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For the last three years, the first week of March has seen a national day of co-ordinated student action in support of accessible, democratic higher education.
The 2010 day of action came as the nation’s most active year of student protest in decades was in full swing. Building on the California protests and occupations of Fall 2009, March 4 saw more than 120 actions in thirty-three states, and drew a level of media attention that was, for its time, astonishing. A year and a half before Occupy Wall Street was launched, eleven months before the Wisconsin statehouse occupation began, #March4 was for many the first sign that something big and new was bubbling up from the campuses.
March 2, 2011 was a bit smaller than March 4, 2010, at least in part because of administrators’ success in quieting student protest in California the previous fall. But it did produce three campus occupations — again, this is well before Occupy Wall Street — including a feminist protest in Pennsylvania, a statehouse solidarity occupation in Wisconsin, and the audacious (and chilling) occupation of the ledge of a building on the Berkeley campus. A week later, high school students staged their first nationally co-ordinated day of protest in recent memory, and the momentum of the campus movement hasn’t subsided since.
So what can we expect to see tomorrow, in the first day of campus action of the OWS era? The Nation has a piece up offering a taste of what’s brewing, while the coordinating group Occupy Colleges lists 64 campuses that they expect to be acting up in one way or another. In California, March 1 is the kickoff of a planned week of action that’s slated to culminate in a state capitol occupation, and there’s a lot of other interesting stuff in the pipeline.
Tomorrow is going to be a very interesting day.
Evening Update | As I reported last week, there have been 37 campus occupations in the US and Canada so far this academic year. (That’s not protests, occupations.) It’s safe to say that number will be higher by Friday. Huffington Post also has a good overview of what’s in store (posted yesterday).
March 1 Morning Update | I’ll be liveblogging the day’s events here.
What you see below is the first step toward a comprehensive interactive map of all American campus occupations during the 2011-12 academic year. It’s not close to done — I’ve got a lot more data to add, for starters — but it’s a beginning.
Fall 2011 occupations are marked in yellow. Spring 2012 (most of which aren’t on the map yet) are in blue. Occupations that saw arrests or other police violence are in red.
Each marker contains at least one link to the occupiers’ blog/Twitter/Facebook info and/or to media coverage of the action. Click here for the full map with a complete explanation and chronological list of occupations.
If you have info about occupations not listed here, or more data about occupations that ARE listed, please share. Include links if you can.
In the universe’s latest variation on the “they call themselves that, so why can’t I?” idiocy, Reuters journalist Matthew Keys offers this take on the Jeremy Lin ESPN scandal:
“So we’re all just going to ignore the fact that Jeremy Lin used the word “Chink” in his Xanga username in 2004, right?
Just wanted to be clear, since, you know, we’re firing ESPN headline writers for being insensitive and criticizing ESPN anchors for using the word during play-by-play.
At what point do we draw the line between “acceptable use” and “unacceptable use?” Do we further divide people by saying it’s okay for some people to use the word, while barring others?
Or can we all agree that nobody should use these sorts of words, in any context?”
Here’s the thing that burns me up most about this tired, absurd claim: nobody would ever make it in any other situation. The reclamation of slurs is the only circumstance in which this argument is ever raised.
I’ve been known to refer to myself as an idiot on occasion. Does that make it okay for journalists to refer to me as “Angus Johnston, historian, blogger, and idiot?” No.
If an Olympic soccer player used the email address sexxxykutie3914@hotmail.com in junior high, would that make it legitimate for ESPN to mention her sexiness every time she scored a goal? Of course not.
The New York Times doesn’t call Senator Rand Paul “Aqua Buddha.” It doesn’t casually refer to Beck as a loser, Thom Yorke as a creep, or Prince as a sexy motherfucker (though it totally should).
Why? Because the “if you ever use a word to describe yourself, it gives everyone else on the planet the right to use that word to describe you in every situation ever for the rest of your life and you don’t ever get to complain” rule is a rule that doesn’t exist.
It’s not a rule. It’s not a rule. It’s not a rule. It’s not a thing. Everybody knows that. Nobody thinks otherwise. Nobody even pretends otherwise unless they’re trying to come up with a reason why it’s okay for them to call someone a chink or a faggot or a bitch.
