You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Student Loans’ category.
Yesterday’s national action was the largest such day of coordinated campus protest since the Occupy Wall Street movement went viral last fall. But it was also the third early-March day of action to emerge from the national student movement that began with Occupy California two years earlier.
Occupy Wall Street has given the American student movement a boost, certainly. But in doing so it is merely returning a favor.
Yesterday student activists took to the Brooklyn Bridge in New York like Occupy Wall Street. They congregated in the park that was until recently home to Occupy Oakland, and marched from there to Morgan Stanley offices in San Francisco. They erected tents at UC Santa Cruz, and hung banners in the Massachusetts statehouse like last spring’s proto-OWS anti-Walker occupiers did in Madison. But they also took over administrators’ offices at DePaul University in Illinois and at UC San Diego. They also rallied for increased library hours at Harvard. They also held teach-ins at Ohio State, teach-outs at Berkeley, and a mock telethon for student debt at SUNY Buffalo.
And yesterday was no stand-alone event. Activists used Oakland’s Oscar Grant Plaza as the kickoff point for a 99-mile march to Sacramento, planning to arrive in time for a Monday occupation of the state capitol. That same day, students throughout New York will be descending on Albany for their own day of action.
#M1 has been described as a kickoff for the new semester, though there have been at least a dozen major campus actions in the US since January. It has been described as a reflection of an OWS “shift to the universities,” though OWS is as much the child of recent student activism as its parent. In reality, it was neither of those things. It was something quite different, and far more interesting.
It was just another day.
In a post titled “We’re Breaking Up,” the Student Labor Action Project announced today that three major student activist organizations have cut ties with banks implicated in predatory lending, student loan profiteering, and right-wing political activity:
- The United States Student Association has voted to close its accounts at Wells Fargo, the nation’s second largest private student lender (and the only major US bank to engage in predatory “payday loan” activity.) Wells Fargo’s student loan interest rates range as high as 14.21%.
- The United Council of University of Wisconsin Students has pulled its money from M&I Bank, which contributed more than $46,000 to the campaign of Wisconsin’s notorious governor, Scott Walker.
- And the University of California Student Association has broken ties with major student lender US Bank in the wake of its “lack of willingness to engage in good-faith efforts to negotiate sustainable permanent mortgage modifications.”
That’s three major student organizations in just a few weeks. More to come?
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments