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Since the fall of 2005 the Texas Tech Daily Toreador has been running the number of US war dead in Iraq on its front page every issue. With the start of the fall semester, though, they’re dropping the feature.
The Toreador announced the change in an editorial last week, saying they made the decision “after President Barack Obama pledged to withdraw troops from Iraq by 2011.” With the Iraq war winding down, and the country “engaged in multiple foreign conflicts,” they feel that the Iraq tally “no longer serves readers as it once did.”
At a moment when the election of a new president has left the anti-Iraq war movement as splintered and quieted, the move appears to derive as much from a change in Washington as any change in Iraq. A withdrawal has been promised, yes, but even if it proceeds according to schedule the end of the war is still a long way off.
More than a hundred Americans have been killed in Iraq since Barack Obama took office as president. Two Americans have died there since the Toreador printed its editorial a week ago. That editorial does not adequately explain why the paper’s staff consider those deaths to be less worthy of notice than those that went before.
In a Delhi meeting Monday, Indian education minister Kapil Sibal told Australia’s deputy prime minister that the Australian government needs to do far more to protect the rights and safety of the one hundred thousand Indians studying in that country.
As the two leaders met, thousands of students marched in Australia’s largest cities, condemning government inaction against violence and exploitation targeting their community. “After a decade of neglect,” Australian National Union of Students president David Barrow proclaimed, “local and international students rally together to demand justice.”
The treatment of Indian students in Australia has provoked a diplomatic crisis between the two nations in recent months. Two vicious assaults this spring drew attention to an epidemic of bias crime against Indian students, and prompted a major protest march in downtown Melbourne that blocked a busy intersection for hours. The assaults and the protest, organized by the Federation of Indian Students in Australia, made the ongoing violence front-page news in both countries.
Indian students’ tuition payments represent a major revenue stream for Australian higher education, and the bias scandal has led to a new scrutiny for educational practices as well. Three private training colleges have shut their doors in recent months, amid charges that the for-profit institutions were offering substandard education and defrauding learners.
Update: I’d meant to include these first-person accounts of bias violence, but the link fell through the cracks while I was writing.
Trigger warning: The following post quotes a repulsive racist joke that features the N-word.
The Oxford University Conservative Association, one of Britain’s largest and most influential campus political organizations, has been stripped of its university recognition after members of its top leadership told racist jokes at an organization dinner — jokes that were met with applause, laughter, and cheers from the students in attendance.
OUCA is Oxford’s student affiliate of the right-wing Conservative Party. Many of the Conservatives’ top leaders are alumni of the OUCA, which has more than six hundred members. (Americans can think of the group as a vague equivalent of the Harvard Young Republicans, but much bigger and more influential.)
At a “hustings” dinner in June, candidates for the OUCA presidency were asked to repeat the most inappropriate joke they knew. One told a joke about lynching, while another, expatriate American Nick Gallagher, is said to have offered this: “What do you say when you see a television moving around in the dark? ‘Drop it nigger, or I’ll shoot you!’ ”
As I said at the top, reports suggest that there was no objection to either of these jokes from the crowd in attendance.
Gallagher and another student were suspended from OUCA after news of the jokes broke in the British press, and this week Oxford announced that it will no longer allow the group to use the university’s name or participate in the annual organizational fair for new students.
The most impressive part of the whole story was the defenses of Gallagher’s joke. Gallagher himself is said to have claimed that it was from a Chris Rock routine (um, no), while an unnamed friend offered this response:
“To suggest Nick is racist is just ridiculous. This has been blown out of all proportion and everyone just needs to lighten up.”
Tony Avella, a Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City, will hold an event at Hunter College this Friday to publicize his support for a return to free education at the City University of New York.
CUNY was tuition-free from its founding until 1975, when a fiscal crisis led the city to begin charging its students. (Not coincidentally, tuition was charged for the first time just six years after CUNY implemented an open-admissions enrollment policy.) Avella, who is currently running well behind Democratic front-runner Bill Thompson in primary polling, is the only candidate from either party to support a return to free tuition at CUNY.
Avella is himself a Hunter graduate, and the 11 AM event at 68th Street and Lexington Avenue will take place on CUNY’s first day of classes for the fall semester.
By the way, as Avella notes on his Twitter feed, the first of two primary election debates will be taking place on NY1 tonight at 7 PM.
Throughout the student movement of the 1960s, most American college students were denied the right to vote.
From the birth of the American republic, the voting age had stood at 21. Pressure for the 18-year-old vote had been building since 18-year-old men were first drafted in the Second World War, but despite the baby boom, the student movements of the sixties, and the deaths of thousands of Americans under 21 in Korea and Vietnam, voting age reform went nowhere for decades.
It was only in May 1970, after National Guard troops shot and killed four students during a protest at Kent State University, that Congress brought the issue to a vote, and even then it was only because of the actions of Senators Ted Kennedy and Mike Mansfield.
In the aftermath of Kent State, with the nation reeling from the spectacle of its own troops gunning down its own students, Kennedy and Mansfield moved decisively. They introduced the 18-year-old vote as an amendment to the Voting Rights Act, and Mansfield threatened to filibuster the renewal of the Act if that amendment was not incorporated into it.
Kennedy and Mansfield won that battle, and the Voting Rights Act, as amended, was signed into law by President Nixon that June. The Supreme Court declared the provision unconstitutional that winter, ruling that Congress didn’t have the power to enfranchise youth in state and local elections, but the Twenty Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, passed by Congress the following spring and ratified by the states in record time, soon gave 18-to-20-year-olds the vote for good.
With the lowering of the voting age, college students became a significant voting bloc in American politics. In the 1970s, for the first time, students could exercise political power not just in the streets, but in the voting booth as well.
A new kind of student politics demanded a new kind of organizing, and so 1971 also saw the creation of the National Student Lobby, America’s first national student-funded, student-directed lobbying organization. State Student Associations (SSAs) and state student lobbies soon followed, making the 1970s an unprecedented boom-time for student electoral organizing.
The SSAs of the 1970s transformed American politics and higher education forever, altering the balance of power between students and educational institutions while giving students a voice in state and national politics that reached far beyond the campus.
This shift in the American political landscape will not be a part of the headlines commemorating Ted Kennedy’s life. It will not be mentioned in most of his obituaries. And of course Kennedy was just one part of the process that brought that transformation into being — the overwhelming majority of the work of the Seventies student revolution was carried out by student activists whose names are lost to history.
But Senator Kennedy did play a crucial role at a crucial moment, and in that respect these changes are part of his legacy as well.
studentactivism.net 
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