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So last night I wandered down to Occupy Wall Street for the second time. I’d visited the night before, and been impressed — impressed by the richness of the space, impressed by the process and enthusiasm of the general assembly. I wasn’t (and I’m still not) sure what it all adds up to, but I found it invigorating and compelling. So I went back.
I spent some time strolling around, talking to people and checking out what was happening. I ate some free food. I sat in on a workshop on building democratic structures in progressive organizations. I compared notes with a couple of friends who were there.
And then the general assembly got started. The evening GA is a decision-making meeting, but it’s also a place where lots of announcements get made — OWS has a lot of working groups on issues ranging from first aid to legal support to action planning, and the GA is where they all check in. I’d sat through all those announcements the previous night, and been mostly fascinated, but it was less compelling the second time through and the pavement was cold and hard, so after a while I figured I’d stretch my legs a bit and circle back in time for the meat of the meeting.
So I took a stroll through the neighborhood, and wound up at a deli that was open and had comfortable seating in the front. I bought a beer for a couple of bucks and sat down to check my email and read a few pages of the book I’d brought.
There was a young woman at the register, paying for a soda and chatting with the counter guy about the Occupy Wall Street protests — she worked in the neighborhood and was on her way to check them out for the first time. I didn’t catch much of what she said, but when the counter guy made a comment about Eisenhower, I listened … and tweeted:
@studentactivism: Counterman at a deli 3 blocks from #OccupyWallStreet just quoted Ike’s warning on the military industrial complex.
“And Eisenhower was a general.” I remember the guy saying. “A general.”
A few minutes later I tweeted this:
@studentactivism: “The government has become the puppet of the big corporations.” -The same deli guy. #OccupyWallStreet
And this:
@studentactivism: #OccupyWallStreet. It’s not just for dirty hippies anymore.
And this:
@studentactivism: “Ordinary folks are getting dicked.” -Same deli guy #OccupyWallStreet
I was tweeting all this, by the way, not because it struck me as strange, but because it struck me as so ordinary — while at the same time so at odds with dominant narratives of the Occupy Wall Street protests. (And not just those in the big media, those in the look-down-your-nose left, too.) New York City is a left-liberal city. It’s a city that went for Obama over McCain by an 85-15 margin. It’s a city whose majority white districts went for Obama 2-to-1. It’s a city where what passes for reactionary is Staten Island, where Obama took 47% of the vote. To hear this middle-aged white guy saying this stuff didn’t surprise me at all.
But I kept listening.
@studentactivism: “I buy you a beer today, you buy me a beer tomorrow. That’s the only way it’s gonna work.” -The OTHER deli guy #OccupyWallStreet
The other guy behind the counter was younger, and black. The woman who’d started the conversation had long since moved on, but a couple of regulars had taken up positions with their own beers at a table in front and the discussion was rolling on.
@studentactivism: Now the black deli guy is holding forth on the need for cross-racial class solidarity. #OccupyWallStreet #NotJoking
I wish I’d transcribed more of this, but by the time I thought to try to write down what I hadn’t tweeted, most of it was gone. I do remember him saying “some guys are all ‘The niggers! The spics!’ But niggers contribute to the economy too. Faggots too.”
He repeated the bit about faggots for emphasis, looking around, kind of hoping that someone would say something he could correct. But by now the four of them were all enthusiastically agreeing to everything, egging each other on.
@studentactivism: Black deli guy: “Everybody said ‘Obama’s gonna get shot.’ Nah. He plays the game.” #OccupyWallStreet
This was, I think, in response to the white deli guy saying that no American president in half a century had ever taken the interests of ordinary people seriously.
I’d bought a second beer at some point along the way, but by now it was kicked. As I was about to head out, I piped up for the first time. “You guys are killing me,” I said. The white counter guy grinned. ” I thought the meeting was up there,” I said, pointing in the vague direction of the plaza.
@studentactivism: Me: “I thought the meeting was up there.” Deli guy: “We’ve been saying this for 30 years.” #OccupyWallStreet
We talked for a few minutes more. None of the four of them had been up to the protest, it sounded like, at least not to do more than walk by and check it out on the fly, so I shared some of my impressions. We did the enthusiastically-agreeing-with-each-other bonding thing for a few minutes. We all agreed that the protest was a lovely development. Then one of the guys sitting at the front table said “But what’s their plan?”
I said I’d gotten the impression that people there had a lot of different ideas about what needed to be done, and that I wasn’t sure they were all going to agree on an agenda for change anytime soon. Then I said that I wasn’t sure that was a bad thing.
I said it seemed like pretty much everyone there basically agreed on certain basic principles — that something was seriously broken in the American economy, that something was seriously broken in American politics, and that an accelerating concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small minority was at the root of most of of that brokenness. People differed on how to address that problem, I said, but they all pretty much agreed about what the problem was, that it needed to be tackled, and that it wasn’t really being tackled now.
