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Tony Avella, a Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City, will hold an event at Hunter College this Friday to publicize his support for a return to free education at the City University of New York.
CUNY was tuition-free from its founding until 1975, when a fiscal crisis led the city to begin charging its students. (Not coincidentally, tuition was charged for the first time just six years after CUNY implemented an open-admissions enrollment policy.) Avella, who is currently running well behind Democratic front-runner Bill Thompson in primary polling, is the only candidate from either party to support a return to free tuition at CUNY.
Avella is himself a Hunter graduate, and the 11 AM event at 68th Street and Lexington Avenue will take place on CUNY’s first day of classes for the fall semester.
By the way, as Avella notes on his Twitter feed, the first of two primary election debates will be taking place on NY1 tonight at 7 PM.
Throughout the student movement of the 1960s, most American college students were denied the right to vote.
From the birth of the American republic, the voting age had stood at 21. Pressure for the 18-year-old vote had been building since 18-year-old men were first drafted in the Second World War, but despite the baby boom, the student movements of the sixties, and the deaths of thousands of Americans under 21 in Korea and Vietnam, voting age reform went nowhere for decades.
It was only in May 1970, after National Guard troops shot and killed four students during a protest at Kent State University, that Congress brought the issue to a vote, and even then it was only because of the actions of Senators Ted Kennedy and Mike Mansfield.
In the aftermath of Kent State, with the nation reeling from the spectacle of its own troops gunning down its own students, Kennedy and Mansfield moved decisively. They introduced the 18-year-old vote as an amendment to the Voting Rights Act, and Mansfield threatened to filibuster the renewal of the Act if that amendment was not incorporated into it.
Kennedy and Mansfield won that battle, and the Voting Rights Act, as amended, was signed into law by President Nixon that June. The Supreme Court declared the provision unconstitutional that winter, ruling that Congress didn’t have the power to enfranchise youth in state and local elections, but the Twenty Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, passed by Congress the following spring and ratified by the states in record time, soon gave 18-to-20-year-olds the vote for good.
With the lowering of the voting age, college students became a significant voting bloc in American politics. In the 1970s, for the first time, students could exercise political power not just in the streets, but in the voting booth as well.
A new kind of student politics demanded a new kind of organizing, and so 1971 also saw the creation of the National Student Lobby, America’s first national student-funded, student-directed lobbying organization. State Student Associations (SSAs) and state student lobbies soon followed, making the 1970s an unprecedented boom-time for student electoral organizing.
The SSAs of the 1970s transformed American politics and higher education forever, altering the balance of power between students and educational institutions while giving students a voice in state and national politics that reached far beyond the campus.
This shift in the American political landscape will not be a part of the headlines commemorating Ted Kennedy’s life. It will not be mentioned in most of his obituaries. And of course Kennedy was just one part of the process that brought that transformation into being — the overwhelming majority of the work of the Seventies student revolution was carried out by student activists whose names are lost to history.
But Senator Kennedy did play a crucial role at a crucial moment, and in that respect these changes are part of his legacy as well.
Over on Twitter about an hour ago, I came across a tweet that said a new study had found that “Social Ntwks make college students more narcissistic.” I’m always interested in the latest research on student culture, so I clicked.
The link took me to a USA Today article on the study. The article doesn’t quite make the claim in the tweet, but it does make some other arguments that are well worth unpacking. (The study itself doesn’t appear to be online anywhere. If anyone reading this finds it, or can get access to it, let me know in comments.)
The tweet I quoted above makes a cause-and-effect claim: that social networking makes students more narcissistic. The lead sentence of the USA Today piece makes a similar, but slightly weaker, claim: that students believe that social networking makes them more narcissistic. But neither of these claims are backed up by the data that follows.
The article is based on the answers to two questions. Students were asked whether their peers “used social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter for self-promotion, narcissism and attention-seeking,” and they were asked whether they agreed that their generation was “more self-promoting, narcissistic, overconfident and attention-seeking than previous generations.” A bit more than half (57%) answered yes to the first question, and 66% agreed “strongly” or “somewhat” with the second statement.
The first thing to point here is that there’s no claim of causality in the students’ answers. Most of them think that their peers (some of them? all of them? a few of them? the article doesn’t say) engage in attention-seeking behavior online (occasionally? frequently? incessantly?). And most of them think their peers are more prone to attention-seeking behavior than previous generations. But the answers provided in the article don’t give any indication that they think social networks themselves are the cause of this behavior, much less any evidence that such a cause-and-effect relationship actually exists.
