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Arizona State University has a big commencement speaker, and a big PR problem.
Last Wednesday the State Press, ASU’s student newspaper, broke the story that the university would not be giving President Obama an honorary degree when he speaks at their commencement next month, and ASU has been scrambling ever since.
A university spokesperson told the State Press that honorary degrees are bestowed on the basis of a lifetime of achievement, and that “because President Obama’s body of work is yet to come, it’s inappropriate to recognize him at this time.” Since then, however, research has revealed that ASU has given honorary degrees in the past to humorist Erma Bombeck, Phoenix Suns owner Jerry Colangelo, and a long list of the university’s major donors.
On Friday ASU president Michael Crow offered a new explanation for the honorary degree decision. In an email to students, he said that the university does not grant honorary degrees “to sitting politicians, a practice based on the very practical realities of operating a public university in our political environment,” but criticism continued to mount.
Crow tried a new tack the next day, announcing that one of the university’s scholarship programs would be renamed the “President Barack Obama Scholars program.” Crow’s statement also declared that the program would be expanded, but as the State Press reported, it “did not say how much the scholarship program will be expanded or when it will begin.”
In an editorial to be published in tomorrow’s paper, the State Press notes that the university’s decision has sparked a round of ASU-bashing in the national media, with students bearing the brunt.
“ASU has been labeled,” it says, “a school where students go to get ‘a master’s degree in lawn-mowing.’ It has been labeled a second-rate university. It has been labeled a racist party school.” All because of a “decision made by a six-person committee.”
A decision, the State Press is too modest to point out, that the nation only learned about because of the intrepid work of the university’s student journalists.
The activists who occupied the New School building at 65 Fifth Avenue early on Friday morning did not use Twitter to organize their action or to communicate with the world outside. No-one who self-identified as a participant in the occupation ever tweeted while it was going on, and the protesters seem not to have given much weight to Twitter as a medium through which they could communicate with the public.
But news of the protest broke online quickly, and by the time the occupation ended much of the conversation surrounding it was taking place on Twitter. Hundreds of tweets about the occupation were posted that morning — by noon, a new one was going up every eighteen seconds. Many of these tweets were written by eyewitnesses, and taken in aggregate the occupation’s Twitter feed offers both a real-time narrative of the morning’s events and a demonstration of the multiple ways that Twitter is deployed when news breaks.
The Occupation On Twitter
The occupation began at about 5:30 in the morning, by most accounts. The first tweet that mentioned it was posted at 6:46 am — twenty-six minutes after the activist group Take Back NYU announced the action via email to its Facebook group.
The first request that observers bring cameras to the occupation site to document events as they unfolded came at 7:26. The first photo from the scene was posted exactly forty minutes later.
Student activists at New York City’s New School have reportedly launched another building occupation.
According to the activist group Take Back NYU, students from the New School have occupied “the entire building” at 65 Fifth Avenue. (65 Fifth is at 14th Street: map.)
The occupation looks very much like the work of The New School In Exile, As of 8 am, there’s been no news directly from the NSIE’s website or blog. More details as they become available, here and on our Twitter feed.
9 am: The New School Free Press is liveblogging the occupation. They say about 60 students entered the building at five o’clock this morning. Cops have cordoned off the sidewalk, and NS president Bob Kerrey says “this is an NYPD situation.” Kerrey claims students “broke and entered” the building, and assaulted a guard. A student inside said the group made a “peaceful entrance.”
9:30 am: News media are starting to cover the story (NY1, AP/Fox), but still no statement from the occupiers.
9:55 am: NY1 has a statement from student Andy Folk: “”Our demand for them to resign is consistent with the faculty’s ‘no confidence’ vote in Bob Kerrey. That demand was not met. Other demands were met, such as starting a socially-responsible investment committee, which Bob Kerrey is trying to bury in red tape. So, we need to show him by force and civil disobedience that students have a right over the school that they pay money for. This is just a demonstration of students taking back their space.”
10:00 am: New post up here.
10:08 am: Cable news channel NY1 is airing a lengthy live report from the scene of the occupation. They say cops have closed down some streets, cleared protesters from sidewalks. Report included video of masked occupiers on the roof of 65 Fifth Avenue waving black-and-red flags.
10:30 am: The New York Times and Gawker weigh in.
10:50 am: Blogpost up from the Village Voice, with photos. Says cops are blocking students from going to class. 13th Street shut down. “Massive police presence … helicopters whirring overhead.”
11:05 am: NY1 reports dozens of cops “preparing to go inside 65 Fifth Avenue.” Cops wearing helmets, shields, carrying plastic handcuffs.
11:20 am: http://reoccupied.wordpress.com/ claims to be blogging from inside occupation. Latest post says cops are storming the building, have used pepper spray and tear gas. Trying to get confirmation…
11:35 am: NY1 news reporting that police are inside the building and on the roof, and that “at least two” students have been removed. No mention of pepper spray or tear gas, no word on mass arrests.
11:45 am: Village Voice blog: “The cops have pulled paddy wagons between the press pen and the front of the building so the press can’t see any of the actual arrests.”
11:50 am: http://reoccupied.wordpress.com/: “Rally NOW at 6th Precinct! Let’s get them free!!! 233 w10th st at Bleecker. NOW NOW NOW Until every last one is out!”
12:05 pm: NY1 reporting that NYPD entered 65 Fifth Ave at 11:15, and cleared the building by noon. Nineteen arrests — fifteen men, four women.
12:30 pm: The New School has released a statement to the media on this morning’s occupation. That statement, and subsequent developments, will be covered in this follow-up post.
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.
“The employers will love this generation. They are not going to press many grievances. There won’t be much trouble. They are going to be easy to handle. There aren’t going to be riots. There aren’t going to be revolutions.”
–Clark Kerr, Chancellor of the University of California, 1959.
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