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Via RAWA comes word that as many as a thousand students at Afghanistan’s Kabul University marched yesterday in protest against American air strikes that mor than a hundred Afghans last week. 

RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan, is a women’s organization in Afghanistan that promotes secular democracy. They say that a local investigation has concluded that 140 civilians were killed, nearly one hundred of them girls under the age of 18 who had taken refuge in a compound.

palmer9Another student party-turned-riot has been broken up by cops — this one at Ohio University.

Thousands of people attended an off-campus party near OU on Saturday night. Cops moved in when partiers began setting fires in the street, and were greeted by students throwing bottles and full beer cans. Police say five police horses were injured, three of them cut by broken glass.

At one point a group of students tore down a stop sign as another set up speakers in an open window to blast NWA’s “Fuck Tha Police” into the street. Some students claim the cops used excessive force in breaking up the party.

Similar melees took place at the University of Minnesota and Kent State earlier this semester.

(Photo of douche giving thumbs-up sign courtesy of the Ohio University Post.)

NBC has a new sitcom set at a community college slated for the fall lineup. The good news is that Community was created by two veterans of the fabulous Arrested Development. The bad news? Neither of those two veterans is Mitchell Hurwitz, who created AD.

The really bad news? Chevy Chase is in it.

Check out the trailer for yourself, if you like, but meh. When the funniest thing you’ve got going is a character shouting out random lines from The Breakfast Club, worry. Lots of annoying hipster “edgy” race stuff, too.

I think I’ll wait for HBO’s new women’s studies comedy.

On the subway home from this meeting, I sketched out the skeleton of a post riffing on the conversation we had there. I just came across those notes again, and though I don’t have time right this minute to write them up into a full essay, I figure I might as well put them out there anyway. I welcome comments and questions, and if you’d like to see the longer version, feel free to prod me.

How are students brought into a movement?

  1. By being met where they are.
  2. By being given a sense of the possible.
  3. By feeling their power.
  4. By confronting their powerlessness.
  5. By experiencing a one-to-one connection.
  6. By experiencing community.

(This is really less a set of six principles than three sets, each made up of two principles in tension with one another. As the physicist Niels Bohr once said, “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”)

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

To contact Angus, click here. For more about him, check out AngusJohnston.com.