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According to the LA Times, more and more community colleges, responding to contracting opportunities at four-year institutions and growth in international student enrollment, are building dorms. And though the Times doesn’t speculate, this development may in turn help foster student organizing at community colleges.
Anyone who has tried to organize students on a commuter campus knows how hard it can be to get things going and keep them going. The proportion of American college students living on campus is much lower now than it was a few decades ago, and this shift is one of the factors that has made student organizing more challenging. From that perspective, a movetoward dorms at community colleges may provide a boost for student activists at those campuses.
And the benefits of dorms to organizers go beyond the students who live in them. Dorms create a 24/7 community on campus, and make it easier to schedule events outside of peak class hours — if people know that students living in the dorms will be coming out for an event, they’ll be more likely to schlep to campus to attend.
Community college student organizing has been growing in recent years. Dorms may give it an additional push.
A group of students presented a University of Florida administrator with a petition Wednesday protesting the disproportionate impact of recent university layoffs on women and people of color.
According to the group, women represent 34% of full-time UF faculty, but 61% of those fired as a result of recent budget cuts. Among people of color, the figures were 25% and 54%, respectively.
Update: Here’s an article from the Gainesville Sun about other recent student organizing against UF budget cuts.
French students escalated ongoing protests in advance of the Easter holiday this week, occupying offices on two campuses and barricading a Paris street.
Early in the week student protesters held university administrators in Orleans, Rennes, and Strasbourg hostage for a brief time. In Rennes, the president was forced to flee his office and call for help from a stairway, and in Strasbourg more than a hundred students forced their way into a room where thirty administrators were meeting, blocking their way out for a time.
On Wednesday protesters in Paris turned the Boulevard Saint-Michel into an impromptu beach, dumping sand into the road and blocking traffic. The beach was a nod to a slogan from the May 1968 protests that shook French society: “sous les pavés, la plage” — under the cobblestones, the beach. (For a discussion of the various shades of meaning behind this slogan, click here.)
Protests against changes to French higher education policy have been going on for two months, and administrators now say that if the disruption does not end after Easter, the spring semester may be lost entirely. Click here for a Reuters article from the newspaper Le Monde on the recent demonstrations, or here for Google’s English translation.
This post was updated on April 10 with new details on the Rennes and Strasbourg protests.
Iowa’s supreme court has unanimously granted legal recognition to same-sex marriages!
More cool details:
- The ruling will take effect on April 24, three weeks from today.
- Two of the justices behind the unanimous opinion were appointed by Republicans.
- The decision is based on the Iowa state constitution, so it cannot be appealed to any other court.
- It appears that the earliest the decision could be overturned by constitutional amendment is November 2012.
- Such an amendment would require approval by the Iowa state legislature prior to a popular referendum.
The majority leaders of both houses of the state legislature can be expected to oppose any effort to overturn the decision by constitutional amendment — they released a joint statement today hailing the ruling as an example of “Iowa common sense and Iowa common decency.”
It’s been a long, long time coming, but I know … a change is gonna come.
“If you want to try for those young voters, first of all, you’ve got to stand for something, because one of the things that stands out with a young voter is originality.”
That was South Carolina governor Mark Sanford right after the 2008 presidential election. Today, in a move that is widely seen as positioning himself for a run at the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, he’s saying he’ll turn down $700 million dollars in federal education funding for his state.
Sanford says the government should be paying down debt, not running up new bills, but his refusal of the stimulus money only makes sense as a symbolic gesture … and it’s an odd one. The stimulus money has been allocated. It’s not going back into the general fund. If South Carolina doesn’t accept its share, it’ll go somewhere else — California’s Governor Schwarzenegger has already said he’ll be happy to take it.
And as Senator Lindsay Graham — a South Carolina Republican, and no fan of the stimulus — has noted, South Carolinians will footing their share of the bill for this expenditure, whether any of it returns to the state or not.
So Sanford’s approach is definitely original. He’s the only governor planning to refuse the education money. It’s an approach that’s getting a lot of attention among conservative activists. But his position is costing him support at home — his favorability rating in South Carolina now stands at 40%, nine points below President Obama. And it’s hard to see it doing him much good with young voters in 2012 — in the primary or the general election.
More than a thousand teachers and students marched on the South Carolina state house yesterday, with a simple message: “Take the money.”
Sanford has until midnight tomorrow to listen.
studentactivism.net 
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