You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Campus Protests’ category.
The Student Affairs Collaborative Blog, a group blog of student affairs administrators, has a post up on student leader self-assessment. It lists a dozen questions to help students evaluate their “experience as a student leader.”
Here’s the list:
- What did I learn as a student leader?
- What will I need to remember from my student leadership year?
- Which interactions with others taught me the most about how to work with people?
- What do I know now that I didn’t know a year ago?
- What am I better at as a result of this student leadership experience?
- How would I describe my student leadership experience in 100 words?
- How am I better prepared for the next chapter in my story?
- What would I have done differently as a student leader?
- If I had one hour with a group of newly elected student leaders, what would I want to talk to them about?
- What mistakes did I make this year and what did I learn from them?
- What do I hope to be remembered for as a student leader?
- How could I have done better as a student leader?
I’ve gotta say that the conception of self-assessment presented here strikes me as really, really narrow.
“What did I learn,” it asks. “What am I better at? What mistakes did I make?” These aren’t bad questions. But what about “What did I accomplish?” or “Who did I help?” or “What did I change?”
There’s nothing here to encourage reflection on how the student’s involvement has changed their group or their campus or their community.
And that’s a particularly weird thing for a “student leader” self-assessment to leave out, because if leadership is about anything at all, it’s about change.
What it means to call someone a “student leader,” and whether that term is a useful one, are questions for another post. But if you’re a leader of any kind, you’re by definition leading folks, and you’re presumably trying to get them to a place better than where they are.
And those concepts are pretty much absent in these questions.
To a point, this reflects the nature of the student affairs administrator’s role. Universities are, by and large, not set up to support students’ efforts to make real change, and student affairs personnel are employed by universities, not students.
But I’ve known student affairs people who did actually believe in student empowerment, ones who encouraged students to ask themselves questions that were a lot more searching than these.
And so I turn it over to y’all. If you were preparing a self-assessment questionnaire for student activists, or student government types, or student organization leaders, what questions would you put on it?
What questions should we all be asking ourselves as this school year comes to an end?
The Arizona Students’ Association and the Associated Students of the University of Arizona have put up a powerful slideshow on the University of Arizona’s proposed tuition increase:
The idea behind the slideshow is simple: Let students speak directly to the increase would change their lives. Real students, real impact.
The statements speak to a wide variety of effects — “a third job,” “my little brother’s ability to come here,” “a plane ticket to visit my dad.” Each tells a personal story, and each gives that story a human face.
It’s a great, powerful statement. Go look.
And if you’re running an anti-tuition campaign of your own, maybe you should bring a camera and a whiteboard (or a pad and sharpie) to your next rally.
A coalition of student groups at New York City’s Brooklyn College is calling a class walkout at 3 pm on Wednesday, April 29.
The walkout is in opposition to a planned $600 tuition hike at CUNY. As the protest organizers put it, “80% of the tuition hike goes to fill a gap in the state’s budget,” making the hike a “tax for students, the very people to whom a $600 increase makes a huge difference!”
You can find out more about the walkout at its Facebook Event page.
May 2 update: Photos!
The University of Vermont student activists who occupied their university’s administration building last week have issued a revised list of demands.
When the activists of Students Stand Up occupied the UVM admin building on Wednesday, they presented the president with thirteen demands, each of which related to budgetary and labor issues. In a news release last night, however, they replaced those thirteen demands with just four.
They call those four demands “the core concerns that are the base of our campaign and our new understanding of what is feasible.”
The first two demands on the new list are substantively the same as the first two on the old list: SSU wants UVM to reverse all dismissals and non-reappointments that it has announced, and cancel all plans for new layoffs. The third new demand is in essence the same as the eleventh from the original list — SSU wants “a democratic process by which students, staff, and faculty have decisive roles in decisions regarding the budget.”
(We’ll get back to that third demand in a subsequent post. It’s a big one, and an important one.)
The fourth demand is a revised version of the eighth demand on the old list — SSU is calling for administrative compensation at UVM to be cut, in order to “save as many positions as possible.” Instead of firing faculty and staff, in other words, make administrators take a pay cut.
There’s a fifth demand in their new statement, though it’s not included in the numbered list. They want UVM President Daniel Fogel to resign. By calling in police to arrest demonstrators last Wednesday instead of talking with them in good faith, they say, Fogel acted in a “disturbing and callous” way. Because of that lack of respect for dialogue and university community, they say, “we are issuing a call for his immediate resignation.”
For updates on Students Stand Up’s next moves, check out their Twitter feed. Also very much worth reading is this SSU member’s dissection of a budget memo released by UVM’s vice president on Friday.
In an article on the weekend’s student rioting at Kent State, the Associated Press makes the following claim:
“It was the first clash between Kent State students and police since 1970, when four students were killed by Ohio National Guard troops during a campus protest of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia.”
Ouch. That’s really really not true.
First, as Kent State’s student newspaper reported in the fifth paragraph of its article on the weekend riots, 81 Kent students were arrested when Halloween parties in and around the campus got out of hand last year. That’s less than six months ago.
Also, as the AP itself notes, the 1970 “clash” wasn’t between students and police, since National Guard troops aren’t cops. Finally, there have been lots of student protests where students clashed with cops at Kent State since 1970 — a two-minute Google turned up this page about a series of 1977 protests on campus that led to about two hundred arrests.
Student protest and student rowdiness are both common on American campuses — they were common before the sixties, and they’ve been common since. An AP reporter really shouldn’t have to be told this.
Update: Dear Volokh Conspiracy, if you’re going to make the title of a blog post a question, you really should enable comments.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments