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The change.org website is running a poll on its readers’ top ten “ideas for change in America.”
They say that “the top 10 rated ideas from the final round will be presented to the Obama administration on January 16th at an event at the National Press Club in Washington, DC,” and that at the NPC they will “announce the launch of a national advocacy campaign behind each idea in collaboration with our nonprofit partners to turn each idea into actual policy.”
Anyone can vote, and the polls close at 5pm Eastern time this afternoon. There are several education-oriented ideas among the leading proposals, and the United States Student Association is urging its members and allies to vote for two in particular — passage of the DREAM Act and student loan forgiveness.
Go check it out.
The Associated Student Government at Northwestern University has been busy this winter.
In recent weeks, ASG has gone live with four different online projects serving the student community — a ride share board, a ratings site for off-campus housing, a research assistance site, and a student guide to academic majors.
The new programs are part of a strategy to shift ASG’s emphasis toward student-directed projects, an ASG representative told the Daily Northwestern. The student government’s operations director estimates that the ride share program has already saved students $15,000 since it went live in early December.
Now, none of these projects stand at the cutting edge of radical activism, it’s true. But each is intended to make a positive practical difference in the lives of students at Northwestern, and several — I’m thinking specifically of the housing site and the academic majors guide — are designed to equalize information imbalances that put students at a disadvantage in dealing with other university community members.
Student services and student advocacy are too often treated as alternatives, or even opposites. In my experience, a strong student government is likely to be (or become) an activist student government, and serving students’ needs makes a student government stronger.
A morning grab-bag of stuff on the York University strike…
- Our post from last night on the announcement that a date has been set for the contract vote.
- An article from the Globe and Mail newspaper about an anti-strike Facebook group.
- A union parody of the York University website.
- The York Federation of Students has established a strike relief fund.
- The Toronto Star is running a series of profiles of students affected by the strike.
To keep tabs on our ongoing coverage of the York strike, check out our Labor category archives, or just bookmark our main page.
The union membership vote on the York University contract proposal has been scheduled for January 19 and 20, from 9 am to 1 pm and 3 pm to 7 pm each day. These are the dates the university requested, and are four days later than those the union had proposed.
York, the third largest university in Canada, has been shuttered for 68 days by a strike of teaching assistants, graduate assistants, and adjunct faculty. The university is using a provision in Ontario labor law to force CUPE, the union representing the strikers, to poll the membership on their latest proposal.
CUPE members rejected the proposal by a lopsided margin at a mass meeting last week, and are organizing to defeat it in this referendum. The three units of the union local will vote separately on January 19-20, and all three must approve the proposal to end the strike.
To keep tabs on our ongoing coverage of the York strike, check out our Labor category archives, or just bookmark our main page.
The two sides in the York University strike have each released FAQs on the upcoming union referendum. The university’s document is this Supervised Vote FAQ, while the union calls its FAQ Forced Ratification 101.
According to CUPE’s strike blog, they have requested that the vote be held this Thursday and Friday, January 15 and 16, while the university is calling for a vote next Monday and Tuesday, January 19 and 20. The Ministry of Labour is expected to announce the timing of the vote today or tomorrow.
We’ve been getting a lot of traffic over the last few days from folks looking for the latest information on the York strike, and we’re going to do our best to pass that info along as we receive it.
To keep tabs on our ongoing coverage of the York strike, check out our Labor category archives, or just bookmark our main page.
Update: The York Federation of Students, the university’s student government, has created a strike relief fund for students suffering financial hardship because of the university closure. According to their website, applications for relief funding will be available online tomorrow.
studentactivism.net 
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