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I’m not planning to blog regularly about AMC’s early-sixties drama Mad Men, but there are aspects of the stories it tells that connect up with the stories I tell in my work as a historian, and I’m going to talk a bit about that this morning. Spoilers for previous seasons, and for last night’s season three opener, follow.
LGBT/Ally group Campus Pride is warning LGBT students to take Princeton Review’s ratings of gay-friendly campuses with a big grain of salt.
Princeton Review’s guide to The Best 371 Colleges ranks schools on how inclusive and welcoming they are to members of the LGBT community, but it does it on the basis of a single survey question, asking responders whether they agree or disagree with this statement: “Students, faculty, and administrators treat all persons equally regardless of their sexual orientation and gender identity/expression.”
That’s it. That’s the whole basis for the ranking.
As Campus Pride points out, “the majority of students responding to such a question — irrespective of response — will be straight. Their perceptions of equality are likely quite different from those of LGBT students.” Without knowing what conditions on the campus actually are, or what LGBT students actually think, it’s hard to put much weight on the results of a single survey question.
Campus Pride isn’t quite a disinterested bystander on this issue, since they publish a guide to gay-friendly campuses and maintain a LGBT “campus climate” website. But their point is a good one, anyway. Asking straight students whether a campus is a good environment for LGBT students doesn’t give you much information at all. In fact, it may give you the opposite of the information you need.
If a campus has an active LGBT student community, and a climate of openness to LGBT issues, straight students are likely to know about any difficulties that LGBT students are confronting and reflect that awareness in their answers to the Princeton Review survey. If such a climate doesn’t exist, straight students may assume that there aren’t any problems, since they haven’t heard of any. So a gay-friendly campus could easily rank lower on the Princeton Review ratings than one with a less supportive environment.
PR should really rethink this survey for next year’s edition of their guide.
The United States Student Association’s 62nd annual National Student Congress opens at the University of Colorado at Boulder in eleven days.
USSA, founded in 1947, is the nation’s oldest national student group, and its pre-eminent student government organization. I got my start in national student organizing in USSA, and I’m always thrilled to go back.
This year, I’ll be running a workshop, co-facilitating the Congress’s people of color “allies space,” and lending a hand in various other ways over the course of the week.
I’ll have more to say about the allies space later, and I’ll be blogging (and tweeting) from the Congress once I get there. In the meantime, here’s the title and description of my workshop, scheduled for Thursday, July 23rd, at two o’clock:
Media and Social Networking for Student Activism, Past and Present
Long before the creation of the internet, campus organizers were social networkers. What can their strategies teach today’s activists, and how can today’s students use new media and online networking to advance their work? This workshop, led by historian, activist, and blogger Angus Johnston, will explore the role of technology, media, and human contact in historical and contemporary student organizing.
Media and Social Networking for Student Activism, Past and Present
Long before the creation of the internet, campus organizers were social networkers. What can their strategies teach today’s activists, and how can today’s students use new media and online networking to advance their work? This workshop, led by historian, activist, and blogger Angus Johnston, will explore the role of technology, media, and human contact in historical and contemporary student organizing.
Hope to see you there!
The folks at TED interviewed Clay Shirky on the Iran uprising yesterday, and the transcript is a great read. Seriously, you should go read the whole thing. There are a few snippets that I think are worth expanding on, too:
I’m always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that … this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted “the whole world is watching.” Really, that wasn’t true then. But this time it’s true.
It wasn’t quite true then, and it isn’t quite true now, but Clay makes a good point.
In 1968, television and satellite transmission of information were transforming media. What happened on America’s streets that summer was broadcast nationwide in real time, and the news didn’t stop at the water’s edge. Images of protests in Chicago appeared within hours in newspapers and on television screens in Paris. Images from Paris appeared in Mexico City. Images from Mexico City appeared in Tokyo, and so on. The whole world wasn’t watching, but more of the world was watching than ever before.
As it was in 1968, so it is in 2009. The whole world isn’t watching, but more of the world is watching than ever before, and as Clay went on to say, “people throughout the world are not only listening but responding.”
Asked which social media platforms have had the most impact on the Iranian uprising, Clay answers flatly:
It’s Twitter. … Twitter [is] so simple and so open that it’s easier to integrate and harder to control than any other tool. At the time, I’m sure it wasn’t conceived as anything other than a smart engineering choice. But it’s had global consequences. Twitter is shareable and open and participatory in a way that Facebook’s model prevents.
I’ve been thinking (and talking) a lot recently about the fact that Facebook has such a bigger buy-in among American student activists than Twitter does, and I think that though Facebook has a lot of strengths, Clay raises a point here that activists ignore at their peril. Twitter is easy and open and shareable, and because of that, a campaign that takes off on Twitter can get really big really fast. If you want to reach beyond your circle, you need to be on Twitter.
I have to head out for a while, but I’ll pick this up later with my thoughts on the rest of the interview.
Slate has a short piece on last week’s small, uncomfortable College Republican convention. Highlights of the article:
- Phyllis Schlafly was a featured speaker, and Tim Pawlenty gave the keynote.
- None of the national offices and only one regional seat were contested.
- Only about two hundred people showed up.
- When Michael Steele spoke, the press was barred from the room.
- One attendee said the GOP is currently the “dead meat party,” and needs to reinvent itself as a “happy meal.”
Good times.
Update: Via Twitter, @echomikeromeo passes on a link to this longer, stronger Campus Progress report on the conference.
studentactivism.net 
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