43-ayotzinapa-students/
  • UVA Students Protest Rape Virginia, November 22: A series of student protests roiled the University of Virginia campus after Rolling Stone magazine reported on an alleged campus gang rape that had gone unpunished. http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/a-weekend-of-protest-at-uva-as-rolling-stone-rape-story-jolts-campus-20141124
  • Norman HS Rape Protest Oklahoma, November 24: Hundreds of students walked out of Norman High School in Norman, Oklahoma to protest the school administration’s handling of the rape of three girls at the school by a fellow student.
  • UCI Tuition Demo California, November 24: About 40 UC Irvine students staged a 90-minute administration building sit-in to protest a system-wide tuition hike.
  • UC Davis Tuition Walkout California, November 24: Hundreds of UC Davis students staged a walkout and march to protest a system-wide tuition hike. The students occupied a campus building for several hours. http://www.theaggie.org/2014/11/24/uc-davis-students-call-for-statewide/
  • Seattle Ferguson Walkout Washington, November 24: One thousand Seattle high school students walked out of classes and staged marches in the city protesting the non-indictment of police officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Mike Brown.
  • Northwestern Rape Protest Illinois, November 24: Students called off a planned sit-in at Northwestern University after the university announced that it was abandoning plans to enter mediation with a professor accused of sexual assault.
  • UCSC Occupation California, November 24: Several dozen UCSC students occupied a building on campus for six days in protest of a system-wide tuition hike. They ended the sit-in voluntarily before the Thanksgiving break.
  • UCSD Occupation California, November 24: UCSD students occupied a lecture hall on campus for at least one night in opposition to a system-wide tuition hike.
  • Ohio U Ferguson Occupation Ohio, November 24: A hundred Ohio University students occupied an administration building on campus for several hours after the grand jury decision in the Mike Brown killing, demanding increased diversity on campus, a disarming of campus police, and other reforms. They left the building voluntarily at 2:30 in the morning.
  • Gonzaga Anti-Rape Organizing Washington, November 24: Gonzaga University’s Title IX Coordinator resigned suddenly after two weeks of student anti-rape organizing. Activists are pressing for a role in choosing her replacement. http://www.inlander.com/spokane/gu-shake-up/Content?oid=2382973
  • UCSD Frats Suspend Activities California, November 25: Fraternities and sororities at UC San Diego announced that they were suspending all social activities indefinitely after a group of frat brothers disrupted a Take Back the Night march by throwing eggs, screaming obscenities, and waving dildos at the marchers. http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/nov/25/sdsu-fraternities-sororities-sexual-assaults/?#article-copy
  • Columbia HS Ferguson Walkout New Jersey, November 25: A hundred students at Columbia High School in northern New Jersey walked out of classes in protest of the police killing of Mike Brown.
  • Minneapolis Ferguson Protest Minnesota, November 25: Four hundred students walked out of South High School in Minneapolis to protest the police killing of Mike Brown. The students staged an hourlong sit-in on school property, then marched to a local police station.
  • Poly Western HS Ferguson Protest Maryland, November 25: Students at Poly Western High School in Baltimore staged a daylong sit-in at their school’s auditorium to protest the police killing of Mike Brown.
  • U of RI Ferguson Protest Rhode Island, November 25: Several dozen University of Rhode Island students staged a die-in near the college’s student union, blocking traffic on a local road. The students were protesting the police killing of Mike Brown.
  • CAPA Ferguson Protest Pennsylvania, November 25: Students at the Pittsburgh Creative and Performing Arts school staged a sit-in inside the school after their principal forbade them from joining a city-wide protest against the police killing of Mike Brown.
  • Morehouse Ferguson Protest Georgia, November 25: Two hundred students gathered at Morehouse College to protest the police killing of Mke Brown.
  • Michigan Ferguson Vigil Michigan, November 25: More than a thousand students at the University of Michigan participated in a protest vigil against the non-indictment of police officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Mike Brown. http://www.michigandaily.com/news/community-members-protest-ferguson-decision
  • Clark Students’ Ferguson March Massachusetts, November 25: Several hundred students from Clark University staged a daylong protest against the non-indictment of police officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Mike Brown. http://worcestermag.com/2014/11/25/worcesters-streets-give-rise-protest-wake-ferguson-ruling/29331
  • Howard Activists Raise Pan-African Flag Washington, DC, November 25. On the morning after the non-indictment of officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Mike Brown, unknown activists replaced a prominent American flag on the Howard University campus with a Garveyite Pan-African flag, flown at half mast. http://dcist.com/2014/11/photo_howard_u_replaces_american_fl.php
  • St Cloud State Ferguson Rally Minnesota, November 25: About forty students staged a protest against the non-indictment of officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Mike Brown. http://wjon.com/peaceful-rally-at-st-cloud-state-university-over-ferguson-decision-audio/
  • Colby Ferguson Protest Maine, November 25: Fifty students at Colby College staged a silent protest against the non-indictment of officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Mike Brown. http://www.colby.edu/news/2014/12/02/students-protest-ferguson-grand-jury-decision/
  • Binghamton Ferguson March New York, November 25: Several dozen students at Colby College marched against the non-indictment of officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Mike Brown. http://www.wbng.com/news/local/Students-protest-Ferguson-decision-283805701.html
  • CMU Ferguson Protest Michigan, November 25: More than a hundred students at Central Michigan University staged a protest against the non-indictment of officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Mike Brown. http://college.usatoday.com/2014/11/26/central-michigan-university-students-protest-ferguson-decision/
  • Kent State Ferguson March Ohio, November 25: More than two hundred students staged a protest against the non-indictment of officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Mike Brown. http://fox8.com/2014/11/25/kent-state-students-protest-ferguson-decision/
  • MTSU Ferguson March Tennessee, November 25: Three hundred students at Middle Tennessee State University staged a protest against the non-indictment of officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Mike Brown. http://mtsusidelines.com/2014/11/mtsu-students-gather-to-protest-mike-brown-case-verdict/
  • ND State Ferguson Rally North Dakota, November 26: A group of six students staged a small protest against the non-indictment of officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Mike Brown. http://ndsuspectrum.com/ndsu-students-rally-for-michael-brown/
  • U of MD Campus Police Sit-In Maryland, November 26: More than a hundred University of Maryland students occupied a cafeteria on campus for three hours in response to the police killing of Mike Brown. They demanded a variety of reforms to the UMD campus police.
  • UCSD Ferguson Protest California, November 26: Students closed Interstate I-5 Northbound near UC San Diego for nearly half an hour in a protest against the non-indictment of Darren Wilson for the killing of Mike Brown. The protest was organized by the UCSD Black Student Union.
  • Students Protest Elimination of Football Alabama, November 30: Hundreds of students at the University of Alabama at Birmingham participated in a series of marches and protests intended to save UAB’s football team from being shut down. The elimination of football at the college was formally announced a few days later. http://www.myfoxal.com/story/27515309/uab-students-march-in-the-streets-for-freeuab-rally

December

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StudentActivism.net is the work of Angus Johnston, a historian and advocate of American student organizing.

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