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So the political world is buzzing right now about a photo of Obama’s chief speechwriter, the 27-year-old Jon Favreau.
In the photo, Favreau and another man are seen with a life-size cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton. Favreau is leaning in toward Clinton and smiling for the camera, like you would if you were getting your photo taken with a celebrity, but with one big difference — he’s groping the cutout’s “breast” with one hand. The other guy is kissing Clinton on the cheek and tipping a beer bottle up to her mouth.
It appears that the photo, which surfaced on Facebook not long ago, probably isn’t going to derail Favreau’s career. He has reportedly called Clinton to apologize, and Clinton’s people have put out a light-hearted statement on the incident. But the sexism and disrespect for Clinton evidenced in the photo have a lot of people fuming.
I mention all this here at studentactivism.net not because of any campus angle to this story, but because the photo reminds me powerfully of another photo — one taken more than a hundred years ago.
Labor activist Mary Beth Maxwell, mentioned by many this week as a possible Obama Labor Secretary, is a former student activist and past staffer at the United States Student Association.
Maxwell, who is the strong favorite of DC heavyweight David Bonior, was a campus activist as an undergraduate at Marquette University, and she capped her student organizing career by serving as Field Director of USSA. From there she moved on to positions at NARAL, Jobs With Justice, and her current seat as executive director of American Rights at Work, a labor advocacy organization.
After the jump, a listing of Friday’s panel sessions at the Youth Movement Summit at Columbia Law School. A full schedule, with links to live streams, can be found here.
Columbia Law School is hosting an Alliance of Youth Movements Summit right now, with all sessions being broadcast live on the net. As the summit website puts it:
Panels will discuss a variety of practical topics, including How To Build Transnational Social Movements Using New Technology, How To Use New Mobile Technologies and How To Preserve Group Safety And Security.
Summit participants will also be honored at a red-carpet event with entertainment celebrities, business leaders, and civil society figures at the former home of MTV’s Total Request Live (“TRL”) overlooking Times Square.
Howcast will use the field manual for youth empowerment developed at the Summit as the cornerstone of a much larger online “hub,” where emerging youth organizations can access and share “how-to” guides and tips on how to use social-networking and other technologies to promote freedom and justice and counter violence, extremism and oppression. The hub will include instructional videos and text guides, links to related online resources and discussion forums for sharing experiences, ideas and advice.
The schedule for the summit is available here, with links to streaming video from every session.
Two sociologists at the City University of New York have received a prestigious and lucrative award for their research into the effects of open admissions on students and colleges.
The professors, Paul Attewell and David Lavin, have been awarded the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education, which comes with a $200,000 prize.
Their research, a study of two thousand women students admitted to CUNY under open admissions in the 1970s, found that more than two-thirds had graduated, and that their time in college had improved their annual earnings by $5000 to $10000 a year. It also found that the women’s children were better educated than the children of similar women who had not attended college.
They presented their research in a 2007 book, Passing the Torch: Does Higher Education for the Disadvantaged Pay Off Across the Generations?
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