This is totally off topic, but it’s burning up my Twitter feed and I just need to get it off my chest.
A bizarre video was recently posted to YouTube of Bishop Eddie Long being “crowned” at his church in a truly weird ritual. In the video, a “rabbi” named Ralph Messer wraps Long in what he describes as a 300-year-old “Holocaust scroll,” then drapes him in a shawl and hoists him in the air before declaring him a king.
It’s all very strange, not least because Long, the pastor of an Atlanta megachurch, was disgraced last year in a scandal involving his sexual relationships with at least four underage parishoners. (Long has been vocally anti-gay throughout his career, and the parishoners were male.)
There’s nothing that’s not creepy about the whole thing, and it’s been greeted with the mockery it deserves, but there’s one piece of the story that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention but should:
Rabbi Ralph Messer isn’t Jewish.
Messer is a proponent of so-called Messianic Judaism, a religious movement founded in the 1960s that wraps evangelical Christian theology in Jewish cultural trappings.
Put simply, it’s a Christian movement. Messer is a Christian minister.
And despite Messer’s claim to be acting “on behalf of the Jewish people and the land of Israel,” there’s nothing Jewish about the performance he put on at Long’s church. Neither the ritual nor the language of Messer’s act have any basis in Jewish traditions, while his repeated references to the divinity of Jesus and quotations from the Christian bible make his actual theology clear.
Also, the “priceless” Torah scroll Messer wraps Long in is almost certainly a fake. As you can see at 5:15 in the video, the thing is held together with scotch tape.
Oh, and one more tip for “Rabbi” Messer, if he’s reading this. The name of the Nazi concentration camp where you claim you found that scroll? It’s Auschwitz-Birkenau, not “Auschwitz and Birkendal.”
Update | A bible scholar lists 27 ways in which Messer’s performance misrepresented Jewish and Christian religious tradition.
Second Update | The “Messianic Judaism” movement repudiates Messer too: “Ralph Messer is not affiliated with the mainstream Messianic Jewish movement, nor is he a legitimately ordained Messianic Rabbi.” (More here and here.)
An obscure academic publishes a strange paper in a no-name journal. Scholars uniformly repudiate it as worthless. Some speculate that the author is mentally ill. But in the meantime the theory attracts huge attention online, and even makes it into some mainstream news outlets, lauded as a potentially earth-shaking discovery.
How does this happen?
University public relations departments.
The academic in question is biochemist Erik Andrulis, and the paper is called “Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life.” It was published in the premiere issue of a minor new journal called Life last week, and if that had been all the exposure it received, it likely would have sunk without a trace.
But Andrulis is an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University, and six days ago the CWRU public relations department issued a press release declaring that the paper presented a “revolutionary … transdisciplinary theory” with the potential to “catalyze a veritable renaissance.” Andrulis, they said, “resolv[es] long-standing paradoxes and puzzles in chemistry and biology, … unifies quantum and celestial mechanics,” and “confirms the proposed existence of eight laws of nature.”
In actuality, Andrulis has done none of those things. Respected biologist and science writer PZ Myers, for instance, describes the paper as “unreadable, incoherent, bizarre, and completely lacking in evidence or mathematical support.”
But a university press release is a university press release, and most people who read them have none of Myers’ ability to tell good science from bad, so the CWRU announcement was quickly picked up by various sites. Indeed, a number of science news aggregators simply stripped the original attributions, slapped on their own bylines, and published the press release itself as news.
As the extent of the paper’s problems became known, CWRU pulled the press release from their site, and a growing number of Life editors tendered their resignations, but by then the paper was out in the world.
In this particular case, the flaws of the original paper were so extreme and so obvious that the story didn’t make it too far before the backlash began. Today, much of the discussion around Andrulis consists of debates as to whether he has committed a hoax or is suffering from mental illness. (PZ Myers tends toward the second explanation, describing the event as “a developing personal tragedy” and expressing the hope that Andrulis “gets the care he clearly needs.”)
But most bad research isn’t anywhere near this bad, and so most press-release-driven journalism never gets properly debunked. I’ve written a bunch of posts about bad academic research on students, and in almost every instance my attention was drawn to the shoddy work by breathless media coverage of somebody’s overheated press release.
studentactivism.net 
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