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“The University of California was a young, comparatively small institution when I entered there in 1885 as a freshman. … My class numbered about one hundred boys and girls, mostly boys, who came from all parts of the State and represented all sorts of people and occupations. … We found already formed at Berkeley the typical undergraduate customs, rights, and privileged vices which we had to respect ourselves and defend against the faculty, regents, and the State government.
“One evening, before I had matriculated, I was taken out by some upper classmen to teach the president a lesson. He had been the head of a private preparatory school and was trying to govern the private lives and the public morals of university “men” as he had those of his schoolboys. Fetching a long ladder, the upper classmen thrust it through a front window of Prexy’s house and, to the chant of obscene songs, swung it back and forth, up and down, round and round, till everything breakable within sounded broken and the drunken indignation outside was satisfied or tired.
“This turned out to be one of the last battles in the war for liberty against that president. He was allowed to resign soon thereafter and I noticed that not only the students but many of the faculty and regents rejoiced in his downfall and turned with us to face and fight the new president when, after a lot of politics, he was appointed and presented. We learned somehow a good deal about the considerations that governed our college government. They were not only academic. The government of a university was — like the State government and horse-racing and so many other things — not what I had been led to expect. And a college education wasn’t either, nor the student mind.”
—The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens
Every year the delegates to the United States Student Association’s National Student Congress must approve the Association’s campaigns for the year — establishing priorities for what the group will work on between then and the next Congress. Voter work and federal higher ed policy are locked in as perennials by USSA’s governing documents, but everything else is up for grabs.
This year seven of thirteen proposed campaigns made it through the delegates’ first round of vetting, but in the second round attention quickly focused on just three. Two of them — student loan forgiveness and support for the DREAM Act — had been approved unanimously in the first round, and drew little criticism in the second.
The third, “Legislating Shared Governance,” was where things got interesting.
Crafted by activists from Wisconsin, a state where students have a statutory right to participate in college governance, the proposal called on the Association to craft a national analysis of “campus and statewide conditions of student rights … abuses of student rights … and prospects for reform.” It further directed USSA to devote resources to defending and expanding students’ rights in campus governance, to create organizing materials and conference workshops in aid of such campaigns, to support legal action by students in defense of their rights, and finally to
“through its member campuses and statewide student associations, conduct a campus, statewide, and national grassroots and lobbying campaign to ensure state legislatures and university administrations codify these rights in state law and university policy.”
In the second round of debate a motion was made to select the DREAM Act and loan forgiveness plans — and only them — as USSA campaigns for the coming year. The shared governance proposal was offered and rejected as a third campaign in an amendment to that motion, but as debate continued it became clear that the DREAM/loan-forgiveness combo couldn’t win the plenary’s support without it.
And so, after several hours of debate and more than a few off-the-floor negotiating sessions, the amendment was offered again, and accepted.
Why was there so much disagreement? Mostly, I think, because while USSA’s officers and staff do a lot of non-electoral organizing work (and training), the Association’s official campaigns have in recent years primarily been federal legislative advocacy projects, and this isn’t that.
But as folks from Occupy to the DREAMers to USSA’s own partner the Student Labor Action Project (SLAP) have been demonstrating in recent months, there’s a lot happening around youth and student organizing right now that’s only peripherally (if at all) connected to legislative lobbying. This is a movement moment, and it’s going to be fascinating to see what USSA makes of it in the coming year.
The summer lull in this year’s Quebec student protests is coming to a close, and the next few weeks are likely to be crucial ones for the future of the movement.
To recap: Quebec’s ruling Liberal Party announced plans for multi-year tuition hikes last February, prompting students to walk out of classes throughout the provinces. Those walkouts quickly developed into ongoing student strikes, with many campuses closing entirely after student strike votes at general assemblies. College administrators generally respected the strikes, even — in some cases — refusing to comply with court orders that their campuses be reopened. Suddenly the red square, symbol of the movement, was everywhere.
In mid-May the government brought forward a proposal to end the strike, but it offered only minimal concessions and its plan was overwhelmingly rejected in a series of campus votes. After that debacle the Liberal Party put forward Bill 78, a law that criminalized much protest in the region and imposed stiff penalties on student organizations that supported campus closures. Bowing to the reality of widespread campus closures, Bill 78 suspended the spring semester at colleges shuttered by the strike, mandating that they resume meeting in mid-August. (The law passed on a party-line vote after a hectic marathon session.)
Defiance of Bill 78 was widespread, and its provisions have generally not yet been implemented. Hundreds of thousands of Quebecois took to the streets in the aftermath of its passage, and protests have continued throughout the summer on a somewhat smaller scale.
That’s what’s happened. Here’s what’s coming:
Rumors have been swirling for months that Quebec’s ruling Liberal Party will announce on August 1 that they will be holding provincial elections on September 4, and news reporting is increasingly treating a Wednesday announcement as a done deal. Polling has been sparse so far, but the most recent data show the LP and the Parti Quebecois virtually deadlocked, with one poll aggregator showing the LP likely to win some 60 seats in the new legislature — a six-seat loss from their current standing, and a decline large enough to rob them of their current majority in the 125-seat body.
But the situation could change dramatically between now and the election, particularly since Bill 78 mandates that the province’s striking colleges re-open their doors on August 17. A student lawsuit to block implementation of the Bill was rejected earlier this month, but another challenge is still pending — this one from professors who say the government does not have the right to unilaterally impose a new teaching schedule on them.
Mark your calendars: This year, campus activism for the new academic year starts in Quebec, and it’s starting early.
I’ve just arrived in Madison, Wisconsin for the 65th annual congress of the United States Student Association.
USSA, a confederation of student governments and state student associations, is the oldest and largest student-run national student organization in the country. Founded (as the US National Student Association) right here in Madison in the aftermath of World War II, USSA has since 1960 been based in Washington DC, working as a political advocacy organization as well as a grassroots organizing group.
I served on the USSA board of directors for two years as an undergrad, and a short internal history of NSA/USSA that I wrote then was (if I’m remembering the chronology right) the first piece of real historical writing I ever did. USSA shaped me as an activist, and it’s a big part of why I became a historian.
Occasionally over the years, and more regularly recently, USSA has invited me to come out to Congress to lend a hand. So I’ll be here for the next six days, holding a workshop on student history, leading a tour of the organization’s archives at the Wisconsin Historical Society, and helping out with chairing plenary sessions. If you’re here at the conference, come say hi. If not, stay tuned for more — I’ll be writing and tweeting (at hashtag #NSC12) a fair amount, I suspect.
One of the Supreme Court’s first cases when it returns in the fall will be Fisher v. University of Texas, scheduled for argument on October 10. The Fisher case concerns the constitutionality of affirmative action policies in undergraduate admissions at UT.
Campus affirmative action has been on shaky legal ground since 2003, when the Supreme Court ruled in the 5-4 Grutter v. Bollinger decision that race-conscious policies could not be used to remedy the effects of past societal discrimination, but only “to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.”
Four of the Court’s members were then willing to accept a broader role for affirmative action, while four wanted to end it entirely. It was Justice O’Connor, the swing vote, who endorsed the compromise that carried the day, but in the last nine years, four members of the Court — including O’Connor — have left by death or resignation, and their replacements have shifted the Court significantly to the right.
Chief Justice John Roberts, one of the conservative post-Grutter additions to the Court, wrote in a 2007 opinion that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” — that the Constitution and sound public policy demand race-blind admissions, in other words. In contrast, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is likely to be the swing vote this year, held in the same case that the government has a “legitimate interest … in ensuring all people have equal opportunity regardless of their race,” and that “narrowly tailored” affirmative action is permissible in service of that interest.
Just how narrow such a policy must be to meet Justice Kennedy’s standards will likely be the central question before the Court in Fisher. And although Kennedy has so far refused to join the Court’s conservative wing in endorsing a ban on race-conscious admissions, he has never yet voted to uphold an actually existing affirmative action program.
I’ll be following this case as it proceeds through the SCOTUS calendar during the coming year, commenting in more detail on the issues involved, the oral arguments, and the decision when it eventually appears. But for now, as I mentioned above, I wanted to draw your attention to a website and petition that the United States Student Association has put up.
USSA will be submitting an amicus brief in support of UT’s affirmative action policies to the Supreme Court early next month, and they’re currently collecting signatures from students to include in that brief. If you’d like to let SCOTUS know you support affirmative action in college admissions, you can do it by adding your name to the USSA brief here.
studentactivism.net 
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