You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Immigration’ category.
The University of Arizona has seen enrollment in its honors program drop by nearly twenty percent after it began charging students $500 a year to participate. More than six hundred students have left the program this year, the first year in which the fee has been imposed.
Remember this story the next time you hear some professor or administrator whining about the “consumer mentality” among today’s college students.
It’s not the students of the University of Arizona who looked at the school’s honors program with dollar signs in their eyes. It’s not the students who decided to transform a community of scholars into a chance to turn a quick buck. It’s not the students who slapped a price tag on a mark of academic distinction.
It’s not the students.
Students, by and large, don’t see themselves as consumers, and they don’t see the university as a product. The campus plays too many — and too varied — roles in their lives to be reduced to that. It’s administrators who commodify education, and those students who adopt consumerist attitudes are taking their cues from them.
NPR is reporting that Northern Arizona University has installed ID card scanners at some lecture halls so that student attendance in large classes can be taken automatically. Apparently NAU is the first college in the country to do this.
I’m no opponent, in principle, of taking attendance in college, though I know many student activists are. In my view, class participation can be a legitimate component of a student’s grade, and you can’t participate if you’re not present. (Beyond that, I do think that it’s a professor’s prerogative to discourage absenteeism by taking attendance, even if it’s only to save some students from themselves.)
But I’ve got a few concerns about this scheme.
First, it seems to me that college attendance is nowhere less important than in huge lecture classes. A lecture is by definition non-interactive — in many cases, a student will get as much from listening to a friend’s recording of a class session as she would by sitting through the class itself. So why shouldn’t that be a legitimate option? Why should a student be penalized for that?
Second, this kind of automated attendance system invites abuse. As a professor, my belief is that the way to keep cheating out of my classroom is to raise the stakes. I organize my classes so that cheating is difficult, catching cheaters is easy, the ethical ramifications of cheating are obvious, and the consequences of cheating are severe. But because these scanners fail to meet any of those standards, they may invite students to see gaming the system as no big deal.
There are a bunch of reasons why students skip class, and a bunch of ways to discourage them from doing so. But the more I think about this particular one, the less I like it.
What’s your take? When should profs take attendance? Is this a legitimate way to do it?
A federal judge this morning blocked enforcement of the most controversial components of Arizona’s SB 1070 immigration law, just one day before the law was to go into effect.
SB 1070 has been the target of considerable student protest and organizing nationally since it was passed this spring, and is expected to be a flash point for activism when students return to campus in the fall.
Judge Susan Bolton found a “substantial likelihood” that legal residents would be subject to wrongful arrest under the law, and ruled that the statute would thus “impose a ‘distinct, unusual and extraordinary’ burden on legal resident aliens that only the federal government has the authority to impose.”
Update | Here’s the text of the judge’s order.
In a letter to the campus community released yesterday, University of Arizona president Robert N. Shelton declares that the passage of SB 1070, Arizona’s new immigration enforcement law, raises “troubling questions about how SB 1070 will affect the University’s international community.”
“The health and safety of our international students, faculty and professional staff are priorities of the highest order for us,” Shelton says, “and … we intend to put in place whatever procedures are necessary to ensure their safety and free movement on campus and in our community.” He further pledges to “do everything possible to ensure that these students continue to feel welcomed and respected, despite the unmistakably negative message that this bill sends to many of them.”
Shelton says he has already received word that several out-of-state students — every one of them an honors student — will be transferring to other universities as a result of the bill’s passage. “This should,” he says, “sadden anyone who cares about attracting the best and brightest students to Arizona.”
The University of Arizona police department will, he says, “be receiving extensive training” on SB 1070, and will be instructed “that individuals may not be stopped solely on the basis of race, color or national origin.” But while he is, he says, “completely confident that no one need fear the way that UAPD will approach the application of this law, I nevertheless appreciate the anxiety that friends and colleagues are feeling. It is a concern and fear that no one should have to harbor.”
He closes the letter by saying that the state Board of Regents “will be discussing the implications of SB1070” at its meeting this week.
A sweeping new immigration enforcement bill signed into law by the governor of Arizona on Friday has met with immediate opposition from students and others around the nation.
The law, known as SB 1070, has many elements, but its most controversial is a mandate that police officers to detain people they believe to be in the United States illegally.
President Obama on Friday described the law as a threat to “trust between police and our communities” and to “basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans.” The Archbishop of Los Angeles has compared the law’s provisions to Nazism.
SB 1070 provoked mass student protests even before it was signed — on Thursday morning more than a thousand Phoenix-area high school students walked out of classes and marched on the state capitol to demand that governor Jan Brewer veto the bill.
Dream Activist, a website by and for students organizing for immigration reform, reports that rallies and vigils were planned for Saturday in California, Florida, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, and Washington DC.
Opponents of the law are using the hashtags #SB1070 and #LegalizeAZ on Twitter.
Update | Add Connecticut to the list of states hosting anti-SB1070 protests — Yale students staged a mock ICE raid on campus on Thursday.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments