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Nearly a dozen students occupied a portion of the Rutgers administration building overnight in defiance of an administration that cut off their access to food and water yesterday evening. The group was able to sneak supplies in via a makeshift pulley system, and say they have no intention of leaving until their demands are met.
The group is demanding that Rutgers’ president endorse a tuition freeze, that new scholarships be put in place for underprivileged and first-generation students, that transcript fees be eliminated, and that the university increase “support for the rights of ALL University affiliated workers.” In addition, the group is calling on Rutgers to implement a new shared governance structure for the university. (A detailed explanation of the demands can be found at the above link.)
The occupiers have a Facebook page and a Twitter feed, and the For Student Power blog has been liveblogging their action since yesterday afternoon.
Is student lending a speculative bubble? Is higher education a scam now? Malcolm Harris makes the case. The whole thing — a cogent, thorough analysis — is well worth reading, but here’s the money quote:
If tuition has increased astronomically and the portion of money spent on instruction and student services has fallen, if the (at very least comparative) market value of a degree has dipped and most students can no longer afford to enjoy college as a period of intellectual adventure, then at least one more thing is clear: higher education, for-profit or not, has increasingly become a scam.
Seriously. Go read.
Often student activists are criticized for not proposing concrete solutions to the problems that others have identified. “Sure, you’re against our plan,” administrators and politicians ask, “but what alternative can you offer?”
Sometimes the “problem” is invented, of course, and sometimes students have detailed proposals at the ready, but not always. When the problem is real and students are offering no solution of their own, “what do you suggest we do?” is a legitimate question.
It’s a legitimate question. But “not this” is a legitimate answer.
Consider Mario Savio’s speech to the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964 — probably the most famous speech ever given by an American student activist:
There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious — makes you so sick at heart — that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.
Faced with a university that was breaking his heart, Savio said “no.” He said “stop.” He didn’t say “here’s an alternative.” He said “not this.”
Sometimes students, organizing against an act or a decision or a proposal or an administration, have an alternative at hand. Sometimes they have a suggestion as to what should happen next, what should take the place of the current plan or the status quo. Sometimes they have many such suggestions.
But sometimes they don’t. Sometimes what they have is “not this.” Sometimes what they have is “no.” Sometimes what they have is “stop.”
And sometimes that “stop” is the most radical, most cogent, most effective, most reasonable intervention there is.
A few years back, columnist David Brooks (who will, as it happens, be the commencement speaker at Brandeis University this year) wrote a piece about campus rape in which he suggested that the best approach to preventing such incidents was the approach that colleges took prior to the sexual revolution.
Back in the good old days, Brooks wrote,
educators … understood that when you concentrate young men, they have a tropism toward barbarism. That’s why these educators cared less about academics than about instilling a formula for character building. The formula, then called chivalry, consisted first of manners, habits and self-imposed restraints to prevent the downward slide.
There’s a lot to object to in this, starting with the suggestion that all men have the impulse to rape, and that the best of us are merely taught to restrain it. But there’s one bit that I’d like to address as a historian of American higher education.
As it happens, I recently acquired a copy of the Berry College Handbook for Women, published by the college’s women’s student government in 1956. Berry was (and is) a co-ed private college in rural Georgia, exactly the kind of place that you’d expect to find Brooks’ “formula for character building” in action.
And what does that handbook say about dating? It says this:
DATES — Girls may have dates on Sunday afternoons from 2:45 to 5:00 PM, at parties, movies, and other social events and also at the college store between classes. When girls are coming from the college campus, boys do not escort them farther than the ‘parting of the ways’ which is on the road between the Recitation Hall and Mother’s Building. There must be no dating in out of the way places. Petting is not permitted.
Self-imposed restraints? Hardly. This was a world of strict gender segregation. At Berry College in the fifties, male and female students weren’t permitted to be alone together. Ever.
On today’s campus, students are given near-total freedom to socialize in private. That freedom is grounded in the belief that college students have sufficient character to use that freedom responsibly. It is also grounded in the belief that people best learn how to regulate their behavior when they are given the opportunity to regulate their behavior.
On the typical American campus of the fifties, students were not taught self-restraint — they were restrained, and they were punished when they were caught circumventing those restraints. If they learned anything about how to behave behind closed doors, it was at great risk, and in defiance of the mechanisms employed to keep them apart. If a female student at Berry College in 1956 consented to be alone with a guy in circumstances that made sex possible, she was in violation of school rules. She was in danger of expulsion. Every man on campus knew this, and that knowledge gave the worst of them great power.
If a woman was treated badly in such circumstances — if she was raped, if she was coerced, if she was abused, if she was humiliated — she was vanishingly unlikely to speak out. And there wasn’t even any way to have an open discussion about what it meant to be “treated badly” — the campus rules permitted no public dialogue about sexual ethics, no opportunity to arrive at communal understanding about how to behave and how to expect your partner to behave, no space in which to forthrightly compare expectations and experiences.
This world that Brooks pines for is a world of stifling rules and unequal punishments. It’s a world of shame and exploitation. It’s a world of ignorance and silence.
It is a world that generations of students heroically fought to be freed from.
Yesterday this site reached a milestone of sorts, registering its 500,000th pageview. It took almost three years to get there, though most of that traffic came in the last few months. (If present trends continue, we’ll rack up our millionth hit sometime in late summer or early fall of this year.)
Those numbers are still small compared to the big kids of the blogosphere, but you all have allowed Student Activism to break some significant stories and draw important attention to others. You’ve also helped to popularize a new model for blogging in the field of student organizing — this beat is a lot less lonely than it was in the spring of 2008.
I’m going to be rolling out some new features for the site this week, so keep checking in. And thanks for all your support!
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