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The Washington Post on student loan reform, this morning:

“Democratic leaders met for a second day Wednesday with administration officials … one participant said a consensus appeared to be emerging that it would be unwise to risk the health-care bill by including the education measure.”

The Washington Post on student loan reform, this afternoon:

“Senate Democrats said Thursday that they are inclined to add an overhaul of the nation’s student loan program to the final health-care bill.”

What happened in between? This. A huge coordinated student lobbying campaign, launched by phone and email by groups like Campus Progress, Rock the Vote, and the United States Student Association.

Click those links to find out more about how to get involved, and read this and this for more background.

Tuition policy for professional schools in the University of California currently requires that fee increases raise tuition no higher than those at similar public universities’ programs. The UC Regents have the power to grant exceptions to this policy, like they did last November when they raised fees at 44 programs, 24 of them to levels above the permitted averages.

But now the San Francisco Chronicle reports that the Regents are thinking about going further, much further, with an astoundingly ill-considered plan.

Currently the professional school tuition policy requires that any proposed increase conform to “the total tuition and/or fees charged by comparable degree programs at other comparable public institutions.” But according to the Chronicle, the Regents are going to be voting later this month on a proposal to drop the word “public” from that passage.

Yes, you read that right.

The UC Regents want to use private universities as their benchmark for student fees.

It’s mind-boggling. It really is. Tens of thousands of California students are taking to the streets to oppose fee increases and cuts to public support for the university. The Regents are desperately trying to make the case that it’s the state legislature, not the university itself, that’s the students’ real enemy. The concept of the privatization of public higher education is just beginning to gain traction with critics of the university’s current direction.

And now the Regents want to take the word “public” out of their tuition policies?

Really? Really?

Wow.

A Mississippi school district has cancelled next month’s high school prom rather than let a lesbian student attend with her girlfriend.

Policy at the Itawamba County Agricultural High School in northern Mississippi bars same-sex prom dates. Senior Constance McMillen approached the school last month about attending the event with her girlfriend, and was told that they would not be allowed to arrive together and that they might be asked to leave if their presence made other students uncomfortable.

The school also vetoed McMillen’s request to wear a tuxedo to the event.

In their statement announcing the cancellation of the prom, school district officials said they hoped that “private citizens will organize an event for the juniors and seniors,” a sentiment with clear echoes of Southern states’ efforts to avoid desegregation of public schools in the late 1950s.

When federal courts ordered public schools in four Virginia counties integrated in early 1958, Virginia governor James Almond ordered those schools to be closed — rather than have students attend on an integrated basis, he would provide no public education whatsoever.

As in the current Mississippi case, Almond foresaw individual initiative filling the gap, and so they did — private “segregation academies,” funded with state money and individual donations, were created to take in the white students whose schools had been closed. No similar provision was made for educating black students. The closed Virginia schools were re-opened by court order within a few months, though Virginia’s Prince Edward County later shut down its school system for five years rather than integrate.

The ACLU of Mississippi has intervened in this case, saying that “schools that discriminate against lesbian, gay, and bisexual students who want to bring same-sex dates to school dances need to know that by doing so they’re violating established federal law, and we will call them on it.”

In a similar case in Alabama last year, a school initially announced that it would cancel prom rather than allow to attend with her girlfriend, but later reversed its decision under ACLU pressure.

Update | The ACLU is suing the school district for canceling the prom, saying the action violates McMillen’s first amendment rights. They’ve asked a federal judge to order the school to hold the prom as planned.

I wrote on Tuesday that a big fight was coming in the Senate over SAFRA, the Obama administration’s attempt to reform the student loan system, making billions of dollars of new money available to educational institutions and student financial aid.

Well, the fight is here, and punches are being thrown.

The Washington post reported last night that six Democratic senators have signed a letter objecting to passage of SAFRA as it now stands, and that White House officials have been meeting with congressional leaders to try to find a way forward.

The crucial question right now is whether SAFRA will be included in the upcoming reconciliation vote in the Senate, under which issues can be considered on a straight up-or-down vote, avoiding the filibusters that so often snarl Senate legislation these days. The primary purpose of the reconciliation bill is the passage of the federal budget, but it has emerged as the best chance for the passage of health care reform and student loan reform in the immediate future.

The current system, which the New York Times described yesterday as one in which “the government pays private, for-profit student lending companies to make risk-free loans using taxpayer money,” is a cash cow for banks, which have lobbied aggressively to kill reform.

See my Tuesday post for more info on SAFRA and the current legislative battle.

