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Students protest fees and crowding in Zimbabwe.
Why the FAFSA form sucks, and why it’s going to be hard to make it better.
A critique of the anti-feminist panic over “hookup culture.”
A new national organization of adjuncts is being formed.
Another news story from Britain on the rise of student activism there. Here’s how this one starts:
They are the iPod generation of students: politically apathetic, absorbed by selfish consumerism, dedicated to a few years of hedonism before they land a lucrative job in the City. Not any more. A seismic change is taking place in British universities.
Around the UK, thousands of students have occupied lecture theatres, offices and other buildings at more than 20 universities in sit-down protests. It seems that the spirit of 1968 has returned to the campus.
While it was the situation in Gaza that triggered this mass protest, the beginnings of political enthusiasm have already spread to other issues.
John Rose, one of the original London School of Economics (LSE) students to mount the barricades alongside Tariq Ali in 1968, spent last week giving lectures on the situation in Gaza at 12 of the occupations.
“This is something different to anything we’ve seen for a long time,” he said. “There is genuine fury at what Israel did.
“I think it’s highly likely that this year will see more student action. What’s interesting is the nervousness of vice chancellors and their willingness to concede demands; it indicates this is something that could well turn into [another] ’68.”
I wrote a brief response on Wednesday to the article “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors” by Ellen Greenberger et al, promising more soon. Then the NYU occupation hit, and I didn’t get back to it as quickly as I’d hoped. But the article, which appeared in the November 2008 issue of The Journal of Youth and Adolescence, is riding a wave of media attention, and there’s a lot more that needs saying about it.
The crucial problem with the article is in its methodology. It’s not at all clear that it measures what it claims to be measuring, and it presents its findings in such a way as to seriously mislead the casual reader as to what the students it surveyed actually said. I’ll dig into those issues in an upcoming post.
For now, though, I’d like to point out one narrow fact: Greenberger’s findings are based on an extremely unrepresentative sample of American college students.
As many academics do, Greenberger and her colleagues found their research subjects by advertising among students on their home campus — they put up flyers asking students to participate in a study, and gave a questionnaire to the students who responded. In this case, the home campus was University of California at Irvine, a highly-competitive university whose entering students have an average high school GPA of 3.95.
For this particular study, the researchers posted flyers in the UC Irvine Social Sciences Human Subjects Laboratory, and posted a notice at the lab’s website.
As they report in their article, these postings brought in 466 student participants. Of those students, 364, or 78.1%, were women, and 269, or 57.7%, were of Asian or Pacific Islander descent. Nearly all were social science majors.
The sample, then, was unrepresentative of the nation as a whole, and unrepresentative in ways that the authors acknowledge may have influenced the study’s results — they note, for instance, that students of Asian descent returned higher scores on measures of what they call “Academic Entitlement” than non-Asians, and that students who were not born in the US returned higher scores than those who were.
So this was a study of social science majors at an extremely selective, extremely competitive research university. It was a sample that was demographically unrepresentative of the nation as a whole. And yet its findings have been eagerly reported as evidence of what American students, as a group, believe.
All of this is significant to our interpretation of the study, but it’s just a lead-up to my favorite tidbit about the way the sample was assembled. More on that in my next post.
(If you’d like to be notified about that post when it goes up, feel free to start following our twitter feed.)
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, a law-professors’ group blog, someone put up a link yesterday to a post by a guy who calls himself Gay Patriot West, saying that gay conservatives on campus get a warmer welcome from conservatives than they do from gays.
The comments thread on the Volokh post explored the issue from a few different angles, but it didn’t address one that I consider crucial — the historical context. Here’s the meat of my contribution to the discussion, posted just a little while ago:
Whatever ease gays have around conservatives exists only because of limitations on conservatives’ political power.
Fifty years ago, you could be imprisoned or institutionalized for being gay or lesbian. You could be jailed for hanging out with gays. You could lose your business if that business catered to gay people. Forget having any job security, or any recognition for your relationships, or any social deference to your life choices except in the most anomalous subcultures. To be gay or lesbian in the United States fifty years ago was to live in fear of disclosure and persecution.
