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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.
In the next few weeks, I’m going to be cleaning out my bookmark folders from 2008 and passing along some of the news and links that I didn’t get around to posting last year. Starting with this…
Back in December, I mentioned an organization called Choose Responsibility in passing, calling it “a drinking-age reform group that arose out of college administrators’ frustration with the status quo.”
In August, Choose Responsibility unveiled a statement on the drinking age that declared that “Twenty-one is not working.” The statement was signed by more than a hundred college and university presidents, a list that at this writing has grown to 134.
See the full text of the statement after the jump, or click through to The Amethyst Initiative to learn more.
Earlier this fall, Tennessee State University became the first public university to block students’ access to the gossip website Juicy Campus.
Now comes word that Juicy Campus has reached out to the Tennessee chapter of the ACLU for assistance in bringing a lawsuit against TSU. The headline of this article notwithstanding, it does not appear that JC has yet filed suit. But we’re following this story, and we’ll pass on more news as we get it.
In other Juicy Campus news, the student government of Western Illinois University has passed a resolution calling on WIU’s administration to enact its own JC ban, with student government president Robert Dulski organizing for statewide action at a meeting of Illinois state student governments in February.
Meanwhile, in Ohio, Miami University’s panhellenic organization asked the state attorney general to take action against JC, while the Miami student newspaper editorialized against such a move.
Take a look at College Freedom, a blog from John K. Wilson, the author of Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and its Enemies and The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education.
The Recording Industry Association of America has announced that it is abandoning its legal strategy of bringing large-scale lawsuits against students and others who download music from the internet.
The RIAA has been bringing such suits for more than five years, often targeting students who used college networks for file-sharing. According to one expert quoted in the Chronicle article, such suits sometimes forced students to drop out of college.
Steven L. Worona, the director of policy and networking programs at the education-policy group Educause, said the move demonstrated that the RIAA understands that “their sue-the-customer, scorched-earth business model has not worked.”
studentactivism.net 
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