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Student sit-ins and occupations have become a common sight in California over the last couple of years, but this week has seen something new — a sit-in at a union office.
Two factions have been competing for leadership of UAW Local 2865, the local that represents academic student employees in the University of California system. Balloting in the union election ended eight days ago, but the vote count was suspended abruptly last weekend, and has yet to resume.
The incumbent United for Social and Economic Justice slate shut down the count last Saturday, claiming irregularities in the voting and alleging that the insurgents were using “scorched earth tactics” to disrupt the process.
The challengers, Academic Workers for a Democratic Union, countered that USEJ pulled the plug because of fears that AWDU might win an upset victory, and staged a sit-in in the union office to press for transparency in the process. Expressing concern that the disruption “contributes to the public perception that unions are corrupt and outmoded,” a group of labor scholars released a public letter calling for the count to resume.
The AWDU, which grew out of California’s student protest movement, says Local 2865 has operated undemocratically, has passed up opportunities to forge coalitions with activists in the state, and has rolled over in contract negotiations.
On Tuesday, the two sides agreed on protocols and mediators for a resumption of the count, but that resumption, slated for yesterday morning, hasn’t yet occurred. Meanwhile, the two sides continue to exchange accusations on their respective blogs (USEJ and AWDU).
Fingers crossed for a swift and just end to this stalemate.
I posted on Tuesday about three Canadian student activists who — to their surprise and everyone else’s — were elected to their nation’s parliament on Monday. Since then, reporting in the Canadian press have revealed that they are just three of six undergraduate students who won seats this week. At least half of the six are under twenty-one years old, and one, at nineteen, is the youngest Member of Parliament in Canada’s history.
All six of the students are members of Canada’s New Democratic Party, which until this year was a minor player in that country’s politics. But in polls leading up to this election the Liberals, Canada’s main center-left party, declined significantly, while the Quebec-nationalist Bloc Quebecois utterly collapsed. In the face of this party realignment many liberal Canadians, particularly in Quebec, unexpectedly cast their votes for the NDP. As a result, candidates who had been recruited as placeholders — many of whom did little or no campaigning — found themselves thrust into office.
Four of the six undergraduates who won election are students at Montreal’s McGill University:
Mylène Freeman is a past president of the McGill NDP club, graduating with a politics degree this spring. Freeman is from Ontario, but “fluently bilingual,” which is an important consideration in Quebec. She worked for the NDP in the country’s last national election in 2008, has run for Montreal city council in the past, and coordinates a program at McGill that is designed to encourage young women to volunteer in MPs offices.
Charmaine Borg, 20, is one of the co-presidents of the McGill NDP club this year, and has experience as a union organizer on campus. She was planning to study abroad in Mexico next semester, but will be moving to Ottawa instead.
Matthew Dubé, also 20, is Borg’s co-president at the McGill NDP club. He’s been keeping a low profile since the election.
Laurin Liu, who is 20 as well, is a second-year student, doing a joint degree in history and cultural studies. She spent election day volunteering in a district a few miles from her own, working to help re-elect one of the NDP’s few incumbent MPs. Liu is involved with student government and the campus radio station at McGill, and is now trying to figure out how to handle the logistics of legislating and constituent services — she doesn’t have a driver’s license or own a car.
Marie-Claude Morin is one of the two new students not enrolled at McGill, with one semester remaining until she graduates from the Université du Québec à Montréal. Like Dubé, she’s been mostly declining interviews this week.
The youngest of the six new student MPs is Pierre-Luc Dusseault, 19, who is doing a degree in applied political studies at the Université de Sherbrooke. Unlike many of his fellow winners, Dusseault stumped strenuously in his district, which is home to the university he attends. (He also reportedly made extensive use of Twitter in his campaign.) Desseault, a first-year student who co-founded the Université de Sherbrooke NDP club just months ago, calls himself a “political junkie” and had planned to spend the summer working at a local golf course if he didn’t win.
The six undergrads have been elected to four-year terms, with annual salaries of $157,000. I’m fascinated to see how their stories develop.
This story is the best short introduction I’ve yet seen to the “New Badger Partnership” — University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin’s proposal to split Madison, the UW flagship, off from the rest of the University of Wisconsin system.
Martin’s plan, negotiated in secret with Wisconsin’s new union-busting governor Scott Walker, would lop $125 million off of UW Madison’s budget, but give it far more operational flexibility on issues ranging from how to spend state money to how much to charge for tuition. The plan, opponents say, is a recipe for privatization of one of the nation’s great public universities.
