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Tens of thousands of French students and professors took to the streets on Tuesday to protest government plans to reform the nation’s universities. The proposals call for job cuts and new reviews of faculty research by university administrators.
The Guardian, Britain’s most prominent left-leaning daily newspaper, has a substantial article out today on the UK’s recent wave of protests. Here’s how it starts:
A new wave of student activism sparked by events in Gaza has seen dozens of university buildings occupied in Britain, with some of the UK’s top educational establishments agreeing to set up scholarships for Palestinians or disinvest in arms companies linked to Israel.
Though the assault on the territory ended three weeks ago, lingering anger over the attack has prompted students to stage sit-ins at 21 universities, many organised via blogs, Facebook and text messages.
Students at Glasgow and Manchester are refusing to leave the buildings until their demands are met, after similar occupations at other universities provided tangible results in what is being seen as a new era of highly organised student activism.
You can read the whole thing here.
Students at the State University of New York at Potsdam are gearing up a protest over the state government’s decision to divert new tuition revenue away from SUNY.
In the deficit reduction bill passed last week, only 10% of this spring’s $310 tuition increase is slotted to be used to support SUNY, and in Governor Paterson’s proposed budget for next year, only 20% of the $620 tuition hike will stay on campus.
The Potsdam student government mounted an on-campus rally against the policies this week, and they are organizing a lobby visit to Albany to bring the message directly to state government.
More drama for York University, attempting to rebound from its recent three-month shutdown. Students on the campus are organizing a recall of the five officers of York’s student government, the York Federation of Students.
The impetus for the recall is YFS’s support for striking faculty in recent months, but Middle East politics has come to play a role as well — many YFS leaders are outspoken critics of Israel, and many of those who are seeking to remove them from office are defenders of Israeli policies. Tensions flared between the two groups at an event on Wednesday.
Saturday Update: Here’s a new article on the dispute from the Toronto Star.
The headlines of the two major articles on Tuesday’s public meeting at the New School each spin the story the same way…
The Chronicle of Higher Education: “New School Faculty Members Renew Standoff With President Bob Kerrey.”
The New York Times: “New School Faculty and President Still at Odds.”
But as followers of this blog know, and as each of the above articles make clear, the New School breakdown is as much a result of student-administration disputes as of faculty-admin conflicts. And the big news out of the meeting, a student group’s ultimatum to Kerrey: Quit by April 1, or we’ll shut the New School down, was downplayed in both pieces.
Take a look at how the Times framed the dispute. They say “faculty members acknowledge that they have limited power to force out Mr. Kerrey,” and note that Kerrey still has broad support among the New School trustees. But when they introduce the student ultimatum, in the fourteenth paragraph of an eighteen-paragraph story, they describe it as a request from “Geeti Das, a doctoral student,” not as what it was — a demand from The New School in Exile, the activist group that Das represented at the meeting.
Does the New School in Exile have the power to shut the university down? I don’t know. But I’m going to be watching this story closely, and I have a hunch that April 1 may turn out to be a pretty big day in the history of this crisis.
studentactivism.net 
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