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The country’s ongoing financial crisis is hitting university budgets hard as the new year gets underway, and students across the United States are mobilizing to respond. Four recent reports from the National Student News Service paint the picture:
Students at UC Berkeley demonstrated last week in support of an upcoming faculty walkout. Faculty plan to stage the action on September 24, a week from this Thursday, in protest against state-mandated furloughs that will cut faculty pay for the current year without reducing their workload. Elsewhere in California, students at USC are scrambling in the wake of drastic last-minute reductions to their financial aid packages.
In Michigan, the MSU student government has appointed a Director of University Budgets to conduct an independent study of the university’s financial condition. The student government is meeting with university administrators to advocate for students’ interests in the budgeting process, and the DUB’s analysis will give them an independent student perspective on the numbers they receive from administrators.
Students also tried to roll back cuts at the University of Southern Mississippi, where administrators announced plans in August to dissolve the university’s Economics department and its technical and occupational education program next year, eliminating 12 tenured and tenure-track faculty positions. In that case, student and faculty protest led to a compromise in which five senior Economics faculty agreed to retire and four younger professors were found new homes in the university’s College of Arts and Letters. (The three affected profs in the technical education program were denied reappointment.)
The student fight for funding is shaping up to be the big campus activism story of the fall. More posts on the subject are in the pipeline, and if you’ve got news we may not have heard of, feel free to leave updates and links in comments.
Gabriel Matthew Schivone, a reporter for the University of Arizona at Tucson’s Daily Wildcat, snagged an interview with Noam Chomsky recently, and Chomsky had some interesting things to say about student activism in the sixties and today.
The whole thing — including Schivone’s analysis of the role of protest on the campus — is worth reading, but here are a couple of choice Chomsky quotes:
When people talk about “the sixties,” what they are thinking of is about two years. You know, 1968, 1969, roughly. A little bit before, a little bit later. And it’s true that student activism today is not like those two years. But, on the whole, I think it’s grown since the 1960s. So, take the feminist and the environmental movements. I mean, they’re from the seventies. Take the International Solidarity Movement — that’s from the eighties. Take the Global Justice Movement, which just had another huge meeting in Brazil. That’s from this century. Plenty of students are involved in these things. In fact, the total level of student involvement in various things is probably as huge as it’s ever been, except for maybe the very peak in the 1960s. It’s not what I would like it to be, but it’s far more than it’s been.
Elite sectors and centers of power want students to be passive and apathetic. One of the reasons for the very sharp rise in tuition is to kind of capture students. You know, if you come out of college with a huge debt, you’re gonna have to work it off. I mean, you’re gonna have to become a corporate lawyer or go into business or something. And you won’t have time for engaged activism. The students of the sixties could take off a year or two and devote it to activism and think, ‘Okay, I’ll get back into my career later on.’ Now, that’s much harder today. And not by accident. These are disciplinary techniques.
Good stuff.
This is a very cool thing.
The Students for a Democratic Society wiki news archive that I posted about back in January was down for a while, but it’s back up with a huge amount of new information about local and national SDS activity.
There are eighteen links up for September already, along with a bunch of news from the summer. It’s great stuff. Go check it out.
Starting today, I’ll be posting highlights from the previous week’s twitter feed every weekend. I won’t repost every tweet, and I’ll mostly be concentrating on links — links back to this blog, and also links to other sites.
Here’s the highlights of the last week. Follow @studentactivism on Twitter to get it all as it comes through…
Links to this blog:
U of Michigan professor accused of assaulting student sex worker is back in the classroom: http://bit.ly/2IGEiM
Undercover state police raid dorm party after Facebook page tips them off to underage drinking: http://bit.ly/NjfzG
Howard University student paper meets w/HU prez after#HUProtest, student govt says “no thanks”: http://bit.ly/OB2QG
Oakland University faculty & admin reach deal to end strike after judge orders round-the-clock talks: http://bit.ly/wvPcM
Quote of the Day: Malcolm X at Oxford University, December 3, 1964. http://bit.ly/PGwXr
Someone once said activists should avoid the mistakes of the past and commit the mistakes of the future. #4change
Here’s that “mistakes of the future” quote in full: http://bit.ly/s1Drs #4change
Student govt advocates in India attacked by police, sparking riot and 3-days of campus protests: http://bit.ly/pi4c9
Links to other sites:
Via @JayBeeStarsky, A Pennsylvania college’s tips for surviving a campus mass shooting: http://su.pr/29n457
RT @CoCoSouthLA: SCYEA youth speak about student activism at SF State: http://bit.ly/IHVMs (via @ucLActivist323)
Longtime student/antiwar activist Tom Hayden interviewed on Vietnam and Afghanistan: http://bit.ly/4E4exG
RT @thecurvature: New Post: Some Thoughts on Tucker Max http://bit.ly/wvcYT
U of Wyoming to name center for international students after Dick Cheney: http://bit.ly/12umnR
Two Cal State students are suing over fee increases: http://bit.ly/ADZbp
Public HS coach takes team to church, baptizes them: http://bit.ly/NP4rF
Joe Wilson was re-elected with only 53.6% of the vote in 2008. This is going to get fun quick. http://bit.ly/US2uF
Suddenly, young people are flocking to Twitter: http://bit.ly/2KqfkZ
Yale can’t uncover source of creepy email ranking new female students’ sexual attractiveness: http://bit.ly/rVzy1
This @womanistmusings post is a perfect analysis of the Caster Semenya media firestorm: http://bit.ly/x4Kb5
RT @zephoria: I (heart) @theonion: “Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids”http://bit.ly/1hpJtV
Police forcibly dispersed a student demonstration in the northern Indian city of Allahabad on Wednesday, sparking a retaliatory riot and two more days of protests.
Students from the University of Allahabad, one of India’s oldest universities, were protesting the administration’s refusal to hold elections for AU’s student government, which was dissolved two years ago. Police charged the crowd wielding long wooden canes known as lathi, injuring more than a dozen demonstrators.
Students later took to the streets, vandalizing a number of cars parked in the area. On Thursday police returned to campus in an attempt to arrest 12 of the participants in the Wednesday protest, but left having taken only two into custody.
Students burned a minister in effigy on campus today as protests against the university and the police continued.
Sunday evening update: Protesting students briefly blocked railway tracks in Allahahabad on Friday, and demonstrations continued over the weekend.
studentactivism.net 
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