You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Campus Protests’ category.
Students at the University of Minnesota Duluth staged a protest and counter-concert when rapper Soulja Boy performed on campus on Friday night. UMD student Arielle Schnur said Soulja Boy’s songs “degrade half the student body as sex objects and the other half as sexual assault perpetrators.”
Protest organizers sat down with the director of the UMD student center to plot strategy for a protest that would raise awareness without disrupting the event. In an effort to ensure an orderly demonstration, organizers required participants to attend an informational session on protest rules before the gig.
The demonstrators’ counter-concert, held at the same time as the Soulja Boy show, was free and featured a lineup of local bands.
The protest was given a boost on Friday afternoon when Soulja Boy mentioned it on his Twitter feed.
(This is part three of a four-part series. Parts one and two are here and here.)
The posting at the NSIE site said that the April 1 action was going to kick off at “the 12th Street building” at 2 o’clock. It didn’t give an address.
I Googled up a campus map without too much trouble, though. The New School only has two buildings on 12th Street, it turns out, and since one of them is a dorm, I figured I was looking for the other one. I’d previously arranged to meet someone on the Lower East Side at three o’clock, so I planned to hang around for the first half hour or so of the NSIE event before heading across town.
(This is part two of a four-part series. Part one is here and part three is here.)
On February 10, the New School In Exile threw down the gauntlet. Bob Kerrey would quit by April 1, or they would bring the New School’s operations to a halt. The ultimatum, delivered at a public meeting, was broadcast to the world by the New York Times and picked up by everyone from the Chronicle of Higher Education to Indymedia.
Some NSIE members were coy about whether the threat was meant to be taken at face value, but they left no doubt that they were serious about their goals. “The students, with the faculty’s backing, are trying to get Kerrey out of the school,” one said. “Setting a deadline raises the stakes.”
In the immediate aftermath of the February announcement, NSIE moved effectively to keep their momentum up. They held teach-ins on February 24 and March 4, and posted video from the first online. NSIE supported and publicized an NYU occupation that was modeled on the New School’s own.
But their energy seemed to falter in March. There were fewer events, and less follow-up. Posting on the NSIE website was infrequent, and that decline seemed to reflect a broader retreat in the group.
At the end of last year The New School In Exile was the most famous single-campus student activist group in the country. Waging a confrontational campaign against former Senator Bob Kerrey, the New School’s deeply unpopular president, they won concessions from administrators — and major media coverage — by staging an audacious 32-hour occupation of a university building.
As the spring semester got underway, the wind seemed to be at NSIE’s back. In an emergency meeting in February, New School faculty unanimously declared their “strong and continuing … sentiment of no confidence” in Kerrey’s administration. Later that month, NSIE members participated in an NYU sit-in modeled on their own. New York magazine ran a damning portrait of Kerrey as an administrator at sea in the face of an extraordinary student and faculty “insurrection,” and in mid-March an NSIE activist was arrested as he spray-painted “Bye Bob” on the door of Kerrey’s residence.
The spring’s grandest gesture came in the course of the February emergency meeting, when graduate student Geeti Das read a statement from NSIE. The group was calling on Kerrey to resign by April first, she said. “If on that date he has not resigned, we will shut down the functions of the university. We will bring it to a halt.”
Her ultimatum was was reported by the New York Times, as was the applause it received.
April first was yesterday. Kerrey is still in place, and the New School is still functioning. According to the NSIE itself, yesterday passed “more or less without incident.” The group held a few small events yesterday (about which more below), but they engaged in no direct action, and haven’t announced any follow-up.
So what happened?
(This is part one of a four-part series. Part two is here and part three is here.)
“If you want to try for those young voters, first of all, you’ve got to stand for something, because one of the things that stands out with a young voter is originality.”
That was South Carolina governor Mark Sanford right after the 2008 presidential election. Today, in a move that is widely seen as positioning himself for a run at the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, he’s saying he’ll turn down $700 million dollars in federal education funding for his state.
Sanford says the government should be paying down debt, not running up new bills, but his refusal of the stimulus money only makes sense as a symbolic gesture … and it’s an odd one. The stimulus money has been allocated. It’s not going back into the general fund. If South Carolina doesn’t accept its share, it’ll go somewhere else — California’s Governor Schwarzenegger has already said he’ll be happy to take it.
And as Senator Lindsay Graham — a South Carolina Republican, and no fan of the stimulus — has noted, South Carolinians will footing their share of the bill for this expenditure, whether any of it returns to the state or not.
So Sanford’s approach is definitely original. He’s the only governor planning to refuse the education money. It’s an approach that’s getting a lot of attention among conservative activists. But his position is costing him support at home — his favorability rating in South Carolina now stands at 40%, nine points below President Obama. And it’s hard to see it doing him much good with young voters in 2012 — in the primary or the general election.
More than a thousand teachers and students marched on the South Carolina state house yesterday, with a simple message: “Take the money.”
Sanford has until midnight tomorrow to listen.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments