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Every year the delegates to the United States Student Association’s National Student Congress must approve the Association’s campaigns for the year — establishing priorities for what the group will work on between then and the next Congress. Voter work and federal higher ed policy are locked in as perennials by USSA’s governing documents, but everything else is up for grabs.
This year seven of thirteen proposed campaigns made it through the delegates’ first round of vetting, but in the second round attention quickly focused on just three. Two of them — student loan forgiveness and support for the DREAM Act — had been approved unanimously in the first round, and drew little criticism in the second.
The third, “Legislating Shared Governance,” was where things got interesting.
Crafted by activists from Wisconsin, a state where students have a statutory right to participate in college governance, the proposal called on the Association to craft a national analysis of “campus and statewide conditions of student rights … abuses of student rights … and prospects for reform.” It further directed USSA to devote resources to defending and expanding students’ rights in campus governance, to create organizing materials and conference workshops in aid of such campaigns, to support legal action by students in defense of their rights, and finally to
“through its member campuses and statewide student associations, conduct a campus, statewide, and national grassroots and lobbying campaign to ensure state legislatures and university administrations codify these rights in state law and university policy.”
In the second round of debate a motion was made to select the DREAM Act and loan forgiveness plans — and only them — as USSA campaigns for the coming year. The shared governance proposal was offered and rejected as a third campaign in an amendment to that motion, but as debate continued it became clear that the DREAM/loan-forgiveness combo couldn’t win the plenary’s support without it.
And so, after several hours of debate and more than a few off-the-floor negotiating sessions, the amendment was offered again, and accepted.
Why was there so much disagreement? Mostly, I think, because while USSA’s officers and staff do a lot of non-electoral organizing work (and training), the Association’s official campaigns have in recent years primarily been federal legislative advocacy projects, and this isn’t that.
But as folks from Occupy to the DREAMers to USSA’s own partner the Student Labor Action Project (SLAP) have been demonstrating in recent months, there’s a lot happening around youth and student organizing right now that’s only peripherally (if at all) connected to legislative lobbying. This is a movement moment, and it’s going to be fascinating to see what USSA makes of it in the coming year.
The summer lull in this year’s Quebec student protests is coming to a close, and the next few weeks are likely to be crucial ones for the future of the movement.
To recap: Quebec’s ruling Liberal Party announced plans for multi-year tuition hikes last February, prompting students to walk out of classes throughout the provinces. Those walkouts quickly developed into ongoing student strikes, with many campuses closing entirely after student strike votes at general assemblies. College administrators generally respected the strikes, even — in some cases — refusing to comply with court orders that their campuses be reopened. Suddenly the red square, symbol of the movement, was everywhere.
In mid-May the government brought forward a proposal to end the strike, but it offered only minimal concessions and its plan was overwhelmingly rejected in a series of campus votes. After that debacle the Liberal Party put forward Bill 78, a law that criminalized much protest in the region and imposed stiff penalties on student organizations that supported campus closures. Bowing to the reality of widespread campus closures, Bill 78 suspended the spring semester at colleges shuttered by the strike, mandating that they resume meeting in mid-August. (The law passed on a party-line vote after a hectic marathon session.)
Defiance of Bill 78 was widespread, and its provisions have generally not yet been implemented. Hundreds of thousands of Quebecois took to the streets in the aftermath of its passage, and protests have continued throughout the summer on a somewhat smaller scale.
That’s what’s happened. Here’s what’s coming:
Rumors have been swirling for months that Quebec’s ruling Liberal Party will announce on August 1 that they will be holding provincial elections on September 4, and news reporting is increasingly treating a Wednesday announcement as a done deal. Polling has been sparse so far, but the most recent data show the LP and the Parti Quebecois virtually deadlocked, with one poll aggregator showing the LP likely to win some 60 seats in the new legislature — a six-seat loss from their current standing, and a decline large enough to rob them of their current majority in the 125-seat body.
But the situation could change dramatically between now and the election, particularly since Bill 78 mandates that the province’s striking colleges re-open their doors on August 17. A student lawsuit to block implementation of the Bill was rejected earlier this month, but another challenge is still pending — this one from professors who say the government does not have the right to unilaterally impose a new teaching schedule on them.
Mark your calendars: This year, campus activism for the new academic year starts in Quebec, and it’s starting early.
Mario Savio. Because Mario Savio.
I’ve just arrived in Madison, Wisconsin for the 65th annual congress of the United States Student Association.
USSA, a confederation of student governments and state student associations, is the oldest and largest student-run national student organization in the country. Founded (as the US National Student Association) right here in Madison in the aftermath of World War II, USSA has since 1960 been based in Washington DC, working as a political advocacy organization as well as a grassroots organizing group.
I served on the USSA board of directors for two years as an undergrad, and a short internal history of NSA/USSA that I wrote then was (if I’m remembering the chronology right) the first piece of real historical writing I ever did. USSA shaped me as an activist, and it’s a big part of why I became a historian.
