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Here’s the info, as posted this morning, on a student/faculty forum being held at NYU at seven o’clock this evening:
Please come join students from the New School In Exile, Take Back NYU!, Radical Student Union, GSOC and faculty from both the New School and NYU for a productive evening and cross-group assembly.
Raising Our Voices: Student Faculty forum
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 7-9 PM
NYU Department of Social And Cultural Analysis
41 E. 11th St. 7th Floor
Agenda
Speakers are requested to limit their remarks to 5 minutes and to include a very brief self-introduction. There will be people from both schools who may not know who you are or what you do.
Welcome and Introduction to the Forum
Jan Clausen, New School, Vice President of UAW Local 7902
Rana Jaleel, NYU Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC)
Andrew Ross, NYU chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)
Radical Student Union (New School) representatives
New School in Exile representatives
Take Back NYU Representatives
Chris Rzonca, NYU Unit Chair, UAW Local 7902
Discussion
Karl Rove, president of the national College Republicans, in 1977.
A fifth grade class in Murfreesboro, TN learned about the civil rights movement this month by staging a protest march … against junk food.
Here’s the meat of the article:
After a two-week lesson on civil rights, the students picked their own issue, eating healthy and exercise, and marched in protest.
Parent Belinda Pate said she thought it was a good way to get the history lesson across, plus healthy eating a exercise are “what us parents are always trying to protest with our kids.”
The teachers also had the students wear different colored T-shirts – either red, green or blue – and treated the groups differently depending on what color they wore.
For example on the way to the protest, red-shirted students had to sit in the back of the bus, blue-shirts sat in the middle and weren’t allowed to talk, and green-shirts could sit in the front of the bus and talk all they wanted, student Asha Phillips explained.
The teachers also made different groups use different bathrooms at school.
This kind of thing leaves me deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, it’s great to see kids learning about activism and organizing in school, and being encouraged to think of themselves as potential activists.
On the other hand…
If you think about what would have happened if the “protest” had been about a controversial subject — gay teachers, say, or prayer in the schools — you see just how problematic the exercise is. Because you really couldn’t do an event like that. Whatever position the class adopted would be offensive to somebody’s parent, and probably go against the values of at least a few of the kids. This “protest” was only possible because it wasn’t the contemporary equivalent of a civil rights march. And that’s not even getting into the whole t-shirt thing.
I don’t want to get off on too much of a rant here. I’m sure these teachers meant well, and I give them credit for trying to bring this particular moment in history alive. But teaching about social justice movements is hard. It’s challenging. If you make it easy, you’re probably doing it wrong.
Anyway, that’s my reaction. What’s yours?
Seventeen-year-olds will have open access to “Plan B” emergency contraception thanks to a judge’s ruling yesterday, and access for younger teens is likely to follow.
A federal court ruled yesterday that the Bush-era Food and Drug Administration relied on politics, not science, when it limited non-prescription sales of Plan B to women aged 18 and over. The court blasted the FDA’s “political considerations … and implausible justifications” in its consideration of Plan B.
The court directed the FDA to allow 17-year-olds access to non-prescription Plan B within 30 days, and to review its decision to require prescriptions for younger teens.
An interesting article from the Kansas City Star on what colleges tell (and don’t tell) families about students’ underage drinking violations.
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) limits what universities can do with information about students, but it gives campuses broad discretion in some areas. The Star explores the question of what universities do, and should, tell students’ families when a student violates drinking rules.
studentactivism.net 
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