Author Archive

“I am dreaming, and I want to do good. For the good you do is never lost. Not even in dreams.”

— Pedro Calderón de la Barca, as quoted by Mario Savio

This is going to be really cool.

Next Saturday, the student government of St. John’s University in Queens will be hosting a day-long University Think Tank for student government leaders. The event is intended to give students from around New York a chance to learn from each other, exchange ideas and questions, and build a new citywide network of activists.

And I’ll be giving the keynote speech — my first public speaking engagement in New York City in almost a year.

Attendance at the conference is free, and includes breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There’ll be discussion sessions, workshops, and other events, with plenty of chances for networking and making connections. St. John’s is easily accessible by car or public transportation.

A dozen campuses are already expected to attend — CUNY and private schools, community colleges and universities. There’s still time to RSVP, too: just drop conference coordinator Ish Sanchez a line at uttcoalition@gmail.com by March 25.

Students from around the country will gather in Washington DC this weekend for the annual Legislative Conference of the United States Student Association. USSA’s Leg Con, one of the nation’s largest student activist conferences, is always a big deal, but this year it’s absolutely huge, for two reasons.

First, there’s the March 4 Day of Action.

Just two weeks ago — two weeks ago exactly — tens of thousands of students from all over the US joined together in a coordinated day of activism. Many of the activists involved in planning and carrying out those events will be in DC this weekend, making this conference their first chance to compare notes, exchange new ideas, and discuss what the Day of Action means for the future of American student organizing.

Second, there’s SAFRA.

Nine days ago, beltway pundits were writing stories about the imminent demise of SAFRA, the student aid reform bill that would transform both higher education loans, financial aid, and university funding. But student activists, led by USSA and a few other groups, bombarded the Hill with a two-day blitz of phone calls, emails, and faxes, by the end of which SAFRA’s chances had been revitalized.

SAFRA is bundled with the “reconciliation” bill that’s being used to pass health care reform, and this weekend is going to be crunch time for that bill. The House vote on reconciliation could come as early as Sunday, with the Senate vote anytime after that. Leg Con starts on Saturday, and the student attendees are scheduled to hit the Hill for a full day of lobbying on Tuesday.

You see where this is going.

I haven’t been to Leg Con in a very long time, but I’ll be there this weekend. Hope to see you there, and if I don’t … watch this space.

Update | Commenters have noted that there’s a bunch of other big stuff going on in DC this weekend. Impressive.

So KC Johnson is a historian and blogger who made something of a name for himself with his coverage of the rape allegations lodged against members of the Duke lacrosse team a few years back. Johnson returned to the subject of campus sexual assault yesterday with a response to Jaclyn Friedman’s weekend Washington Post op-ed on universities’ judicial policies.

It didn’t go well.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan wrote an op-ed for the Huffington Post called Campus Protests Should Remind Us All of College’s Value. The piece itself — mostly a call for passage of student loan reform — wasn’t particularly remarkable, but Duncan’s embrace of the current wave of student protest was striking.

There’s quite a bit of that going around right now. The California protests of the fall boosted student activism’s profile dramatically, and March 4 raised it a lot more.

But the weirdest example of the trend I’ve seen is an ad I caught on television late last night for the for-profit university chain Kaplan University. In it, a young female student stands behind a podium on a campus quad and passionately intones these words:

“There’s a movement afoot in this country. A student-led revolution. A rallying cry for change in an otherwise unchanged educational system.”

It goes on in that vein, in language that slithers from stirring-but-vague activist rhetoric to stirring-but-contentless corporatespeak and back again. (You can see the ad at this page on the Kaplan U site. It’s called “People Like Me.”)

Of course Kaplan University, which was created ten years ago with the purchase of an old correspondence school by the Stanley Kaplan test prep company, is obviously anything but “a student-led revolution” in higher ed.

By coincidence, in fact, yesterday’s New York Times featured a front-page article on how for-profit universities deliver “dubious benefits to students” by “exploit[ing] the recession as a lucrative recruiting device” and “harvesting growing federal student aid dollars, including Pell grants awarded to low-income students.”

(It took me about fifteen minutes of Googling and clicking to find Kaplan’s tuition rates, but it looks like they run about $16,000 per year. That’s $2,000 more than the national average for for-profit colleges, and $11,000 a year more than in-state tuition for full-time online enrollment in New York’s state university system.)