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The Texas Student Association, a statewide student advocacy and lobbying group, has officially constituted itself at a meeting on the University of North Texas campus.
Texas’s last statewide student association was founded after the Second World War but went dormant about a decade ago. The new group, organized over the course of the last few months, is moving forward in 2009 with a lobbying agenda that emphasizes pocketbook issues.
A quick Google didn’t turn up a website or contact information for the TSA, but if any of our readers have that info, we’d be glad to post it.
A morning grab-bag of stuff on the York University strike…
- Our post from last night on the announcement that a date has been set for the contract vote.
- An article from the Globe and Mail newspaper about an anti-strike Facebook group.
- A union parody of the York University website.
- The York Federation of Students has established a strike relief fund.
- The Toronto Star is running a series of profiles of students affected by the strike.
To keep tabs on our ongoing coverage of the York strike, check out our Labor category archives, or just bookmark our main page.
The union membership vote on the York University contract proposal has been scheduled for January 19 and 20, from 9 am to 1 pm and 3 pm to 7 pm each day. These are the dates the university requested, and are four days later than those the union had proposed.
York, the third largest university in Canada, has been shuttered for 68 days by a strike of teaching assistants, graduate assistants, and adjunct faculty. The university is using a provision in Ontario labor law to force CUPE, the union representing the strikers, to poll the membership on their latest proposal.
CUPE members rejected the proposal by a lopsided margin at a mass meeting last week, and are organizing to defeat it in this referendum. The three units of the union local will vote separately on January 19-20, and all three must approve the proposal to end the strike.
To keep tabs on our ongoing coverage of the York strike, check out our Labor category archives, or just bookmark our main page.
The two sides in the York University strike have each released FAQs on the upcoming union referendum. The university’s document is this Supervised Vote FAQ, while the union calls its FAQ Forced Ratification 101.
According to CUPE’s strike blog, they have requested that the vote be held this Thursday and Friday, January 15 and 16, while the university is calling for a vote next Monday and Tuesday, January 19 and 20. The Ministry of Labour is expected to announce the timing of the vote today or tomorrow.
We’ve been getting a lot of traffic over the last few days from folks looking for the latest information on the York strike, and we’re going to do our best to pass that info along as we receive it.
To keep tabs on our ongoing coverage of the York strike, check out our Labor category archives, or just bookmark our main page.
Update: The York Federation of Students, the university’s student government, has created a strike relief fund for students suffering financial hardship because of the university closure. According to their website, applications for relief funding will be available online tomorrow.
Last August, Mother Jones magazine ran a spread on campus activism that included a timeline of “Student Activism Firsts.”
It was a fluff piece, obviously thrown together pretty quickly and without much interest in historical accuracy, and like many such pieces it treated student activism as something that began in the sixties. I took a few notes with the idea of putting up an annotated version of the timeline, pointing out some of the more obvious mistakes, but I never got around to finishing it.
As I was preparing the Hillary Clinton/Carry Nation story last month, though, I stumbled across something that really jumped out at me.
In the course of researching that post, I Googled temperance campus prank photo, trying to remember what campus the Carry Nation prank had taken place on. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did find this.
That’s the index of the Oberlin College Archives, and as I flipped through it looking for temperance materials, I stumbled across a reference to a folder titled “Temperance ‘Sit-in,’ 1882.”
Huh.
studentactivism.net 
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