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The landmark Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) is moving toward a vote in the House of Representatives today.
SAFRA is the most significant piece of financial aid legislation to be taken up by the US Congress in decades. You can follow the progress of the bill at the United States Student Association homepage, or by checking in on the #SAFRA hashtag on Twitter.
I’ll be spending most of today teaching, but I’ll update here when I get the chance, and post news and links at the @studentactivism Twitter feed in the meantime.
A new exhibit on the white anti-slavery activist John Brown opens today at the New-York Historical society, 150 years (minus a month and a day) after he tried to start a slave uprising at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Brown was executed in December 1859 for his role in that raid, but his actions — at Harper’s Ferry and before — helped to spark the Civil War.
I’ve got a photo on my bookshelf, in a carved wooden frame I bought at a rummage sale. The photo is actually a postcard, though it’s been trimmed down and you can’t really tell.
It’s this photo. John Brown, swearing an oath.
John Brown was an abolitionist, of course, and that’s part of why I like him. But I’ve never really been explicit about why I like him so much, why I’m drawn to him as opposed to any other white abolitionist. I think I just figured it out, though.
In 1856 John Brown went to Kansas, where pro-slavery and anti-slavery whites were fighting. He wanted to intervene on the side of righteousness, and he did. He went to Kansas and he killed a bunch of white people. He killed white people who were standing in the way of racial justice.
Three years later, with the Civil War looming, he acted again. This time he raided a federal arsenal to try to liberate weapons for a slave uprising. He was caught, and hanged.
The photo I have is of the John Brown of 1856. (By 1859 he had a huge flowing beard.) The Brown in my photo was the Brown who saw racism and went to Kansas.
Now, I’m not big on killing people. Not at all. Not even in my most ludicrous fantasies of radical action am I big on killing people. It’s never particularly been the killing people part that attracted me to Brown.
It’s more, I think, that he went into the white community first. It sounds weird, phrased like that, since his work with white people consisted of murdering them, but that’s what he did. He took his whiteness and he used it in the service of racial justice, used it to do what a black person couldn’t have done, used it in his own community.
When I look at that photo in that frame, I’m reminded that I’m white. I’m reminded that whiteness is an identity, one among many. I’m reminded that whiteness is specific, not generic. And I’m reminded that as a white man, I’ve got important work to do.
The country’s ongoing financial crisis is hitting university budgets hard as the new year gets underway, and students across the United States are mobilizing to respond. Four recent reports from the National Student News Service paint the picture:
Students at UC Berkeley demonstrated last week in support of an upcoming faculty walkout. Faculty plan to stage the action on September 24, a week from this Thursday, in protest against state-mandated furloughs that will cut faculty pay for the current year without reducing their workload. Elsewhere in California, students at USC are scrambling in the wake of drastic last-minute reductions to their financial aid packages.
In Michigan, the MSU student government has appointed a Director of University Budgets to conduct an independent study of the university’s financial condition. The student government is meeting with university administrators to advocate for students’ interests in the budgeting process, and the DUB’s analysis will give them an independent student perspective on the numbers they receive from administrators.
Students also tried to roll back cuts at the University of Southern Mississippi, where administrators announced plans in August to dissolve the university’s Economics department and its technical and occupational education program next year, eliminating 12 tenured and tenure-track faculty positions. In that case, student and faculty protest led to a compromise in which five senior Economics faculty agreed to retire and four younger professors were found new homes in the university’s College of Arts and Letters. (The three affected profs in the technical education program were denied reappointment.)
The student fight for funding is shaping up to be the big campus activism story of the fall. More posts on the subject are in the pipeline, and if you’ve got news we may not have heard of, feel free to leave updates and links in comments.
Gabriel Matthew Schivone, a reporter for the University of Arizona at Tucson’s Daily Wildcat, snagged an interview with Noam Chomsky recently, and Chomsky had some interesting things to say about student activism in the sixties and today.
The whole thing — including Schivone’s analysis of the role of protest on the campus — is worth reading, but here are a couple of choice Chomsky quotes:
When people talk about “the sixties,” what they are thinking of is about two years. You know, 1968, 1969, roughly. A little bit before, a little bit later. And it’s true that student activism today is not like those two years. But, on the whole, I think it’s grown since the 1960s. So, take the feminist and the environmental movements. I mean, they’re from the seventies. Take the International Solidarity Movement — that’s from the eighties. Take the Global Justice Movement, which just had another huge meeting in Brazil. That’s from this century. Plenty of students are involved in these things. In fact, the total level of student involvement in various things is probably as huge as it’s ever been, except for maybe the very peak in the 1960s. It’s not what I would like it to be, but it’s far more than it’s been.
Elite sectors and centers of power want students to be passive and apathetic. One of the reasons for the very sharp rise in tuition is to kind of capture students. You know, if you come out of college with a huge debt, you’re gonna have to work it off. I mean, you’re gonna have to become a corporate lawyer or go into business or something. And you won’t have time for engaged activism. The students of the sixties could take off a year or two and devote it to activism and think, ‘Okay, I’ll get back into my career later on.’ Now, that’s much harder today. And not by accident. These are disciplinary techniques.
Good stuff.
This is a very cool thing.
The Students for a Democratic Society wiki news archive that I posted about back in January was down for a while, but it’s back up with a huge amount of new information about local and national SDS activity.
There are eighteen links up for September already, along with a bunch of news from the summer. It’s great stuff. Go check it out.
studentactivism.net 
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