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In a post titled “We’re Breaking Up,” the Student Labor Action Project announced today that three major student activist organizations have cut ties with banks implicated in predatory lending, student loan profiteering, and right-wing political activity:
- The United States Student Association has voted to close its accounts at Wells Fargo, the nation’s second largest private student lender (and the only major US bank to engage in predatory “payday loan” activity.) Wells Fargo’s student loan interest rates range as high as 14.21%.
- The United Council of University of Wisconsin Students has pulled its money from M&I Bank, which contributed more than $46,000 to the campaign of Wisconsin’s notorious governor, Scott Walker.
- And the University of California Student Association has broken ties with major student lender US Bank in the wake of its “lack of willingness to engage in good-faith efforts to negotiate sustainable permanent mortgage modifications.”
That’s three major student organizations in just a few weeks. More to come?
No time for a full treatment of this right now, but can I just point out something?
There wasn’t a Superbowl riot at U Mass last night.
The AP story on last night’s events on campus says there were no hospitalizations, and no property damage. A university spokesperson says there were a few fistfights, but all thirteen of the student arrests were for either disorderly conduct or failure to disperse.
Why the “failure to disperse” arrests? Because fifteen minutes after students gathered in a main residential quad on campus, police told them to go home. They used horses, dogs, and smokebombs, cops to clear the area, and busted folks who wouldn’t leave. From everything I’ve seen the big drama all came from the cops.
Which is part of why I was a bit disappointed to see supporters of the Occupy movement snarking the U Mass students. No, their Superbowl party wasn’t a political act, but since when do any of us only like political parties? Occupy is about (among many other things) reclaiming public spaces, opposing police harassment, and creating community. Isn’t a mass campus gathering like the one that took place last night presumptively a good thing? Isn’t it a good thing even if we call it a riot?
A couple of years ago, Malcolm Harris — then a campus radical at UMD-College Park, now a writer and Occupy activist in New York — was present at a similar “riot” after Maryland’s basketball team beat Duke. His take on that night is well worth remembering now:
I know as an activist I’m supposed to oppose sports riots. I’m supposed to complain that students are willing to take to the streets when the Terrapin mens’ basketball team wins but not when tuition increases or black enrollment drops. Sadly, I can’t play the alienated radical role today because I was there Wednesday night, and I saw more than drunk revelers.
When students took to Route 1 after a hard-fought victory over Duke, it was with joy and celebration. We chanted “Maaarylaaaand,” and we didn’t mean the buildings or the endowment or the logo. We meant one another.
Student activism (as I wrote then) has always straddled the line between politics and play, between organizing for social change and acting up for the hell of it. Either impulse can be creative or destructive, either can be deployed for positive or negative ends, but both impulses are inherent to student identity, and both are worth celebrating.
Go Terps.
Update | Aaron Bady passes along a fascinating piece on the role of Egyptian soccer fans in that country’s popular uprising. Here’s a taste:
I believe we are witnessing a natural development in an inevitable conflict between two parties that have found themselves following two different paradigms of life: the paradigm of the depression, control, and normalization of apathy versus the paradigm of joyful liberation from the shackles of social and institutional norms to create gratifying chaos.
The latter is what I call “the politics of fun”.
And another:
The key to understanding the Ultras phenomenon is to imagine it as a way of life for these youth. For them, becoming a football fan became a symbolic action that was both joyful and a means of self-expression. But the broader social, psychological, and cultural contexts were unable to adapt to the groups’ activities, in part by virtue of their rebellious nature and their defiance of norms.
A bill in the Arizona legislature would bar the state’s university system from providing scholarships that reduced out-of-pocket tuition to less than $2000 a year.
Republican John Kavanaugh says that keeping tuition low creates “perverse incentives” for students to enroll in college. His bill, which has 24 co-sponsors in Arizona’s 60-member House of Representatives, would restrict all grants, scholarships, and awards administered by the university, even those funded by private donors.
Students on full academic scholarships would be exempted from the regulation, as would those on athletic scholarships. Asked why athletes were exempt, Kavanaugh said “they contribute to school spirit, and those on football and basketball teams also generate a lot of extra revenue.”
The athletic and academic loopholes, of course, mean that the bill’s largest impact would be on need-based aid.
February 22 Update | The tuition bill, HB 2675, has just been approved by the Appropriations Committee of the Arizona House of Representatives in what Anne Ryman of the Arizona Republic described as a “narrow” vote. On Twitter, Ms. Ryman described exchanges between committeemembers and students testifying against the bill as “heated,” giving the following example:
University of Arizona student James Allen: “You’re making it harder to achieve a higher education degree.”
Representative Michelle Ugenti: “Welcome to life.”
Ouch.
