You are currently browsing Angus Johnston’s articles.
A group of Florida high school students is waging war against a local curfew.
The law — which bars under-18s from downtown West Palm Beach after 10 o’clock on weeknights and eleven on weekends — is, they say, unconscionable age discrimination. But that’s not all.
The law exempts married young people, but not those who are out with parental permission. On the contrary, it imposes fines on parents who “knowingly permit or by insufficient control allow” their children to break the curfew. “Insufficient control” is apparently nowhere defined — is a parent whose 17-year-old is in college expected to exercise “sufficient control” to keep him or her indoors at night?
The most bizarre — and, in a bizarre way, comforting — provision of the two-year-old law is one which exempts young people who are “attending or traveling directly to or from an activity that involves the exercise of rights protected under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution” from the curfew.
That’s right. The curfew as written only applies to those young people who don’t intend to speak while they’re out on the town. If you’re going to be exercising your freedom of speech (or assembly, or religion, or the press, or, you know, petitioning the government for redress of grievances), you’re golden. If you’re heading out to sit by your grandmother who’s in a coma, though, you’re getting a ticket.
(Only not really. The city is mostly just using the law as a mechanism for rousting young people rather than going through the hassle of ticketing them — as of the end of March it had issued a thousand warnings but only five citations.)
It’s ridiculous, is what it is, and the National Youth Rights Association of Southeast Florida is doing something about it.
NYRASEFL leaders Zach Goodman and Jeffrey Nadel (both 16) spent a big chunk of the spring explaining to the mayor and city commission just how farkakte the law is, but didn’t get anywhere. Then in late March they retained local civil rights attorney Barry Silver, who managed to get a law that criminalized feeding the homeless (yes, really) overturned last year. But so far he hasn’t had any luck either.
So on the evening of May 1, they took to the streets, letting the city know when and where they would defy the curfew.
During the protest they were tailed by two officers on Segways, but otherwise left alone. Their presence does seem to have gotten under the cops’ skin, though, as police ticketed several teens who were waiting for their parents outside a nearby movie theater as the protest was going on.
NYRASEFL intends to make one final effort to convince the city commission to repeal the curfew law before filing suit against the city. We’ll keep you informed as the story develops.
Update: As Justin Graham notes in comments, NYRASEFL is on Twitter, too.
It seems like every month or so there’s a big media buzz around another deeply flawed study that claims to confirm negative stereotypes about American college students. In February it was the one that explored students’ supposed “sense of entitlement” in the classroom, in March it was the one that claimed that students spend more time drinking than studying.
In April it was the one from Ohio State University researcher Aryn Karpinski that found that Facebook users have lower grades than students who aren’t on FB. It was only a draft paper, based on a small group of students from one college, but it made a huge splash all over the world.
And now it turns out that it’s pretty much worthless as scholarship.
A new response from three scholars in the field (Josh Pasek, eian more, and Eszter Hargittai) looks closely at the Facebook study, and finds it incredibly weak. In comparing the grades of students who use and don’t use Facebook, for instance, one needs a substantial number in each category, but this study’s sample only included 15 non-FB undergrads. It also found major differences in Facebook adoption across majors, but made no effort to determine whether it was those population differences, rather than an actual tie to Facebook use, that was responsible for grade variation.
At least as important, the response looks at data obtained from three large studies, and found no significant connection between Facebook use and low grades. Indeed, one set of data suggested that Facebook use was, as the authors put it, “slightly more common among individuals with higher grades.”
As for Karpinski, despite the fact that she was quoted as saying that there was a “disconnect between students’ claim that Facebook use doesn’t impact their studies, and our finding showing that they had lower grades,” and despite the fact that she invited administrators “to find ways to limit access [to Facebook] … resulting in better academic performance,” she now says her findings were just “exploratory,” and that she never intended them to be seen as conclusive.
“People, she says, “need to chill out.”
Afternoon update: In the interest of fairness and completeness, here’s a link to Karpinski’s original conference presentation and to her rebuttal to the three scholars’ response to it. (She argues that their study has “serious methodological and statistical flaws” of its own.)
Late afternoon update: And here’s a link to Pasek, more, and Hargittai’s rebuttal to the rebuttal, courtesy of Hargittai.
The Associated Students of the University of Arizona took a $917,000 hit when a concert they sponsored drew a smaller-than-expected crowd.
ASUC paid a total of $1.4 million to mount the show, and brought in barely a third that much in revenue. Jay-Z headlined the concert, whose bill also included Kelly Clarkson, Third Eye Blind, and The Veronicas.
The loss wipes out ASUC’s $350,000 emergency reserve fund. The remainder of the debt will be covered by the campus bookstore, which provides the student government with more than half a million dollars in support each year. For the next five years, those annual payments will be cut by $114,000.
The Jay-Z concert was ASUC’s first stadium show in more than thirty years, and the culmination of a four-year campaign by the student government to bring large-scale performances to campus.
The New School Free Press has the transcript of the Wednesday night speech in which Bob Kerrey told the New School Board of Trustees that he wouldn’t be seeking a contract extension. As I was reading it over just now, a passage from near the end leaped out at me:
“My term as President will end no later than July 1, 2011.”
No later than. Huh.
Like lots of other people, I reported yesterday that Kerrey had announced he would be leaving the New School at the end of his current contract — but that’s not actually what he said. He said he would be leaving by then, and he was careful to leave the door open for an earlier departure.
Now, to be fair, he did say earlier in the speech that he had “confidence I can continue to lead this university through June 30, 2011 when my current contract ends.” And he has said in the past that if he ever lost the support of the New School’s trustees, he’d resign. But still.
Look what else he said, near the top of the speech: “To understate the case, this has been a challenging semester for the university and my family. There have been moments when I reached the limit of my willingness to continue serving as your president.”
It’s been clear for a long time that Kerrey has been ambivalent about continuing on as president of the New School. It doesn’t look to me like he’s completely put that ambivalence behind him, even now.
May 8 update: As I noted in this follow-up, Kerrey actually told the trustees that he will end his term as New School president “no later than” the end of his current contract. So the title of this post should really read “Bob Kerrey to Leave New School BY 2011.”
Bob Kerrey has told the New School Board of Trustees that he will step down as the university’s president when his contract expires twenty-six months from now.
He made the announcement last night at the final board meeting of the academic year.
Kerrey’s eight-year tenure at the New School has been a stormy one, with students and faculty expressing broad and deep opposition to many of his policies.
In recent months the activist group The New School In Exile has waged an ongoing campaign to force his resignation. But he told a campus newspaper just last month that he would remain as long as he had the confidence of the trustees.
1:30 pm update: Twitterer @dodijoyce wonders “why must I hear that Kerrey will leave The New School in 2011 from NYT & not #thenewschool itself?”
It’s a good question. Kerrey told the trustees he was stepping down last night, but neither he nor any of them appear to have made any public statement on the decision until Kerrey tipped off the Times late this morning. The manner in which he made this announcement isn’t going to win him any new friends among New School students and faculty, and twenty-six months is a long time to be running a university as a lame duck.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments