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Heading down to Washington today for tomorrow’s Campus Progress national conference. I’ll be moderating a panel on students and youth in social justice movements in the United States with Carmen Berkeley of Choice USA (a former US Student Association president), John Halpin of the Center for American Progress, and Evangeline Weiss of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
It should be a really good panel. If you’re going to be at the conference, stop by and say hi!
NOTE: The conference schedule has changed to accommodate Bill Clinton’s schedule (he’s keynoting). Our panel starts at 11:00 now.
Throughout the student movement of the 1960s, most American college students were denied the right to vote.
From the birth of the American republic the voting age had stood at 21. Pressure for earlier voting had been building since 18-year-olds were first drafted in the Second World War, but despite the baby boom, the student movements of the sixties, and the deaths of thousands of Americans under 21 in Korea and Vietnam, reform went nowhere for decades. It was only in May 1970, after National Guard troops shot and killed four students during a protest at Kent State University, that Congress finally took action.
In the aftermath of Kent State, with the nation reeling from the spectacle of its own troops gunning down its own students, the 18-year-old vote was introduced as an amendment to the Voting Rights Act. One senator threatened to filibuster the renewal of the Act if that amendment was not incorporated into it.
The Voting Rights Act, as amended, was signed into law by President Nixon that June. The Supreme Court declared the provision unconstitutional that winter, ruling that Congress didn’t have the power to enfranchise youth in state and local elections, but the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, passed by Congress the following spring and ratified by the states in record time, gave 18-to-20-year-olds the vote for good.
That ratification came forty years ago today.
With the lowering of the voting age, college students became a significant voting bloc in American politics. In the 1970s, for the first time, students could exercise political power not just in the streets, but in the voting booth as well.
A new kind of student politics demanded a new kind of organizing, and so 1971 also saw the creation of the National Student Lobby, America’s first national student-funded, student-directed lobbying organization. State Student Associations (SSAs) and state student lobbies soon followed, making the 1970s an unprecedented boom-time for student electoral organizing.
The SSAs of the 1970s transformed American politics and higher education forever, altering the balance of power between students and educational institutions while giving students a voice in state and national politics that reached far beyond the campus.
Happy birthday, youth voting!
If you thought the end of the school year meant no more grass-roots student agitation until fall, you thought wrong. Not gonna happen. Not this year. Yesterday students in California and Wisconsin, two of the country’s most active states, held targeted protests, and there’s more on the horizon.
In California, students at UCLA staged a campus march and sit-in to protest plans to suspend free tutoring services at the university’s Covel Commons. The group, who had timed their action to get noisy only during scheduled breaks between final exams, met with a vice chancellor and took steps to keep the pressure on in the weeks to come.
More on what’s happening in Wisconsin later today…
“The events we’re seeing are happening because this university is not a community of students and teachers as it should be. Instead it’s an institution run by professional managers who have other interests. The security police on campus should serve the students and faculty. Instead they are hostile and contemptuous towards them, and often harass them. As for the administration, it should be in the employ of students and faculty, not the other way around. The students have rebelled against the administration because it identifies itself with all the outside forces that the students oppose.”
–Harvard professor Jeremy Larner, 1970
Nine activists, seven of them students, were arrested at Ohio State University yesterday afternoon at the offices of university president Gordon Gee. The nine were part of a group of more than a hundred who had gathered to protest OSU’s relationship with campus contractor Sodexo.
The activists were affiliated with the OSU chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops, a national organization whose members have mounted nearly a dozen major campus protests across the country in recent weeks. USAS was spurred to action by reports of Sodexo worker rights abuses in at least five countries, as well as reports of mistreatment by Sodexo workers at OSU’s own sports stadium.
Western Washington University last week broke ties with Sodexo in the face of a USAS-led campaign, while administrators at Emory and the University of Washington have arrested students peacefully protesting against the company.
studentactivism.net 
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