An obscure academic publishes a strange paper in a no-name journal. Scholars uniformly repudiate it as worthless. Some speculate that the author is mentally ill. But in the meantime the theory attracts huge attention online, and even makes it into some mainstream news outlets, lauded as a potentially earth-shaking discovery.
How does this happen?
University public relations departments.
The academic in question is biochemist Erik Andrulis, and the paper is called “Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life.” It was published in the premiere issue of a minor new journal called Life last week, and if that had been all the exposure it received, it likely would have sunk without a trace.
But Andrulis is an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University, and six days ago the CWRU public relations department issued a press release declaring that the paper presented a “revolutionary … transdisciplinary theory” with the potential to “catalyze a veritable renaissance.” Andrulis, they said, “resolv[es] long-standing paradoxes and puzzles in chemistry and biology, … unifies quantum and celestial mechanics,” and “confirms the proposed existence of eight laws of nature.”
In actuality, Andrulis has done none of those things. Respected biologist and science writer PZ Myers, for instance, describes the paper as “unreadable, incoherent, bizarre, and completely lacking in evidence or mathematical support.”
But a university press release is a university press release, and most people who read them have none of Myers’ ability to tell good science from bad, so the CWRU announcement was quickly picked up by various sites. Indeed, a number of science news aggregators simply stripped the original attributions, slapped on their own bylines, and published the press release itself as news.
As the extent of the paper’s problems became known, CWRU pulled the press release from their site, and a growing number of Life editors tendered their resignations, but by then the paper was out in the world.
In this particular case, the flaws of the original paper were so extreme and so obvious that the story didn’t make it too far before the backlash began. Today, much of the discussion around Andrulis consists of debates as to whether he has committed a hoax or is suffering from mental illness. (PZ Myers tends toward the second explanation, describing the event as “a developing personal tragedy” and expressing the hope that Andrulis “gets the care he clearly needs.”)
But most bad research isn’t anywhere near this bad, and so most press-release-driven journalism never gets properly debunked. I’ve written a bunch of posts about bad academic research on students, and in almost every instance my attention was drawn to the shoddy work by breathless media coverage of somebody’s overheated press release.
A federal appeals court gave a conservative Christian counseling student’s lawsuit new life last week, ruling that Julea Ward’s case against Eastern Michigan University could go forward.
Ward was expelled from EMU’s graduate counseling program in early 2009. As I wrote at the time, Ward asked to be reassigned off the case of a gay counseling client. In a letter she read during her disciplinary hearing, Ward said she believes that “God ordained relationships between men and women,” and that people should “strive to cultivate sexual desires for persons of the opposite sex.” She is, she said, “morally obligated … to express the biblical viewpoint regarding proper sexual relationships” in the course of her counseling work.
When asked by the school why she would feel comfortable counseling someone who was contemplating abortion, but not someone who was in a gay relationship. “With abortion,” she said, “you have options which you can offer. With a client that’s struggling with homosexuality … it’s just, ‘OK, this is who you are, so we’re only going to deal with helping you feel comfortable with who you are.’ You cannot discuss any other treatment plans that would bring them out of that particular lifestyle.”
The Ward case has become a cause celebre for the Christian Right, who see her expulsion as a violation of religious freedom and as evidence of the politicization of the counseling profession’s ethics codes. Although the American Counseling Association does not explicitly bar so-called conversion therapy intended to “cure” homosexuality, it notes that such therapies have no proven record of effectiveness. More importantly, as I wrote in 2009, it bars therapists from suggesting such approaches in the absence of a client-initiated request.
Last week’s decision is not a ruling against EMU on the merits of the case, but a reversal of a lower court’s granting of what’s known as “summary judgment” in the university’s favor. The court declared that because, under the most generous reading of the evidence available, “a reasonable jury could conclude that Ward’s professors ejected her from the counseling program because of hostility toward her speech and faith,” the previous decision to throw out the case before it reached a jury was mistaken.
The issues in play here are important ones. A fundamental question is that of the EMU (and ACA) policy on referral in situations in which a counselor is unable to meet a client’s therapeutic needs — Ward claims that such referrals are explicitly authorized by the ACA ethics code, and the appellate court ruling is sympathetic to that position.
As I’ve written in the past, however, the ACA code only anticipates client referral on a case-by-case basis, not a counselor’s rejection of an entire class of clients. And while Ward’s stance may seem reasonable on the surface, the fact is that a client’s homosexuality will not always be made known to a counselor in advance of the establishment of a therapeutic relationship. For a counselor to establish such a relationship and then break it off upon learning that her client is gay would, EMU rightly perceived, represent a profound betrayal and a violation of the counselor’s ethical obligations.
More on this as the case goes forward.
studentactivism.net 
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