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Turns out I missed the exact anniversary — it was on Tuesday — but it’s been one year since studentactivism.net went live. In honor of that milestone, here’s a list of the site’s top ten search terms ever and the posts that inspired them…
10: sds wiki
Back in January I wrote about a very cool wiki that Students for Democratic Society had set up. Unfortunately, the wiki hasn’t been functioning for a while, but I’m hoping they’ll bring it back online soon.
9: obama youth ball
I wrote six stories in January about the Obama youth inaugural ball, covering controversies over the event’s logistics and message, as well as the decision to sell exclusive television rights to MTV.
8: bill ayers
Former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers’ name pops up on the site with some regularity, but most of the search traffic he’s received here came because of a post about someone else — student activist and antiwar radical David Ifshin, who became a friend of John McCain’s after the war ended.
7: self-entitled college students
This search is for references to a recent journal article that purported to find a strong “sense of entitlement” among American students. The article has major flaws, some of which I’ve discussed here and here. (And yes, I’ve got a third post on the article planned. I’ll write it eventually.)
6: julea ward
Julea Ward’s prominence on this list, just a week after I wrote about her, is a testament not only to public interest in her lawsuit against Eastern Michigan University, but also to the effect of including an easily Googlable name in the title of a post.
5: new school in exile
Eighteen posts so far on these New York City activists, and I’m working on another.
4: tulane rape
I’ve posted on three different stories relating to sexual violence at Tulane — the university’s failure to investigate charges made by the student government relating to druggings and possible rapes at one fraternity’s parties, the mild punishment the university meted out to a student accused of committing rape in the Tulane dorms, and a case in which a student claimed he’d been sexually assaulted by a campus police officer.
3: hillary clinton
Last May I posted about Secretary Clinton’s relationship to the campus radicalism of the 1960s, and in December I wrote about some parallels between the story of an Obama speechwriter’s groping of a life size Clinton cut-out and that of a campus prank that took place a hundred years earlier.
2: york university strike
Although few US citizens noticed at the time, one of Canada’s largest universities was shut down for three months this winter by the third-longest higher education strike in Canada’s history. Many of the strikers were graduate students, and undergraduates were active in organizing both in support of and in opposition to the strike, so it was a natural story for this site.
1: student activism
That’s what we’re here for. Thanks for a great year.
Students and faculty at the University of Texas at Austin are going to walk out of classes at 11:30 this morning and march to the Texas State Capitol in protest of a bill to allow guns on campus.
Today is the second anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre, in which a student shot and killed 32 people before committing suicide.
Under the terms of a bill under consideration in the state legislature, Texas residents with concealed-carry permits would be allowed to bring their weapons onto the campuses of the state’s public universities. The UT student government came out against the law in a lopsided vote earlier this semester.
(Via @thedailytexan on Twitter.)
Friday update: Two hundred students participated in the walkout and rally. The Daily Texan has the story.
Today would have been Hugh Thompson’s 66th birthday.
Hugh Thompson was a 24-year-old helicopter pilot in the US Army in March 1968 when he flew a mission over the town of My Lai in Vietnam.
Providing aerial support to American troops operating in My Lai, Thompson and his crew discovered evidence that US soldiers were massacring unarmed villagers, including children and the elderly. When Thompson spotted a group of eleven unarmed people — including several children — fleeing American soldiers, he landed his helicopter between them and the troops. As he got out of the helicopter, he ordered his gunner to shoot the American soldiers if the soldiers opened fire on the civilians.
Thompson was able to secure the evacuation of those eleven, and as he was flying back to base to report on what he had seen, his gunner spotted and rescued an eight-year-old boy from a drainage ditch in which as many as a hundred people — including his mother and his younger sister and brother — lay dead.
When Thompson returned to base, he was able to convince a high-ranking officer to order a cease fire.
The campus concealed-carry debate is heating up in several state legislatures right now, and I’m trying to get up to speed, so I’ve just started reading “Pretend ‘Gun-Free’ School Zones: A Deadly Legal Fiction” — an article by David Kopel that argues that laws prohibiting faculty and adult students from carrying guns on school campuses are “irrational and deadly.” (I found the article through the National Review‘s Phi Beta Cons blog, here.)
Kopel says that for most of America’s history “it was not uncommon for students to bring guns to school.” He cites a column in which John Lane reminisces about his youth in the 1940s and 1950s, and says that he “attempted to find a ‘school shooting’ from that era,” but “came up empty.” On the following page Kopel goes further, passing on the claim that “before the 1990 [Gun-Free School Zone Act], there had been only seven shootings at an American school in the previous 214 years,” and that “in the 17 years following the GFSZA, there were 78 such incidents.”
Each of these claims — that one might search for school shootings in the 1940s and 1950s and find no examples, and that there were only seven shootings at American schools before 1990 — struck me as unlikely, so I decided to check them out.
I fired up the search engine for the archives of the New York Times, looking for articles published between January 1, 1940 and December 31, 1959 that included the words “shot” and “school.”
The search returned 4,940 results.
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.
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