Most of that has changed. But it has changed despite conservatives, not because of them. To a large degree it has changed over the vocal and forceful opposition of conservatives. It has changed because conservatives’ power has waned, because conservatives’ power has been constrained, and because conservatives have realized that most Americans don’t agree with their most anti-gay positions. And yes, it has changed because many conservatives have become less hostile to gays and lesbians, buoyed along by a broader cultural transformation that they did not initiate.
To the extent that it is easy to be a gay person among conservatives today, that is because of the weakness of traditional conservative values in American society today. The idea of conservatives as second-class citizens, deprived of basic civil rights, is a right-wing fever dream. That of gays and lesbians being deprived of basic civil rights is a matter of historical record.
The Gay Patriot has his ease because his side has been defeated in a thousand hard-fought struggles over the last half-century.
One other thing that I could have mentioned: The social and political climate for lesbians and gays in America has changed least in the last half-century in the parts of the country where conservatives remain strongest. It has changed the most in those places where conservatism is weakest. Gay Patriot West went to the University of Virginia law school. He lives in Los Angeles today. His experience of being a conservative gay man reflects those facts of his geography.
Coverage continues from here. Additional updates can be found on our twitter feed. For a discussion of the protesters’ demands, see this post.
At 10 PM on Wednesday, more than sixty students from NYU and various other colleges barricaded themselves into a dining area on the third floor of NYU’s Kimmel Center on Washington Square South. On Thursday afternoon they forced a door and gained access to a balcony overlooking the park, while supporters twice evaded campus security to add more numbers to the protest’s ranks.
On Thursday evening NYU administrators threatened students who remained in Kimmel after the building’s scheduled 1 AM closing time with arrest and expulsion, but 1 o’clock came and went with no movement from inside. Supporters of the protest on the street below clashedwith police a few minutes after 1 AM, but when the dust cleared from those scuffles students were still occupying the third floor.
There was only one arrest last night, of an NYU student who tried to climb a No Parking sign on Washington Square South. I’ve seen no reports of serious injuries to protesters, police, or bystanders during the one o’clock clash, and no update on the condition of the NYU security guard who was taken away in an ambulance earlier in the evening. About twenty protesters remain on the third floor of Kimmel, having rejected a late-night “safe harbor” offer that would have suspended disciplinary action against them as long as they stayed out of trouble for the remainder of their time on campus.
The protesters who remain have been given no assurances about how they will be treated going forward. No word on how many, if any, of them are non-NYU.
A liveblogger from the website NYULocal was in Kimmel from the start of the occupation, but he left the building late last night, and is not expected to be allowed to re-enter. The Washington Square News, a student newspaper, is providing ongoing online coverage of events. Take Back NYU!, the group that organized the protest, is providing regular updates on its website and twitter feed. In their first twitter update of the morning, however, they announced that NYU has cut off internet access to the occupied building.
That’s where things stand as of 9:30 this morning.
11:30 am Update: Yesterday, NYU kept most of the Kimmel building open, using security to (ineffectively) control access to the occupied third floor. Today they’ve shut the whole building down. Also, TBNYU is reporting that NYU has cut off not just internet access, but also power flow to electrical outlets in the occupied space. If the report is accurate, and NYU maintains this policy, the protesters will lose all ability to communicate with the outside world other than by megaphone as soon as their batteries run down.
TBNYU has another rally planned for the front of the building at noon today.
12:30 pm Update: NYU is shutting down the Kimmel occupation. Most of the news on the ground is coming via Twitter at this point, so it’s fragmentary. We’re not going to post moment-by-moment updates — we’ll wait for the situation to shake out, and provide a full report when we can.
Look for follow-up analysis from us in the hours and days to come, as well. It seems clear that the NYU administration’s approach to this sit-in was, like the sit-in itself, influenced by an awareness of its relationship to a broader student movement. How that played out, and what it means for students on other campuses, is going to be something worth exploring going forward.
1:15 pm Update: NYULocal reported at 12:50 that all protesters had left Kimmel except for four who remained on the balcony. According to the Take Back NYU twitter feed, at least ten NYU students have been suspended, and an unspecified number have been escorted to their dorms to collect their belongings. There are conflicting reports on the fate of the non-NYU protesters who left the building in the last hour.
3:00 pm Update: The building has been cleared.
studentactivism.net 
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