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The omnibus budget bill that the Senate passed last night may make low-cost birth control available from campus health centers after a four-year absence.
The bill incorporated the Affordable Birth Control Act, which overturns provisions of a 2005 law that, in the words of Choice USA,
stopped pharmaceutical companies from providing prescriptions at lower than market costs to health clinics and College and University health centers. Previously, companies were supplying schools and safety-net providers with low cost or no cost birth control. As a result of the [Deficit Reduction Act], low income women and college students were forced to pay market price, approximately $40-$50 per month.
The Affordable Birth Control Act was the subject of intense organizing by campus groups, making its passage a victory for students and for student activism.
Quoting Choice USA again, “This is an example of the power we as young people have to make real change that directly impacts our lives. Congratulations everyone!”
Chas Freeman, the Obama nominee for chair of the National Intelligence Council has withdrawn his name from consideration. As we noted last week, Freeman once said this about China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square protests:
I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be. Such folk, whether they represent a veterans’ “Bonus Army” or a “student uprising” on behalf of “the goddess of democracy” should expect to be displaced with despatch from the ground they occupy.
Freeman had come under heavy attack in recent days for his ties to Saudi Arabia and his criticisms of Israel, as well as his relationship with the Chinese government.
Quick updates on a bunch of stories we’ve been following…
- The University of North Carolina has become the twenty-first US campus to dump Russell Athletic in response to labor violations.
- A three-part analysis of the Power Shift 2009 conference: Background, Tactics, and The Future.
- A hundred NYU grad students held a “work-in” at Bobst Library yesterday afternoon.
- The economic crisis is leading students to transfer to cheaper colleges.
- Hillary Clinton has announced a million-dollar scholarship program for Palestinian students.
- President Obama will be providing major new details of his education plan at a speech this morning.
Saturday’s edition of the Eugene, Oregon Register Guard had a great, lengthy editorial on the Oregon Daily Emerald student newspaper strike. Here’s a taste:
Members of the Emerald’s news staff are student journalists, but they’re more than that — they’re journalists, period. The Emerald is not a practice field or a plaything. It’s a real newspaper where people gather, edit and report the news under daily deadline stress and intensifying economic pressures.
[…]
The Emerald still must find a way to break even or better financially. In that respect it faces the same challenges as other newspapers, large and small. The Emerald must find a way to survive, but its long-term prospects have been improved. They’ve improved because the newspaper’s editors, reporters and photographers have ensured that survival will be worth fighting for.
Ron Charles, a senior editor at the Washington Post, has an op-ed in today’s paper (“On Campus, Vampires Are Besting the Beats“) about how much the current generation of college students … well, sucks.
They don’t read great literature, apparently. They don’t read Richard Brautigan. (Really? Richard Brautigan?) They’re not interested enough in books of poetry, or in artsy smutty (published) diaries. And this lack of interest in the printed-and-bound word is the source of their lack of interest in politics.
Or maybe it’s the other way around. It’s not clear. The piece is a mess, frankly. Examples:
- Charles doesn’t see any contradiction in quoting a prof who sniffs that today’s college students “do not have any shame about reading inferior texts” and complaining that this generation hasn’t produced its own Jerry Rubin.
- When he wants to know whether there’s any activism on the campus of today, he asks the co-editor of the Kent State literary magazine.
- He grounds his claim that students are politically disengaged by linking to a web essay whose first line is “College freshmen are more politically engaged today than at any point during the last 40 years.”
Charles says this generation isn’t reading, or producing, radical novels or poetry — but most of the radical writers he cites are polemicists. Eldridge Cleaver, Abbie Hoffman, and Malcolm X weren’t writing novels, and Sylvia Plath, Anais Nin, and Richard Brautigan weren’t leading revolutions. (If a great political novel emerged from the ferment of the late 1960s, Charles doesn’t mention it.)
The moment that Charles is lamenting is not a moment of radicalism’s ascendance in culture, it’s a moment of counterculture’s ascendance in mass media, and of publishing’s dominance in the media mix. Is Soul On Ice a more incisive critique of American racial politics than The Wire? Was Soul On Ice more read in its heyday than The Wire was watched when it came out a few years ago? Charles doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care.
Charles is eager to juxtapose books with the internet, as if books and Twitter are the only two media in existence. But The Autobiography of Malcolm X wasn’t published until after Malcolm’s assassination — Malcolm didn’t get his word out through writing books, he got it out through newspapers and speeches. Abbie Hoffman did write books, but he did it for a simple reason: television and radio didn’t have a place for him, and the internet hadn’t been invented yet.
This is a core truth that passes Charles by — college students read Soul On Ice in the late 1960s because it was their only way to find out what Eldridge Cleaver was all about. They read Anais Nin because she, and writers like her, were their only source of smut. They read Jerry Rubin’s Do It! for the cartoons, and the grainy black-and-white photos of naked hippies, and because there was no way in hell that Rubin was ever going to get a chance to do his schtick on television.
Jon Stewart doesn’t exist in Charles’ conception of today’s college student’s intellectual universe. The millions of hits that political rants past and present are getting on YouTube don’t exist. Barack Obama exists — Charles mentions in passing that he’s a top selling author on American campuses — but as Meredith Sires notes, that fact seems to have left no impression on him.
We are living in an age when political discourse is more open — and more open-ended — than it’s ever been before. We are living in an age of sharply rising youth political engagement, of the production and consumption of tremendous new cultural artifacts, of the redefining of what culture is and who it’s for. But Charles can’t — or won’t — see any of it.
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