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Last night a group of at least fifty Greek student activists stormed the studios of their country’s state television network, taking over the room where the evening news was broadcasting live.
The students were leaders in a national wave of student protest that is sweeping Greece in opposition to fiscal austerity measures and proposals to privatize higher education in the country. Student protest has also been swelled by the recent repeal of Greece’s academic asylum law, which until last month barred police from setting foot onto the nation’s campuses.
Network officials pulled the broadcast from the air abruptly, switching over to a travel documentary after a short break, but home viewers were able to tell that something was happening in the studio before the feed went dark.
The students demanded airtime to read a statement on the current student protests in Greece, a demand that was rejected. But after several hours of negotiations the network agreed to allow the group to record a statement for broadcast later that evening. The statement was shown on the network at midnight and the students left the station without incident (Google translation).
In December 2008 a group of Greek student activists succeeded in unfurling a protest banner on live television during a news broadcast after police shot and killed a fifteen-year-old protester.
Today is the first day of classes for most of the University of California system, and student activists at UC Berkeley are marking the day with their first student protests of 2011-12.
UC generally, and Berkeley in particular, have been a center of American student organizing in the last few years, though administrative crackdowns have quieted the campuses somewhat in the last twelve months. With the summer announcement of new tuition hike proposals that could nearly double UC fees in the next four years, however, things may be due to heat up again.
The organizers of today’s protest announced their agenda in a Daily Cal op-ed earlier this week, and the paper is planning a liveblog of the day’s events. Activists have already started livetweeting the day at the #Day1 hashtag.
I’ll be away from my computer for most of the afternoon (Eastern Time), but I’ll try to update as events warrant, either here or on Twitter. And with UC back in session, I’ll be posting updates on several big stories from the summer in the very near future, so stay tuned.
Four Egyptian university presidents with ties to the overthrown Mubarak regime resigned yesterday, clearing the way for campus elections to choose their successors.
Students, faculty and staff have been engaging in ongoing protests against Mubarak-era holdovers in university administration, protests that have intensified after the new government reneged on promised to oust all top university leaders this summer. These new resignations come just weeks before the scheduled start of the new Egyptian academic year.
Only faculty members are eligible to vote in these elections for university administrators, but students are asserting newfound power in the university system as well. Student activists have been at the center of recent campus demonstrations, and a weeklong sit-in at American University in Cairo ended on Monday in victory for student activists. Meanwhile, Egypt’s national union of students held its first leadership elections since the 1970s last month.
Norway held its first elections since the Utoya massacre Monday, and the results show a repudiation of the views — and the party — of the man responsible for the carnage.
It’s been seven weeks since anti-immigration zealot Anders Breivik murdered sixty-nine people at a Labor Party youth retreat on the island of Utoya. Yesterday’s results showed 33.2% of voters supporting Labor candidates, giving that party its best result in a municipal election in two decades. The big swing came on the right, however, as the anti-immigrant Progress Party, of which Breivik was a member until 2006, lost more than a third of its support.
With the Progress Party dropping from 18.5% to 11.8% in the polling, most of its support landed with the Conservative Party, which had been losing ground to Progress in recent years. Labor’s 3.6% jump, however, was enough to give it an overall victory.
Youth voting in Norway also took a big step forward yesterday, as twenty-one municipalities were granted permission to lower their voting age to 16 on a trial basis. More than a hundred local governments applied for permission to participate in the trial, which was offered as a first step toward allowing municipalities to reduce the voting age at their own discretion.
The always-thoughtful danah boyd (those lower case letters are her idea) speaks up for youthful recklessness:
I’m worried about our societal assumption that risk-taking without thinking of the consequences is an inherently bad thing. We need some radical thinking to solve many of the world’s biggest problems. And I don’t believe that it’s so easy to separate out what adults perceive as ‘good’ risk-taking from what they think is ‘bad’ risk-taking. But how many brilliant minds will we destroy by punishing their radical acts of defying authority? How many brilliant minds will we destroy by punishing them for ‘being stupid’? It’s easy to get caught up in a binary of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ when all that you can think about is the consequences. But change has never happened when people simply play by the rules. You have to break the rules to create a better society. And I don’t think that it’s easy to do this when you’re always thinking about the consequences of your actions.
I’m not arguing for anarchy. I’m too old for that. But I am arguing that we should question our assumption that people are better off when they have the cognitive capacity to think through consequences. Or that society is better off when all individuals have that mental capability. From my perspective, there are definitely pros and cons to overthinking and while there are certainly cases where future-aware thought is helpful, there are also cases where it’s not. And I also think that there are some serious consequences of imprisoning youth until they grow up.
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