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Ten years ago yesterday I was at the same place I was twenty years ago — on the Binghamton University campus in upstate New York. (In 1991 I was a student, in 2001 I was advising a statewide student organization.)
I woke up in Albany on the morning of September 11, and drove on empty highways to Binghamton for a scheduled meeting, listening to reports of the attacks on the radio. A few days later I wrote this summary of what I found when I arrived:
Binghamton was surprisingly subdued — much calmer than I’d seen it when the Gulf War started in January 1991. Lots more people have cable in their dorms now than did then, though, so I expect most of the students who were really worried were in their rooms by the phone.
In 1991, if you wanted to keep up with a breaking news story on a college campus, you usually had to go to the student union and gather around a communal television. In 2001 if you wanted to keep in touch with family you needed to stay in your dorm room.
Ten years ago, twenty years ago. No Facebook, no Twitter. Today you can sit on a couch in the union surrounded by dozens of your fellow students while you hear your parents’ voices from a hundred miles away and read what your friends are doing on their couches in their unions all over the country. All at the same time. You don’t have to choose between connecting with a global experience and your local community and your far-flung networks of loved ones. You used to have to choose, but you don’t anymore.
I wrote a few weeks ago about how impoverished the Beloit College “mindset list” is, how trivial and how silly. But it’s not just in matters of educational policy and campus politics that the list missed the mark. The American campus, and the American student experience, is changing in all sorts of ways, in ways it’s easy for both students and faculty to miss.
Technology doesn’t shatter community, it transforms it.
The California State Senate has passed a bill expanding financial aid to undocumented students in the state’s public colleges and universities. The California Dream Act now goes to the Democratic-controlled State Assembly, which is expected to pass it next week. Governor Jerry Brown has not said whether he will sign the bill, but he approved similar legislation this summer and is considered likely to do so again.
Undocumented students make up about one percent of enrollment at California’s public colleges and universities, a rate of attendance far below undocumented immigrants’ representation in the state’s population (in the range of two or three million out of a total of thirty-seven million).
This year, like every year since 1998, a couple of profs at Beloit College have released a “Mindset List” describing the world that the new crop of incoming first-years grew up in. Here’s a few things they left out:
The average first-year college student in the United States this fall was born in 1993. For them…
College presidents have never been expected to stay in their positions for long, and have always had onerous fundraising responsibilities.
Pell Grant funding has always been under attack.
Colleges have always been required to keep public statistics on campus crime, and have always evaded those requirements with impunity.
Grad students have always been boosting enrollment with jokey-sounding course names.
Conservative commentators have always been appalled.
The presence of significant numbers of students of color on campus has always been treated as a new development.
NCAA rules violations have always been a headline-grabbing crisis.
College athletes at high-ranking Division 1 schools have always been pampered and cynically exploited.
The connection between the above two realities has always been the subject of hand-wringing op-eds.
Which have never translated into serious reform.
Tenured professors who came of age in the late sixties have always been exaggerating their own activist exploits, and deriding contemporary student organizing.
The drinking age has always been 21.
Binge drinking by under-21s has always been epidemic.
Returning students have always been a growing campus demographic.
And have always been ignored in lists like this.
Remediation has always been a handy cudgel for enemies of open enrollment.
Middle-aged people who spent their youth desperate for sexual gratification have always been decrying the rise of hook-up culture.
The proportion of state budgets devoted to higher education has always been plummeting.
The extent of rape in the dorms and at frat parties has always been the subject of whispered rumor.
Adjunct hiring has always been growing.
Adjunct pay has always been unsustainable.
Free public higher education has always been a distant memory.
Faculty and administrators have always been inexplicably surprised to discover that the new incoming class is roughly a year younger than the previous one.
Charlie Webster, the state chair of the Maine Republican party, has produced documents claiming to show that over two hundred of the state’s college students have committed fraud by voting in Maine while paying out-of-state tuition.
This is a lie. It’s an evil lie. It’s just … jeez.
Here’s the deal. If you move to Maine for college, you have to pay out-of-state tution your first year. And your second. And your third. And your fourth. And your fifth. You have to pay out-of-state tuition forever, in fact, until you demonstrate that you have “established a Maine domicile for other than educational purposes.”
And as long as you’re attending college full-time, you’ll be “presumed to be in Maine for educational purposes and not to establish a domicile.” Again: Forever.
You can arrive in Maine fresh out of high school, move into your own place, live there 365 days a year. Work there, spend summers there, get married there. Finish your undergraduate degree, go on to grad school. But as long as you’re still a student, you’re “presumed to be in Maine for educational purposes and not to establish a domicile,” and the burden of proof is on you to show otherwise. (“No one factor can be used to establish domicile,” by the way. “All factors and circumstances must be considered on a case-by-case basis.”)
Paying out-of-state tuition isn’t evidence that you don’t live in Maine, in other words. It’s not evidence of anything at all. Out-of-state tuition is a revenue stream for the university and the state, and as such, it’s designed to put every possible burden on the student who’s looking to get out from under it.
Which brings us back to Charlie Webster.
What Webster is doing here is deploying a state regulation designed to deprive Maine’s college students of their money as a mechanism to deprive them of their votes. There’s no other way to describe it. Take their money, take their votes. Justice, fairness, and the Supreme Court of the United States be damned.
It’s really that simple.
The leadership of the Simon Fraser Student Society (SFSS) has announced a Sunday lockout of SFSS’s union employees, after two years of unsuccessful contract negotiations. Unless an agreement is reached by tomorrow afternoon, CUPE local 3338’s twenty employees will be barred from working their jobs.
Unsurprisingly, the two sides characterize the state of negotiations differently, with CUPE arguing that SFSS is demanding “dramatic wage rollbacks and cuts to staffing levels,” while SFSS president Jeff McCann says that the student society is asking for a 12% average pay cut, with about a quarter of that loss to be restored over the course of the new contract. (Edit: see comments for more details on the proposed cuts.)
Activists claim that this move is ideologically motivated, noting that newly-elected SFSS leaders announced the lockout simultaneously with an effort to evict the Simon Fraser Public Interest Research Group (SFPIRG) from student-owned offices.
I’ll be following this story as it develops, but I think one element that hasn’t yet received much attention is worth emphasizing — the timing of the lockout.
Now, I don’t know anything about what triggered this particular decision. It’s possible that there’s a compelling reason why this had to happen now. But as I’ve written many times before, summer is the season when university administrators traditionally launch their most obnoxious initiatives, on the premise that there aren’t any students around to object. If you want to pave a community garden, or eliminate a department, or create a new parking fee, or whatever, summer’s the time to do it.
Like I say, I don’t know why SFSS acted when it did. Maybe they had a good reason. But if they timed this lockout — and the SFPIRG eviction — to take place in July because they knew that their student opponents wouldn’t be able to mobilize … well, that’s just punk. It’s anti-democratic, and it’s anti-student. It’s wrong.
studentactivism.net 
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