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Ten years ago yesterday I was at the same place I was twenty years ago — on the Binghamton University campus in upstate New York. (In 1991 I was a student, in 2001 I was advising a statewide student organization.)
I woke up in Albany on the morning of September 11, and drove on empty highways to Binghamton for a scheduled meeting, listening to reports of the attacks on the radio. A few days later I wrote this summary of what I found when I arrived:
Binghamton was surprisingly subdued — much calmer than I’d seen it when the Gulf War started in January 1991. Lots more people have cable in their dorms now than did then, though, so I expect most of the students who were really worried were in their rooms by the phone.
In 1991, if you wanted to keep up with a breaking news story on a college campus, you usually had to go to the student union and gather around a communal television. In 2001 if you wanted to keep in touch with family you needed to stay in your dorm room.
Ten years ago, twenty years ago. No Facebook, no Twitter. Today you can sit on a couch in the union surrounded by dozens of your fellow students while you hear your parents’ voices from a hundred miles away and read what your friends are doing on their couches in their unions all over the country. All at the same time. You don’t have to choose between connecting with a global experience and your local community and your far-flung networks of loved ones. You used to have to choose, but you don’t anymore.
I wrote a few weeks ago about how impoverished the Beloit College “mindset list” is, how trivial and how silly. But it’s not just in matters of educational policy and campus politics that the list missed the mark. The American campus, and the American student experience, is changing in all sorts of ways, in ways it’s easy for both students and faculty to miss.
Technology doesn’t shatter community, it transforms it.
When I left off my report on the 2011 National Student Congress of the United States Student Association, students were walking out of the plenary. I’ll pick back up there…
The Association had just passed an amendment to its constitution giving every member State Student Association a seat on the USSA board of directors. The idea behind the amendment was that it would encourage SSA’s to join (and stay), help strengthen the SSA movement throughout the country, and maybe even lead to the growth of new State Student Associations in states where they don’t exist. On the premise that strong SSAs mean strong student governments (and vice versa), it was expected that the change could even help USSA expand its campus membership.
Not everybody saw it that way.
Some folks from states without SSAs viewed the move as a way of consolidating organizational power in the hands of the states that are already well-represented in the Association. There were even a few SSA representatives who opposed it, on the grounds that their SSAs — lacking the funds to send students to board meetings — would themselves be closed out of the new structure.
A solid supermajority of delegates to the Congress supported the SSA amendment — it garnered the votes of about three quarters of the delegates on the floor — but passage rankled a significant minority, some of whom were already perturbed by other developments. And so, with the body in recess, a sizable handful of delegates walked out.
When the plenary came back from recess and the vote was formally announced, vice presidential candidate Tiffany Loftin moved to reconsider the amendment in order to allow for continued discussion. That motion passed easily, and the body then continued on with the agenda. The number of students who had walked out wasn’t large, nor was the number who had followed them to try to sort things out, so quorum wasn’t a problem.
Soon it was time for dinner, though, and so the students went into recess again. When they came back, the students who had walked out — some of whom were, uncomfortably, from the Congress’s host campus — were still discussing the situation among themselves. An informal decision was reached by USSA leadership to see if some accommodation could be reached.
Discussions continued, in various configurations. Some of those who walked out met with USSA officers. Others met with sponsors of the SSA proposal. Meetings were held, formal and informal. And the non-protesting majority of the plenary just hung out and waited.
It was really quite extraordinary. The walkout had been small, and the position of the Congress majority had been clear and decisive. There was very little information available about what was being discussed, or what was likely to result. And yet the students just hung out, trusting the process, more than willing to cool their heels in the hope that some sort of consensus would emerge that would allow everyone to go forward as friends and allies.
In the end, they waited for more than six hours.
They chatted. They read the upcoming resolutions. They worked on their presentations for their various already-submitted proposals, and drafted new ones. They taught each other games. They hooked up the arena’s sound system to YouTube and taught each other line dances. A LOT of line dances.
And then, shortly before midnight, the walkers-out returned. A few short speeches were made, and everyone got back to work. The SSA amendment was re-introduced, with a few proposed changes. Two were approved easily, but a third — which would have given every state with a member campus its own board seat — was rejected decisively.
At that, one of the campuses which had walked out before walked out again. A couple of people urged them to stay, but most of the delegates seemed willing to let them make their own decision. They weren’t happy to see them go, but they weren’t going to chase them, either. They’d made their case, the body had considered their proposals, and if the compromise that had been arrived at wasn’t a compromise they could live with, then so be it. After the walkout, the SSA amendment passed a second and final time.
The plenary kept going after that, until something like 3:30 in the morning. (They’d have likely kept at it for longer, but the university told USSA that they had to leave the building by four.) And then, as before, the most startling fact of the gathering was its lack of ill-feeling.