The growth of the student protest movement has sparked a series of debates about strategy and tactics, and those debates have gotten more intense in the wake of the March 4 Day of Action. Activists and their critics have legitimate disagreements about methods and goals, and those disagreements are now being aired in public with growing frequency.

I’m going to be talking a bit about those disagreements soon, but first I want to clear away some of the strawmen that have popped up recently. If there’s going to be a debate, and there should be, let it be in good faith.

I read an essay this morning that suffers from all of the weaknesses that I’ve got in mind. In an opinion piece in the online journal Politics Daily, Muskingum College senior Joshua Chaney argues that March 4 represented a missed opportunity because “participants’ messages were mixed, their disruptions turned away other students and members of the public, and their voices often fell on the wrong ears.” That’s a legitimate argument, but unfortunately Chaney gets the specifics of it completely wrong.

Here are four things to bear in mind when writing, talking, or thinking about contemporary student protest:

1. Mixed messages come with the territory.

Chaney complains of the March 4 protesters’ “lack of a common voice and purpose,” calling for “clearer messaging.” That’s all fine nad dandy, but it avoids the central question: clearer messaging from whom?

The contemporary American student movement isn’t an organization or a political party. Nobody was screening March 4 actions and giving out credentials. There was no seal of approval. This was a grassroots event. Nobody had the power to impose a common agenda on the events, because the events weren’t coordinated or conceived by a central body. Anybody could mount an action on March 4, and just about everybody did. That’s how social movements roll.

“Student activists are now taking divergent paths in determining what steps are next,” Chaney says. Well, of course they are. They weren’t all on one path to begin with. That diversity is a reflection of the vigor and vitality of the movement.

2. A rally and a lobby day are two different things.

Chaney quotes a Berkeley first-year as saying that students should be talking to legislators in Sacramento rather than “waving [their] hands” at a campus protest. I’m a big fan of lobbying. Huge fan. But I also recognize that state legislators read the papers and watch television, and I’m having a hard time remembering the last time that a sit-down with an assemblymember’s staff made the evening news or attracted the attention of a student on her way to class.

Mass action gets noticed, and getting noticed is part of getting results.

It’s also important to note that many protesters last Thursday weren’t particularly interested in swaying legislators. Some were working to reform campus-specific policies. Some were looking to build student power in their institutions. Some, for that matter, were trying to bring on the revolution and overthrow capitalism entirely.

Before you tell people that protesting won’t get them what they want, make sure you know what they want.

3. The disruptions of March 4 were actually really mild.

Chaney opens with a vivid account of the campus climate of the late 1960s. Eight bombings in a year at Berkeley. A riot that sent nearly fifty cops to the hospital. Hundreds of weapons confiscated from student protesters.

This “style of protest,” he says, “was alive in various forms” on March 4.

Really? Come on.

There were more than a hundred actions on March 4, and Chaney finds evidence of disruptive activity at just four of them. At Davis and in the Bay area, students blocked traffic, or tried to. At Santa Cruz, students barred cars from campus. And at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, fifteen activists were arrested “for obstructing justice and disorderly conduct.” That’s it. That’s all he’s got.

In colonial days, armed students regularly burned buildings and terrorized professors. In the early years of the American republic universities often had to be shut down because student unrest threatened life and property. Campus riots hospitalized untold numbers of activists, police, and bystanders in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Student violence didn’t begin with the sixties — it’s been a recurring theme of campus life for hundreds of years.

But there was virtually no student violence last Thursday. Throughout the country, even on campuses where activists had clashed with police in the recent past, activists conducted themselves with care and restraint. I am aware of only two serious injuries on the day — a student who was hit by a car that was running the blockade at UC Santa Cruz, and a high schooler who fell off the highway overpass in Oakland. That’s all.

If you’re going to criticize the student activists of March 4 as being out of control, then no grassroots movement will ever meet your standards for restraint and decorum.

4. Mass action works.

The student protests of the 1960s that Chaney decries provided the impetus for profound changes in the American university, and in society more broadly. In the late sixties and early seventies students across the country achieved huge victories in their efforts to secure a real role in campus governance. They forced the creation of ethnic and gender studies departments on hundreds of campuses. They ended the draft. With the adoption of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1971, they even gained the right to vote. They didn’t win everything they were fighting for, but they won a hell of a lot.

Was it rioting and bombing that won those victories? Mostly it wasn’t. The vast majority of student agitation then, as now, was peaceful and disciplined. But that movement, far messier and far rowdier than today’s, transformed the country.