Occasionally over the years, and more regularly recently, USSA has invited me to come out to Congress to lend a hand. So I’ll be here for the next six days, holding a workshop on student history, leading a tour of the organization’s archives at the Wisconsin Historical Society, and helping out with chairing plenary sessions. If you’re here at the conference, come say hi. If not, stay tuned for more — I’ll be writing and tweeting (at hashtag #NSC12) a fair amount, I suspect.
Update | Much more about Derrick Bell.
• • •
Video has surfaced from a speech President Obama gave at a campus rally in 1990, the first of a series of videos that conservative activist Andrew Breitbart claimed would reveal the president’s true radicalism to the American people.
Only a little over a minute of the speech has appeared so far, but Breitbart’s website promises “additional footage that has been hidden by Obama’s allies in the mainstream media and academia” is yet to come.
In today’s video, Obama — then a 29-year-old Harvard law student — is seen introducing Harvard professor Derrick Bell, who had taken an unpaid leave from the law school to protest the absence of women of color from its tenured faculty ranks. Bell, who had been a prominent civil rights lawyer in the 1960s, was the school’s first black tenured professor and a prominent scholar in the field of critical race theory.
Here’s the clip, followed by a transcript and a bit more background.
Obama:
“And I remember that the black law students had organized an orientation for the first year students. And one of the persons who spoke at that orientation was Professor Bell. And I remember him sauntering up to the front, and not giving us a lecture but engaging us in a conversation. And speaking the truth, and telling us that he [cut] to learn of this place that I’ve carried with me ever since. Now how did this one man do all this? How has he accomplished all this? He hasn’t done it simply by his good looks and easy charm, although he has both in ample measure. He hasn’t done it simply because of the excellence of his scholarship, although his scholarship has opened up new vistas and new horizons, and changed the standards of what legal writing is about. [cut] Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell.”
In a February 9 speech Breitbart, who died unexpectedly on March 1, said that he was going to “vet” the president with videos “from his college days to show you why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008. The videos are going to come out, the narrative is going to come out.”
After alluding to Obama’s relationship with “silver ponytails” like former Weather Underground leaders Bernardine Dorhn and Bill Ayers, Breitbart said that when Obama was at Harvard “he was advocating for the worst of the worst to join the faculty. Radicals. Radicals at Beiruit on the Charles.” (If Breitbart’s “worst of the worst” reference was to Professor Bell, he was taking some liberties with the timeline — Bell was hired by Harvard in 1969, when Obama was seven years old. He was tenured there in 1971, left in 1980, and returned in 1986, two years before Obama enrolled.)
All should be revealed soon, however, as the Breitbart people say they’ll play the “full tape” on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show tonight. I’ll be watching, and I’ll update this post if anything interesting turns up.
Update | PBS’s Frontline website has posted what it says is the “full archived tape” of the speech as recorded and edited by local affiliate WBGH in 1990. Though no additional portions of Obama’s speech appear on that tape, which consists of 4-minute report on Bell’s withdrawal from teaching and an additional seven minutes of raw clips from the protest, Frontline says “no other footage of the event exists at WGBH.” Excerpts from the tape appeared in a Frontline documentary on Obama in 2008, and have been available online ever since.
Second Update | The Breitbart site has posted its first purported evidence of what they call Bell’s “radical … bizarre … racialist, antisemitic” views, a short story he wrote called “Space Traders.” (You can read that story and judge it for yourself here.) Unfortunately for their attempt to tar Obama with the contents of that story, however, it was published in October 1993, some three years after Obama’s Harvard speech.
Third Update | One amusing moment from the WBGH tape: Professor Bell is seen at 8:52 noting that while he himself relied on a written outline for his address, “the student” — future president Obama — “delivered a mighty address without notes.” Given Breitbart’s fondness for making teleprompter jokes at Obama’s expense, that one’s got to sting a little.
Fourth Update | Unsurprisingly, the Breitbart gloss on Bell’s short story, “Space Traders,” as antisemitic is unwarranted. In the story, a sci-fi allegory which imagines space aliens offering the United States untold wealth in exchange for its black citizenry, a group of Jews object to the trade. The Breitbart site quotes an op-ed by a federal judge as saying that in the story, the Jews are motivated not by “empathy from another group that has suffered oppression” but “instead” by fear “that ‘in the absence of blacks, Jews could become the scapegoats.'”
But this is a tendentious misreading of Bell, who describes the Jewish leaders as denouncing “America’s version of the Final Solution to its race problem” and promising to disrupt it by ” all possible nonviolent means” if necessary, including by hiding black families in their own homes “until the nation returns to its senses.” Jewish concern that they could become scapegoats should blacks disappear is offered by Bell as an additional fear, not as a true, duplicitous motivation, and it is a fear that Bell presents as justified in “a system so reliant on an identifiable group on whose heads less-well-off whites can discharge their hate and frustrations for societal disabilities about which they are unwilling to confront their leaders.”
Great writing? Maybe not. Subtle writing? Probably not. But antisemitic? Not that either.
Fifth Update | Okay, I watched Hannity. They found a two-second clip of Obama hugging Bell after introducing him at the rally, and a clip of Harvard professor Charles Ogletree joking that he hid that clip from the media during the 2008 campaign. That’s it. That’s the whole thing that they have.
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