So the Twitter soundbite version of the study is bunk — the survey doesn’t show that social networking makes people more narcissistic. And the weaknesses of the study don’t end there.
A second big problem is that the survey questions are muddled. Every blogger I know uses social networks for “self-promotion,” and to the extent that seeking attention for your writing is “attention seeking,” I guess they all do that too. But I wouldn’t call that behavior narcissistic, and I don’t think it makes much sense at all to frame the question as if it was. Self-promotion and narcissism aren’t the same thing. They’re not even close to the same thing — nobody thinks USA Today’s own self-promoting Twitter feed is narcissistic.
And here’s a third problem: what basis do young people have for assessing how “self-promoting, narcissistic, overconfident and attention-seeking” their parents’ generation was in their youth, much less their grandparents or great-grandparents? They weren’t there. They don’t know.
What they do know is how previous generations, and their own peers, are perceived in popular culture, and the perception of youth as “self-promoting, narcissistic, overconfident and attention-seeking” is a pop culture cliche. So that second question really only measures the degree to which young people have embraced society’s negative image of them.
And this is where we really go down the rabbit hole.
Where does the perception of today’s young people as narcissistic come from? In large part it comes from the work of researchers like Jean Twenge, who’s written two books and dozens of articles making exactly that argument. Twenge’s most recent project? She’s the author of the study we’re talking about today.
So here’s how it works. Writers come up with the idea — valid or invalid — that today’s youth are narcissists. They write books and publish op-eds and go on talk shows and give quotes to journalists and do public speaking engagements pushing this idea. Then, with their perspective embedded in popular culture, one of them, Twenge, conducts a survey asking young people what they think of it. Most of those young people, having been fed that story for years, admit that it’s at least “somewhat” accurate. And then that survey is presented as evidence that the theory is true.
Jean Twenge graduated from high school in the 1980s, a time when the popular media were full of stories about the entitlement and self-absorption of the nation’s youth. Her parents came of age in the 1960s, an era whose young people were widely condemned as narcissistic by their parents. As strange as it may seem now, the youth of the early 1940s faced similar charges, and anyone who’s ever read an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel knows that the same stereotype was rampant in the 1920s.
Are today’s youth more narcissistic than their parents were at their age? Maybe. I’m not sure that the question is a particularly meaningful one, but it’s possible that I could be convinced that it is, and that Twenge’s answer to it is the right one.
But what I do know for sure is that every generation thinks their children are more frivolous and more selfish than they were as youths, and that every generation is eager to consume “research” that supports this self-perception. Every generation loves to read about how great they are, and how the kids of today just don’t measure up.
And if I had to sum up that attitude in a single word?
I’d be tempted to call it narcissism.
Student loan giant Sallie Mae has released a new study, How America Pays for College 2009, that misrepresents the state of college lending today.
Sallie Mae is facing potentially crippling losses of revenue under the government’s planned shift to direct lending for college students. Right now, the company manages $188 billion dollars a year in college loans, revenue that would be threatened if direct lending becomes a reality. (The government anticipates that student loan reform would save $87 billion over ten years.)
In its new report, Sallie Mae trumpets the results of a survey it commissioned that found that “58 percent of families invested in higher education last year without borrowing.” It uses this finding to claim that “American families are making the investment in higher education the smart way – by pursuing grants and scholarships more frequently than borrowing.”
But Sallie Mae’s figures are for a single year, not the length of an undergraduate career, and they’re based on survey results, not hard data. As it turns out — and as we reported less than two weeks ago — a new study by the College Board has just been released that uses real numbers and a multi-year perspective, and it found that 59% of college students borrowed, almost half again as many as Sallie Mae suggests.
I wrote about the new search engine Wolfram|Alpha shortly after it debuted this spring, and concluded that whatever its strengths in mathematics and the hard sciences, it was pretty much useless as a tool for scholars of higher education. As I wrote at the time, “it has no idea what college enrollment or tuition is, and can’t tell me anything about trends in those arenas. It doesn’t know that Howard University is a HBCU, or even what proportion of Howard’s student body is black.”
The team behind W|A say they’ve been working on expanding its “knowledge domains” this summer, so I took it out for another spin this morning, re-running all the searches I ran last spring. Unfortunately, it did no better with any of them this time around.
If and when Wolfram|Alpha expands into social science and demographic research, it may well be something spectacular. But that day is apparently still pretty far off.
studentactivism.net 
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