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The country’s ongoing financial crisis is hitting university budgets hard as the new year gets underway, and students across the United States are mobilizing to respond. Four recent reports from the National Student News Service paint the picture:
Students at UC Berkeley demonstrated last week in support of an upcoming faculty walkout. Faculty plan to stage the action on September 24, a week from this Thursday, in protest against state-mandated furloughs that will cut faculty pay for the current year without reducing their workload. Elsewhere in California, students at USC are scrambling in the wake of drastic last-minute reductions to their financial aid packages.
In Michigan, the MSU student government has appointed a Director of University Budgets to conduct an independent study of the university’s financial condition. The student government is meeting with university administrators to advocate for students’ interests in the budgeting process, and the DUB’s analysis will give them an independent student perspective on the numbers they receive from administrators.
Students also tried to roll back cuts at the University of Southern Mississippi, where administrators announced plans in August to dissolve the university’s Economics department and its technical and occupational education program next year, eliminating 12 tenured and tenure-track faculty positions. In that case, student and faculty protest led to a compromise in which five senior Economics faculty agreed to retire and four younger professors were found new homes in the university’s College of Arts and Letters. (The three affected profs in the technical education program were denied reappointment.)
The student fight for funding is shaping up to be the big campus activism story of the fall. More posts on the subject are in the pipeline, and if you’ve got news we may not have heard of, feel free to leave updates and links in comments.
Gabriel Matthew Schivone, a reporter for the University of Arizona at Tucson’s Daily Wildcat, snagged an interview with Noam Chomsky recently, and Chomsky had some interesting things to say about student activism in the sixties and today.
The whole thing — including Schivone’s analysis of the role of protest on the campus — is worth reading, but here are a couple of choice Chomsky quotes:
When people talk about “the sixties,” what they are thinking of is about two years. You know, 1968, 1969, roughly. A little bit before, a little bit later. And it’s true that student activism today is not like those two years. But, on the whole, I think it’s grown since the 1960s. So, take the feminist and the environmental movements. I mean, they’re from the seventies. Take the International Solidarity Movement — that’s from the eighties. Take the Global Justice Movement, which just had another huge meeting in Brazil. That’s from this century. Plenty of students are involved in these things. In fact, the total level of student involvement in various things is probably as huge as it’s ever been, except for maybe the very peak in the 1960s. It’s not what I would like it to be, but it’s far more than it’s been.
Elite sectors and centers of power want students to be passive and apathetic. One of the reasons for the very sharp rise in tuition is to kind of capture students. You know, if you come out of college with a huge debt, you’re gonna have to work it off. I mean, you’re gonna have to become a corporate lawyer or go into business or something. And you won’t have time for engaged activism. The students of the sixties could take off a year or two and devote it to activism and think, ‘Okay, I’ll get back into my career later on.’ Now, that’s much harder today. And not by accident. These are disciplinary techniques.
Good stuff.
See bottom of post for updates.
The first major American student protest of the new academic year has erupted at Howard University.
Hundreds of Howard students gathered outside the historically black university’s administration building on Friday, demanding that Howard address problems with financial aid, campus housing, and other issues. Rapper and entrepreneur Diddy, a Howard graduate, urged the students on via Twitter, telling them to “Do what we did and take IT OVER!!!!”
Classes began nearly two weeks ago at Howard, but many students say their financial aid is still in limbo. Students also complained about a shortage of on campus housing and about administration censorship of the student newspaper, the Hilltop.
The Hilltop reported on Twitter that after campus security locked the administration building down the protest moved on to the university chapel, where Howard student government officers addressed the crowd.
A thirteen-point list of demands presented to the administration included
- The resignation of the leadership of the Office of Student Affairs.
- Immediate reforms to financial aid policies.
- Bringing campus buildings into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
- Budgetary transparency within the university.
- Expansion of on-campus housing.
The protesters asked that the administration respond to their demands by next Wednesday, September 9.
More on this story as it develops…
Update: Here’s a YouTube clip from the protest, and a longer, edited YouTube vid, which includes an explanation of the demands.
Tuesday morning update: The Hilltop, Howard’s student newspaper, is going to meet with university president Sidney Ribeau at 12:30 pm this afternoon. Today’s Hilltop reports that more protests are planned if Ribeau does not adequately address the students’ demands by tomorrow.
In a Delhi meeting Monday, Indian education minister Kapil Sibal told Australia’s deputy prime minister that the Australian government needs to do far more to protect the rights and safety of the one hundred thousand Indians studying in that country.
As the two leaders met, thousands of students marched in Australia’s largest cities, condemning government inaction against violence and exploitation targeting their community. “After a decade of neglect,” Australian National Union of Students president David Barrow proclaimed, “local and international students rally together to demand justice.”
The treatment of Indian students in Australia has provoked a diplomatic crisis between the two nations in recent months. Two vicious assaults this spring drew attention to an epidemic of bias crime against Indian students, and prompted a major protest march in downtown Melbourne that blocked a busy intersection for hours. The assaults and the protest, organized by the Federation of Indian Students in Australia, made the ongoing violence front-page news in both countries.
Indian students’ tuition payments represent a major revenue stream for Australian higher education, and the bias scandal has led to a new scrutiny for educational practices as well. Three private training colleges have shut their doors in recent months, amid charges that the for-profit institutions were offering substandard education and defrauding learners.
Update: I’d meant to include these first-person accounts of bias violence, but the link fell through the cracks while I was writing.
September 2 Update: Well, this sucks. A Slate investigation has concluded that Roxanne Shante’s story of her life after hip hop is pretty much all fake. Literally almost all of it. It’s mind-boggling.
Whoever drew up Roxanne Shante’s contract at Warner Music in 1984 probably figured he’d earned his bonus.
Shante, a 14-year-old MC from Queens, had a big hit that fall with “Roxanne’s Revenge,” an early hip-hop smash. But though the song sold hundreds of thousands of copies and Shante went on to make two albums for Warner, she never saw much in the way of royalties.
The one upside of her contract, from Shante’s perspective, was a clause committing Warner to pay all of her educational expenses … for life.
Warner most likely assumed that there wasn’t much chance they’d have to pay out much under that clause — Shante was a kid from the projects, and a single mom at 14. And when she did decide to go to college five years later, Warner gave her the run-around.
But Shante found an administrator at Marymount Manhattan College who was willing to give her a hand. Marguerita Grecco, Marymount’s dean, helped Shante to press Warner to make good, and let her take classes for free while she negotiated.
Warner eventually blinked after Shante threatened to go public, and the label wound up paying not only for her undergraduate schooling but also for the Cornell doctorate in Psychology that Shante earned in 2001. (All in all, they wound up paying out $217,000 for her educational expenses.)
Today Shante has a therapy practice serving the black community, owns an ice cream parlor in Queens, and funds a $5000 annual college scholarship for female rappers.
(Hat tips to PostBourgie and Hoyden About Town.)
studentactivism.net 
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