The plan needs to be approved by the Wisconsin state legislature, and the prospects of that seem have dimmed recently — battles over the state budget and collective bargaining have battered the governor’s standing in the state, and it’s not clear that his party has the stomach for another big fight. Opposition to the plan from the university’s system-wide board of regents is a further barrier to its adoption.
But even if the plan is dropped from the current budget, it’s sure to return in the future, and its prospects are being watched closely by higher education advocates and analysts all over the country. At a time when the principles that have governed public higher education in the United States for generations are increasingly under fire, the fate of the University of Wisconsin is sure to have implications from New York to California and beyond.
Students who oppose the New Badger Partnership will be holding a mock auction of Bascom Hall, the UW Madison administration building, this afternoon, with more actions planned for the rest of the week. I’ll be following the story here, so keep checking back.
Often student activists are criticized for not proposing concrete solutions to the problems that others have identified. “Sure, you’re against our plan,” administrators and politicians ask, “but what alternative can you offer?”
Sometimes the “problem” is invented, of course, and sometimes students have detailed proposals at the ready, but not always. When the problem is real and students are offering no solution of their own, “what do you suggest we do?” is a legitimate question.
It’s a legitimate question. But “not this” is a legitimate answer.
Consider Mario Savio’s speech to the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964 — probably the most famous speech ever given by an American student activist:
There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious — makes you so sick at heart — that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.
Faced with a university that was breaking his heart, Savio said “no.” He said “stop.” He didn’t say “here’s an alternative.” He said “not this.”
Sometimes students, organizing against an act or a decision or a proposal or an administration, have an alternative at hand. Sometimes they have a suggestion as to what should happen next, what should take the place of the current plan or the status quo. Sometimes they have many such suggestions.
But sometimes they don’t. Sometimes what they have is “not this.” Sometimes what they have is “no.” Sometimes what they have is “stop.”
And sometimes that “stop” is the most radical, most cogent, most effective, most reasonable intervention there is.
A few years back, columnist David Brooks (who will, as it happens, be the commencement speaker at Brandeis University this year) wrote a piece about campus rape in which he suggested that the best approach to preventing such incidents was the approach that colleges took prior to the sexual revolution.
Back in the good old days, Brooks wrote,
educators … understood that when you concentrate young men, they have a tropism toward barbarism. That’s why these educators cared less about academics than about instilling a formula for character building. The formula, then called chivalry, consisted first of manners, habits and self-imposed restraints to prevent the downward slide.
There’s a lot to object to in this, starting with the suggestion that all men have the impulse to rape, and that the best of us are merely taught to restrain it. But there’s one bit that I’d like to address as a historian of American higher education.
As it happens, I recently acquired a copy of the Berry College Handbook for Women, published by the college’s women’s student government in 1956. Berry was (and is) a co-ed private college in rural Georgia, exactly the kind of place that you’d expect to find Brooks’ “formula for character building” in action.
And what does that handbook say about dating? It says this:
DATES — Girls may have dates on Sunday afternoons from 2:45 to 5:00 PM, at parties, movies, and other social events and also at the college store between classes. When girls are coming from the college campus, boys do not escort them farther than the ‘parting of the ways’ which is on the road between the Recitation Hall and Mother’s Building. There must be no dating in out of the way places. Petting is not permitted.
Self-imposed restraints? Hardly. This was a world of strict gender segregation. At Berry College in the fifties, male and female students weren’t permitted to be alone together. Ever.
On today’s campus, students are given near-total freedom to socialize in private. That freedom is grounded in the belief that college students have sufficient character to use that freedom responsibly. It is also grounded in the belief that people best learn how to regulate their behavior when they are given the opportunity to regulate their behavior.
On the typical American campus of the fifties, students were not taught self-restraint — they were restrained, and they were punished when they were caught circumventing those restraints. If they learned anything about how to behave behind closed doors, it was at great risk, and in defiance of the mechanisms employed to keep them apart. If a female student at Berry College in 1956 consented to be alone with a guy in circumstances that made sex possible, she was in violation of school rules. She was in danger of expulsion. Every man on campus knew this, and that knowledge gave the worst of them great power.
If a woman was treated badly in such circumstances — if she was raped, if she was coerced, if she was abused, if she was humiliated — she was vanishingly unlikely to speak out. And there wasn’t even any way to have an open discussion about what it meant to be “treated badly” — the campus rules permitted no public dialogue about sexual ethics, no opportunity to arrive at communal understanding about how to behave and how to expect your partner to behave, no space in which to forthrightly compare expectations and experiences.
This world that Brooks pines for is a world of stifling rules and unequal punishments. It’s a world of shame and exploitation. It’s a world of ignorance and silence.
It is a world that generations of students heroically fought to be freed from.
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