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After the jump, a listing of Friday’s panel sessions at the Youth Movement Summit at Columbia Law School. A full schedule, with links to live streams, can be found here.
Columbia Law School is hosting an Alliance of Youth Movements Summit right now, with all sessions being broadcast live on the net. As the summit website puts it:
Panels will discuss a variety of practical topics, including How To Build Transnational Social Movements Using New Technology, How To Use New Mobile Technologies and How To Preserve Group Safety And Security.
Summit participants will also be honored at a red-carpet event with entertainment celebrities, business leaders, and civil society figures at the former home of MTV’s Total Request Live (“TRL”) overlooking Times Square.
Howcast will use the field manual for youth empowerment developed at the Summit as the cornerstone of a much larger online “hub,” where emerging youth organizations can access and share “how-to” guides and tips on how to use social-networking and other technologies to promote freedom and justice and counter violence, extremism and oppression. The hub will include instructional videos and text guides, links to related online resources and discussion forums for sharing experiences, ideas and advice.
The schedule for the summit is available here, with links to streaming video from every session.
I recently stumbled across an interesting study of hazing in American colleges and universities, released earlier this year. I haven’t had the chance to fully digest it yet, but I thought I’d pass it along.
A few highlights of the executive summary:
55% of college students involved in clubs, teams, and organizations experience hazing.
Hazing occurs in, but extends beyond, varsity athletics and Greek-letter organizations and includes behaviors that are abusive, dangerous, and potentially illegal.
Alcohol consumption, humiliation, isolation, sleep- deprivation, and sex acts are hazing practices common across types of student groups.
In more than half of the hazing incidents, a member of the offending group posts pictures on a public web space.
More students perceive positive rather than negative outcomes of hazing.
In 95% of the cases where students identified their experience as hazing, they did not report the events to campus officials.
Nine out of ten students who have experienced hazing behavior in college do not consider themselves to have been hazed.
The study defines “hazing” quite broadly, and I’m not sure I buy all of its premises, but it’s certainly worth a peek.
Two sociologists at the City University of New York have received a prestigious and lucrative award for their research into the effects of open admissions on students and colleges.
The professors, Paul Attewell and David Lavin, have been awarded the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education, which comes with a $200,000 prize.
Their research, a study of two thousand women students admitted to CUNY under open admissions in the 1970s, found that more than two-thirds had graduated, and that their time in college had improved their annual earnings by $5000 to $10000 a year. It also found that the women’s children were better educated than the children of similar women who had not attended college.
They presented their research in a 2007 book, Passing the Torch: Does Higher Education for the Disadvantaged Pay Off Across the Generations?
The student government of Ottawa’s Carelton University has apologized for passing a resolution withdrawing its support for cystic fibrosis fundraising.
As we noted over the weekend, the Carleton student government had announced that it was dropping cystic fibrosis research as a beneficiary of its fundraising efforts because it had learned that the disease “only affect[ed] white people, and primarily men.” Neither of those statements turned out to be true.
At a packed public meeting on Monday, the president of the student government personally apologized for the resolution. The student government then went on to unanimously pass a resolution of apology, as well as a separate resolution pledging to increase campus cystic fibrosis fundraising going forward.
The author of the original resolution has resigned his position in student government.
studentactivism.net 
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