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A little while ago I linked to a piece by Malcolm Harris on what he calls the “generational war” being waged against American youth. Harris’s argument has been criticized from the left by a blogger named Freddie DeBoer who writes that he’s “using the language of revolution to justify what is, at its essence, a dispute among the ruling class,” making “a case that is simply antithetical to the left-wing project: the notion that recent college graduates are the dispossessed.”
College is, DeBoer writes, the province of the elite:
Less than a third of Americans has a bachelor’s degree. The racial college achievement gap is large, and it’s not shrinking; it’s growing. Social class is extremely determinative of access to college education. From 1970 to 2006, those from the highest income quartile had a better than 70 percent change of holding a college degree. Those in the lowest quartile? 10 percent.
This is an important argument, and so it’s important to point out that DeBoer gets it wrong.
Yes, the white and the wealthy are more likely to attend college than the black (and Latino) and the poor. That’s true. But it’s less true than it’s been in the past, not more. Just look at the numbers:
In 1975, 64.5% of high income Americans who graduated from high school went on directly to college, while 34.8% of low income high school graduates did, a ratio of 1.9 to 1. A wealthy student, in other words, was nearly twice as likely as a poor one to go immediately to college, even if they both graduated from high school. By 2009, that ratio had dropped to 1.5 to 1. (The gap in high school graduation rates by income has remained largely constant during the same period.)
Comparing educational outcomes by race shows similar results. In 1970, a white American 25 or older was 2.6 times as likely than a black American in the same age group to have a college degree. Today, that ratio is 1.5 to 1. When whites and Latinos are compared the gap has narrowed more slowly — from 2.5 to 1 in 1970 to 2.2 to 1 in 2010 — but again, the trend is positive.
(And though DeBoer doesn’t discuss gender, it’s worth pointing out how much things have changed there too — in 1960, men earned almost two-thirds of bachelor’s degrees and ninety percent of doctorates. By 2009, women were earning 58% of all degrees granted in the United States, and more than half of doctorates.)
There are still racial and economic barriers to higher education, of course, and the issues that Harris identified are prominent among them. But DeBoer’s characterization of college students as white and privileged ignores major changes that have taken place in the demographics higher education in recent decades, perpetuating the tired stereotype of student activists as coddled whiners.
The American student body does not reflect the nation as a whole, not yet. But it comes closer to doing so than it ever has in the past, and the folks in Occupy who are fighting for higher education access and student debt relief are fighting to bring it even closer.
Running around today, but wanted to at least quickly follow up on the student protests in Sacramento and Albany yesterday.
The New York Times has a good overview of the Albany action. Excerpt:
About 300 students, most of them from public universities in New York, rattled the Capitol on Monday with an outburst of loud protests, in the gallery of the Senate Chamber and outside the governor’s office.
The students, part of a statewide coalition of campus organizations called New York Students Rising, were objecting to the tuition hikes that were approved last year under a measure that permits public universities in New York to increase tuition by up to 5 percent per year over the next five years. The research universities at Albany, Buffalo, Binghamton and Stony Brook are permitted an additional 3 percent tuition increase each year.
The bill also allows the universities to form partnerships with private corporations for development, a change that Alexi Shalom, a student atHunter College, said he feared would bring for-profit enterprises into the public universities.
“It’s a public university,” he said. “It’s supposed to be funded by tax dollars. We oppose corporations and big business being involved in our education.”
New York Students Rising, who mounted the protest, put together an exhaustive media roundup.
For Sacramento, Occupy Education CA had a liveblog and the Berkeley Daily Cal had a solid writeup:
As California Highway Patrol officers stood guard at the entrance of the state Capitol building’s rotunda Monday afternoon, protesters inside the building kicked off a 7-hour occupation that resulted in at least 72 arrests.
The occupation followed a rally on the Capitol building’s steps in which thousands of protesters from across the state called for lawmakers to end the recent trend of decreased funding to the state’s public higher education systems.
Feel free to add links to additional coverage and analysis in comments.
A mere 12 hours before it was due to be released online, the official UC Davis report on last November’s pepper-spray incident has been pulled indefinitely as a result of threatened legal action by the UCD police department.
The report, commissioned by UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi in November and originally slated for a December release, had already been delayed multiple times. Police had previously refused to allow investigators access to Davis police chief Annette Spicuzza or either of the two officers who sprayed the activists.
According to the Associated Press, “the officers involved in the Nov. 18 incident where 10 protesters were pepper-sprayed don’t want their names and confidential information they told investigators” released, and planed a morning filing for a Temporary Restraining Order.
Former California Supreme Court Associate Justice Cruz Reynoso, head of the investigating committee, said that the report’s release was being delayed on the advice of university lawyers. He added, however, that he remained “undeterred in my commitment to release the complete and unredacted work of the Task Force, a view shared by President Yudof.” Yudof himself said that “the entire UC Davis community deserves a fully transparent and unexpurgated accounting of the incidents in question,” and that he had “asked the UC General Counsel’s office to do everything in its power in court to turn back this attempt to stifle these reports.”
Yesterday’s national action was the largest such day of coordinated campus protest since the Occupy Wall Street movement went viral last fall. But it was also the third early-March day of action to emerge from the national student movement that began with Occupy California two years earlier.
Occupy Wall Street has given the American student movement a boost, certainly. But in doing so it is merely returning a favor.
Yesterday student activists took to the Brooklyn Bridge in New York like Occupy Wall Street. They congregated in the park that was until recently home to Occupy Oakland, and marched from there to Morgan Stanley offices in San Francisco. They erected tents at UC Santa Cruz, and hung banners in the Massachusetts statehouse like last spring’s proto-OWS anti-Walker occupiers did in Madison. But they also took over administrators’ offices at DePaul University in Illinois and at UC San Diego. They also rallied for increased library hours at Harvard. They also held teach-ins at Ohio State, teach-outs at Berkeley, and a mock telethon for student debt at SUNY Buffalo.