I was struck by the “what’s their plan” question in a few ways. First because it was the first even vaguely critical comment about OWS I’d heard in the whole discussion — for half an hour these guys had been been talking about and around the protests, and everything they’d said was emphatically positive. Second because it wasn’t asked in a spirit of attack but a spirit of curiosity, and maybe gentle prodding — a central premise of the conversation I’d snooped on was that there’s no obvious fix for what’s gone wrong. For many on the chattering left “what’s their plan” is the rhetorical leadup to a dismissal, as if it’s the job of five hundred strangers in a park to come up with a concrete step-by-step proposal for reforming (or overthrowing) global capitalism. But here it wasn’t that. Here it was a real question: “What can be done?”
If Occupy Wall Street is as marginal as its liberal-left critics assume, then no answer to the guy at the table’s question would make any sense at all. Five hundred strangers in a park will never themselves be the engines of any profound societal transformation. But if what I saw last night is real, if OWS is offering a critique that resonates in content — if not necessarily in form — with a broader and more eclectic swath of the country, then maybe those five hundred strangers are pounding on a door that’s a bit less well-armored than it looks.
Maybe what they have to offer isn’t a plan so much as an opportunity to have a bigger conversation, or even just an invitation to continue and expand a conversation that’s been going on in small ways in small places for a long time.
And that’s a conversation I’m really eager to see continue.
Last night a group of at least fifty Greek student activists stormed the studios of their country’s state television network, taking over the room where the evening news was broadcasting live.
The students were leaders in a national wave of student protest that is sweeping Greece in opposition to fiscal austerity measures and proposals to privatize higher education in the country. Student protest has also been swelled by the recent repeal of Greece’s academic asylum law, which until last month barred police from setting foot onto the nation’s campuses.
Network officials pulled the broadcast from the air abruptly, switching over to a travel documentary after a short break, but home viewers were able to tell that something was happening in the studio before the feed went dark.
The students demanded airtime to read a statement on the current student protests in Greece, a demand that was rejected. But after several hours of negotiations the network agreed to allow the group to record a statement for broadcast later that evening. The statement was shown on the network at midnight and the students left the station without incident (Google translation).
In December 2008 a group of Greek student activists succeeded in unfurling a protest banner on live television during a news broadcast after police shot and killed a fifteen-year-old protester.
Four Egyptian university presidents with ties to the overthrown Mubarak regime resigned yesterday, clearing the way for campus elections to choose their successors.
Students, faculty and staff have been engaging in ongoing protests against Mubarak-era holdovers in university administration, protests that have intensified after the new government reneged on promised to oust all top university leaders this summer. These new resignations come just weeks before the scheduled start of the new Egyptian academic year.
Only faculty members are eligible to vote in these elections for university administrators, but students are asserting newfound power in the university system as well. Student activists have been at the center of recent campus demonstrations, and a weeklong sit-in at American University in Cairo ended on Monday in victory for student activists. Meanwhile, Egypt’s national union of students held its first leadership elections since the 1970s last month.
Sunday night I tweeted, as Jon Stewart won his I’m-not-even-making-this-up ninth consecutive Emmy for Best Variety Show or whatever, that “Jon Stewart is like 63% of the way to being the guy he started out mocking. Maybe 64%.” And then today I stumbled across this, a Tom Junod profile of Stewart from next month’s Esquire that makes the case far better than I possibly could.
The thing is full of great lines, including the one I quoted this morning, and the one about how
even when Stewart’s a dick, he is never the dick. It is Stewart’s unique talent for coming across as decent and well-meaning when he’s bullying and hectoring and self-righteous. And this is because his talent is not just for comedy and not just for media criticism or truth-telling; it’s for being — for remaining — likable.
The bit about why nobody ever does a Jon Stewart impression is right on the money too. Read the whole piece, but the takeaway is this: Jon Stewart’s public persona is profoundly disingenuous, and ultimately toxic to American political discourse.
But there’s one part of the piece that I’d quibble with, and it’s the passage on Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity, held in DC on the weekend before the 2010 midterm elections:
Three days before a crucial election, Jon Stewart had stood in America’s most symbolic public space and given a speech to two hundred thousand people. The speech wasn’t about his need to be a player or his need for power or his need for influence. It wasn’t about getting out the vote or telling people to vote in a certain way. It was about Jon Stewart — about his need for another kind of out. For years, his out had been his comedy. Now it was his sincerity — his evenhandedness, his ability to rise above politics, his goodness. And three days later, when the side he didn’t even say was his side was routed in the midterms, he pretty much proved his point. He was no player. He had no political power. He’d proven he was beyond all that by presiding over the biggest celebration of political powerlessness in American history.
