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Last year fifty students at Atlanta’s Spelman College were forced to drop out because of financial hardship, and with the nation’s economy reeling, prospects for 2009 are looking considerably more grim.
And so, an effort to keep the student body together, the student government of the nation’s first historically black college for women has created an emergency scholarship fund.
The new fund builds on projects the student government undertook last semester, when it created a free textbook program for students in need and persuaded Aramark, the college’s dining services provider, to provide meal plan subsidies to selected undergraduates.
The student government has provided $10,000 in seed money for the new emergency scholarships, and is connecting current students with potential donors in a letter-writing campaign to raise more.
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.
A student programming committee’s decision to show the porn film Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge in the University of Maryland College Park student union this weekend has been overruled by the university’s president.
UM President C.D. Mote Jr. took the action after Maryland state legislators raised the possibility of cutting state funding to the institution.
Republican state senator Andrew Harris proposed amending the state budget to cut off funding to any college or university that screened an adult film other than as part of coursework, and senate president Thomas Miller indicated that he would support such an amendment. “That’s really not what Maryland residents send their young students to college campus for, to view pornography,” he said.
The college’s vice president for student affairs, Linda Clement, said the decision to cancel the screening wasn’t made on any one basis. “People were concerned about portrayal of women, concerned about violence, concerned about our students and decision-making processes,” she said. “It just seemed like the best thing to do.”
Discussion of the issue in the legislature was halted several times this morning as student groups on class trips filed through the senate chamber. “If you kids are wondering what we’re doing, we’re waiting for you to leave the room,” Miller said at one point. “We’re going to talk about some bad stuff.”
Update: Big shock — the legislators got played for fools by the movie’s distributors.
studentactivism.net 
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