And yesterday was no stand-alone event. Activists used Oakland’s Oscar Grant Plaza as the kickoff point for a 99-mile march to Sacramento, planning to arrive in time for a Monday occupation of the state capitol. That same day, students throughout New York will be descending on Albany for their own day of action.
#M1 has been described as a kickoff for the new semester, though there have been at least a dozen major campus actions in the US since January. It has been described as a reflection of an OWS “shift to the universities,” though OWS is as much the child of recent student activism as its parent. In reality, it was neither of those things. It was something quite different, and far more interesting.
It was just another day.
It’s four o’clock in the afternoon (ET), I’m back from teaching, and I’m picking up my liveblog of today’s national day of student action where I left off two hours ago. So far today we’ve seen one campus (UC Santa Cruz) essentially shut down by student protest, significant citywide marches several places, students rallying inside the Massachusetts statehouse, and other actions of various kinds at dozens of campuses from coast to coast.
The day is young, and there’s clearly a lot more to come. Stay tuned.
Friday Update: I’ve put together a summary/synthesis post on the day’s events here.
• • •
11:00 pm | That’ll do it for me for tonight. More thoughts tomorrow.
9:54 pm | UC Santa Cruz activists have re-opened one of the two UCSC entrances to vehicular traffic.
9:43 pm | Some of the Berkeley/Oakland activists have been occupying a state building in San Francisco. They’re currently being removed from the building, issued citations, and released.
9:34 pm | The DePaul occupation has ended, with the occupiers regrouping for new actions tomorrow.
8:38 pm | Having dinner. DePaul occupation still ongoing, reports of occupation of chancellor’s office at UC San Diego. More in a bit.
7:31 pm | Reports coming in of police presence at the DePaul occupation. Situation still unclear, but one tweeter says the occupation was “partially broken up by cops.”
7:22 pm | Two big non-#M1 campus stories today. In Arizona, a state legislator withdrew his proposal to require (nearly) all students to pay at least $2000 a year in tuition out-of-pocket, regardless of financial need. And in Virginia, more than a dozen UVA students ended a 13-day hunger strike after the university administration acceded to many of their living wage demands.
6:58 pm | There’s now a livestream of the Berkeley/Oakland demonstration out front of the Morgan Stanley offices.
6:44 pm | Tweet from inside the DePaul occupation: “We’re staying. Come to 55 e jackson right away-we need your support!!!!”
6:37 pm | The Oakland marchers who aren’t going to Sacramento are heading to Morgan Stanley.
6:30 pm | The Student Labor Action Project is in the early stages of compiling a photo album of today’s actions. Check it out.
6:28 pm | Marchers are setting out from Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland, heading for … Sacramento, 99 miles away. Background here.
6:13 pm | DePaul admin building occupation is settling in. Occupier reports that they “just voted unanimously to stay in this room until we get a date and time for a public forum with the entire student body.” He says there are about 45 people there at the moment, and that the university’s president met with them, rejected their demands, and left.
6:09 pm |Via Twitter comes word of a Seattle march on the Gates Foundation headquarters. That’s the seventh city march (along with NYC, Philly, Boston, Oakland/Berkeley, DC, Montgomery) I’ve learned of today.
6:05 pm | The DC marchers delivered a statement of grievances and demands to an official at the Department of Education, who promised a response by a week from tomorrow. That action is apparently now over for the day.
5:49 pm | Students and supporters from around the Bay area have congregated in Oscar Grant Park, the longtime home of the Occupy Oakland encampment.
5:22 pm | We apparently have our first campus occupation of the afternoon. According to tweeter Brad Hamilton (who posted a photo), students at DePaul University in Chicago have occupied administrative offices there, demanding a tuition freeze at the Catholic institution.
5:01 pm | Actions today aren’t confined to the campuses and regions you’d expect, as this photo of a sizable rally at the Alabama state capitol demonstrates.
4:58 pm | Six tents and the shell of a geodesic dome are up on the UCSC campus, but it’s not clear whether an occupation is planned.
4:42 pm | DC marchers have arrived at the Department of Education, where they have been denied entry by police.
4:37 pm | Bad weather appears to have depressed turnout on both coasts earlier today, but rain seems to be ending both in Northern California and the NYC area at this hour.
4:33 pm | UC Santa Cruz remains almost entirely shut down as a result of students’ blockade of the campus’s two entrances. A motorist who drove through a crowd of protesters earlier today was “briefly detained” but apparently not arrested.
4:30 pm | Bay area march now heading from Berkeley to Oakland. Students who had been at the Boston state capitol are marching to Harvard.
4:25 pm | The American Association of University Professors has been tweeting about #M1 events all day, mentioning chapter support for actions at Hofstra, the U of Akron, Indiana U, Stetson U, Lincoln U, Delaware State, Marymount Manhattan, Bowie State, the U of Delaware, St. Catherine U, and the U of Rhode Island.
4:21 pm | Tweet of the afternoon, from San Francisco State: “Stuck in class and can’t walkout? Tweet out and #occupysfsu will come save you.”
4:18 pm | The Washington DC action is currently outside the offices of student loan corporation Sallie Mae. The founder of http://occupystudentdebt.com/ is speaking to the crowd.
4:15 pm | The New York City march has been on the move for several hours. Size is estimated at several hundred.
4:06 pm | In addition to the Boston march which has ended in the statehouse, there are citywide marches confirmed in New York, Philadelphia, the Bay area, and Washington DC so far.
4:02 pm | Students are inside the Massachusetts state capitol in Boston, hanging banners.
studentactivism.net 
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