There’s nothing incorrect here, but there’s one pair of dots that Junod doesn’t quite connect, and it’s this:
By holding that rally on that day, Stewart took two hundred thousand of his most political fans out of the game on electoral fieldwork’s biggest weekend. The kind of folks who would show up to a Jon Stewart rally are pretty much exactly the kind of folks who would knock on doors for local candidates in the run-up to an off-year election. And what did Stewart do? He gave them a reason not to.
If you believe in the political process, if you believe in civic engagement, if you believe in local communities, if you believe in reforming America from the ground up, the last thing you do is hold a huge fake rally for politics dorks in Washington DC on the weekend before the midterms. I mean, come on.
I used to love Jon Stewart. But that’s when he really lost me.
In CEO’s report on racial disparities in UW admissions, they highlight an extremely misleading statistical concept — that of “odds ratios” — to leave the false impression that black and Latino applicants to UW are hundreds of times more likely to win acceptance than whites. They also dump more than a thousand students of color out of their applicant sample, inflating admissions percentages for blacks and Latinos by excluding weak and unqualified applicants from that pool and distorting statistics on Asians by excluding all applicants of Southeast Asian origin from their study.
In addition to all that, they engage in a variety of petty manipulations of data, as when they scale their admissions rates chart to begin at 50% rather than 0%, thus dramatically enhancing the visual impact of the graph at the expense of accuracy and readability.
Strangely missing in all this statistical sleight-of-hand is any straightforward statement of the magnitude of the supposed advantage that black and Latino applicants have over whites. At no point in the report do they compare — for instance — the chances of admission of two students, each at the midpoint of the applicant pool, one white, one black. (Neither do they directly compare the chances of admissions of students by criteria other than race under which white applicants have a structural advantage — those of legacy admits vs. non-legacies, for instance.)
At one point they inch toward such a comparison, with a chart listing the number of students of various races rejected with SATs or ACT scores and class rank higher than the median black admittee, but since that chart fails to list how many students in that category were accepted from each race, it’s impossible to translate the chart into actual comparative data.
In fact, there is only one section of their report in which they offer a direct comparison of the chances of admission of two groups of students, and it’s a comparison whose terms have been cherry-picked to provide the impression that they are hoping to leave.
In the report’s section on “Probabilities of Admission” they provide a chart comparing the chances of admission for groups of white, black, Latino, and Asian students — one chart each for in-state and out-of-state applicants. So far so good.
But each chart compares only a small sliver of the actual applicant pool. Beyond the exclusions I mentioned in previous posts, these charts leave out female applicants, who represent well over half of total applicants. They leave out the substantial fraction who took the SAT rather than the ACT. They leave out all legacies, a mostly white group with significant advantages in the admissions process. And as in the previous chart they set the bar for comparison at the median ACT score for black admittees.
There’s a basic principle in statistics that the farther away from the middle you get, the weirder your numbers are going to turn out. If you compare the chances of two students near the middle of the pack, you’re going to get stats on their odds of admission that reflect the fact that they’re similarly situated. But if you go looking for outliers, things start to get wacky.
To understand how this works, let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine that only one student whose first and last names both begin with the letter Z was admitted to Wisconsin in a particular year, and that this student happened, by chance, to have the second-worst grades and test scores of the entire entering class. Of all those students whose numbers were worse, only one was admitted, while 2000 were turned down. And among those 2000, by coincidence, there was a second student with a ZZ name.
Among ZZ-named students with grades and test scores as bad as or worse than our admittee, then, one out of two was admitted, giving that group odds of admission of one in two, or 50%. Among non-ZZ students with similar grades and test scores, only one in 2000 was admitted, giving admission odds of 0.05%. ZZ-named students at that grade/score level, in other words, were one thousand times more likely to be admitted than non-ZZs.
And what does this tell us? Pretty much nothing. If that ZZ student happened to be 100th from the bottom rather than second, the exact same formula would show that ZZs had odds twenty times better than non-ZZs, instead of a thousand times better. One-hundredth from the bottom and second are damn near identical in terms of actual numbers, but we’re so far out on the statistical distribution tail that even a slight change in real-world data produces huge swings in the reported odds.
The folks at CEO understand this. They understand that because the vast majority of UW’s applicants are white, and because black applicants tend to have somewhat lower test scores, choosing the black admittees’ median as your starting point will produce more dramatic contrasts than using the median of all applicants. They also understand that the smaller you make the pool, the more random variation you get. And so they made the pool small and unrepresentative.
To be clear, I don’t know what the numbers would look like if CEO were to crunch the data in a useful way. I don’t know how many times more likely to gain admission a black or Latino applicant with an application at the middle of the total pool would be than a white student with identical numbers. I suspect that such a student would have a considerable advantage.
But here’s the thing. CEO does know the answer to this question. They do have the data. They know what admissions rates look like if you compare students of different races from the middle of the pack, just as they know what the plain-language version of their misleading “odds ratio” claim would be.
They know all this stuff. They’re just choosing not to share.
studentactivism.net 
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