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“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.
I don’t know if the Education Times site is new, or just new to me, but I’m going to be making it a regular stop from now on.
It’s a straightforward site — links to news articles on K-12 and higher education, with brief summaries — but it’s got a lot of stuff, and it’s easy to navigate. Because they emphasize quantity over depth, they cover a lot more ground than Inside Higher Ed or the Chronicle. If it’s the kind of thing you’re interested in, you’ll be interested.
And they (like us) are on Twitter, too.
A professor at the University of East London has been suspended from his position for predicting that there may “be real bankers hanging from lampposts” at Wednesday’s protests against the G20 economic summit.
Chris Knight, a professor of anthropology, is an organizer of G20 protests in London this week. He told the BBC that if bankers and government ministers don’t “surrender their power, obviously it’s going to get us even more wound up and things could get nasty.”
Knight’s G20 Meltdown is just one of many groups planning actions in London this week, but Knight’s eagerness to make incendiary statements to the media has made him the most quoted figure in the movement right now.
The UEL’s decision to suspend him has confirmed that position.
The British police have in recent months opened files on more than two hundred students who have been identified as potential “criminals and would-be terrorists” by teachers and other authority figures.
Under a program called the “Channel project,” launched in selected British localities 18 months ago, Muslim students who have expressed “bad attitudes towards ‘the West'” have been reported to the police and subsequently subjected to formal intervention by community members or government officals. Such intervention is said to range from meetings with religious leaders to investigation by social services workers and “intervention directly by the police.”
Students targeted by the Channel project have been as young as thirteen.
Kristen Juras, the University of Montana law professor who has been campaigning to force the UM Kaimin to dump its sex advice column, appeared at a campus forum with the Kaimin‘s editor last night.
Juras called student activity fee support for the paper “government” funding, and described that funding as “a privilege.” She has in the past threatened to intervene with the university’s trustees or even the Montana state legislature to attempt to get that privilege withdrawn.
At last night’s forum, Juras said that any Kaimin sex column should be written by a “sexologist,” though she acknowledged, when pressed, that other student columns — such as those on religion — do not require such “expertise.”
Kaimin editor Bill Oram defended the column’s lackadaisical tone. “We’ll stop talking casually about sex when students stop having sex casually,” he said. “We’ll stop talking about sex in a fun way when sex stops being fun.”
Juras took a less lighthearted stance. “I’m not opposed to sex,” she said at one point. “I’m happily married and it’s an important part of our relationship.”
studentactivism.net 
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