This was a group which had gathered at nine in the morning, ready to work. It had faced delay after delay — by the time the plenary shut down for the night, it had worked for a total of eight hours, and waited to work for a total of ten and a half. And yet there was almost no grumpiness during the waits, almost no snippiness during the debates. Folks were there to work, there to work together, and so that’s what they did.
Next up: Plenary, Day Two.
The 2011 National Student Congress of the United States Student Association is winding down today — as I type this, the group’s newly elected 2011-12 Board of Directors is meeting for the first time. It’s been a whirlwind of a conference, so I haven’t had the chance to update as much as I’d have liked, but I’ll be compiling a full report here over the next few days.
The conference began with a couple of days of speeches and workshops and meetings. The Congress site was Florida A&M University, the first historically black college or university (HBCU) ever to host a USSA annual meeting, and they were wonderful hosts — it’s a hell of a campus, and a hell of a student body. If you’re ever down here, be sure to stop by their archives — it’s one of the best-curated university galleries I’ve ever visited, as well as being a gem of a small museum of the history of race and racism in the United States.
Nothing huge broke in the first few days of the Congress. No huge drama, no dramatic developments. The association’s sitting vice president, Victor Sanchez, drew one competitor in his race for USSA President, while National People of Color Student Coalition chair Tiffany Dena Loftin was unopposed for the vice presidency.
The Congress was looking like a quiet one as Monday broke, but Monday — plenary day — turned out to be a doozy.
The plenary was scheduled to begin at nine in the morning in the FAMU basketball stadium. Students entered down a long stairway past row after row of deeply raked seats, taking their positions on the parquet of the stadium’s center court. Technical glitches delayed the start of the session for a couple of hours, but spirits remained good as the group started work, held a brief session, and then boarded buses for a barbeque lunch, step show, and rousing speech by a Wisconsin union leader on that state’s recent student-labor uprising.
The group reconvened early in the afternoon, making its way through the agenda to the first contentious issue — a constitutional amendment altering the makeup of the USSA Board of Directors.
USSA’s board is based on a hybrid structure combining regional representatives and identity-based caucuses representing various student constituencies. Monday’s amendment proposed adding a designated seat for each member State Student Association, giving those organizations — which, along with USSA’s campus chapters, make up the Association’s membership — a direct role in the group’s governance for the first time.
In the eyes of the proposal’s authors, the change was intended to strengthen USSA’s relationship with its member SSAs, to encourage non-member SSAs to join, to foster the development of SSAs in states where none exist. To some opponents, though, it represented a power grab by already powerful factions within the Association.
The proposal was brought up Monday afternoon, and passed by a comfortable margin. After the vote was completed, but before it was announced, the body went into recess for fifteen minutes. During that time some simmering frustrations bubbled over, and several delegations who had opposed the amendment walked out of the meeting.
…and my flight has just been called. More soon.
Two survivors of yesterday’s massacre at Utoya have written blogposts describing their experiences.
One post comes from Prableen Kaur, the head of the Worker’s Youth League in Grorud, a district in Oslo. Her post has been verified by, and republished in, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten.
The other was written by Khamshajiny Gunaratnam, a 23-year-old youth activist, whose identity and authorship of her blogpost was confirmed by the newspaper Dagbladet.
Kaur and are apparently close friends — each makes references in their post that seem to refer to the other.
I’m not going to quote at length from either of the posts — if you decide to click through, be aware that they describe harrowing scenes of violence in some detail. (Be aware as well that the links above are to Google automatic translations of the posts, which were written in Norwegian.) But I do want to repost something that Gunaratnam said near the end of her entry:
“I’m still in shock. And that is why I write this note. I can not bear to tell the story over and over again. … We continuously hear who was shot, etc. I have omitted that. It is degrading to the relatives. They deserve better.
“We deserve not to die. And that is also why I write this note. We are just normal teenagers. We are engaged in politics. We will make the world a better place.”
News is still spotty, and early reports from an event like this should always be taken skeptically, but the basic outlines of the story appear to be these:
A gunman disguised as a policeman opened fire earlier today at a camp for young activists affiliated with Norway’s Labor Party, a center-left party which is the leading member of Norway’s governing coalition. The campers, who were apparently on an organizing retreat, were in their mid-teens, and reports suggest that as many as a dozen — and perhaps many more — have been killed.
Initial claims as to the identity of the shooter have been confused and contradictory.
Update | Police have released new details on the Utoya massacre, and now say at least eighty people have died there. A white Norwegian with reported ties to far-right groups is in custody, as officials attempt to determine whether he had accomplices in the attacks.
studentactivism.net 
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