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September 2 Update: Well, this sucks. A Slate investigation has concluded that Roxanne Shante’s story of her life after hip hop is pretty much all fake. Literally almost all of it. It’s mind-boggling.
Whoever drew up Roxanne Shante’s contract at Warner Music in 1984 probably figured he’d earned his bonus.
Shante, a 14-year-old MC from Queens, had a big hit that fall with “Roxanne’s Revenge,” an early hip-hop smash. But though the song sold hundreds of thousands of copies and Shante went on to make two albums for Warner, she never saw much in the way of royalties.
The one upside of her contract, from Shante’s perspective, was a clause committing Warner to pay all of her educational expenses … for life.
Warner most likely assumed that there wasn’t much chance they’d have to pay out much under that clause — Shante was a kid from the projects, and a single mom at 14. And when she did decide to go to college five years later, Warner gave her the run-around.
But Shante found an administrator at Marymount Manhattan College who was willing to give her a hand. Marguerita Grecco, Marymount’s dean, helped Shante to press Warner to make good, and let her take classes for free while she negotiated.
Warner eventually blinked after Shante threatened to go public, and the label wound up paying not only for her undergraduate schooling but also for the Cornell doctorate in Psychology that Shante earned in 2001. (All in all, they wound up paying out $217,000 for her educational expenses.)
Today Shante has a therapy practice serving the black community, owns an ice cream parlor in Queens, and funds a $5000 annual college scholarship for female rappers.
(Hat tips to PostBourgie and Hoyden About Town.)
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 the 18-year-old vote had been building since 18-year-old men 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, voting age 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 brought the issue to a vote, and even then it was only because of the actions of Senators Ted Kennedy and Mike Mansfield.
In the aftermath of Kent State, with the nation reeling from the spectacle of its own troops gunning down its own students, Kennedy and Mansfield moved decisively. They introduced the 18-year-old vote as an amendment to the Voting Rights Act, and Mansfield threatened to filibuster the renewal of the Act if that amendment was not incorporated into it.
Kennedy and Mansfield won that battle, and 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, soon gave 18-to-20-year-olds the vote for good.
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.
This shift in the American political landscape will not be a part of the headlines commemorating Ted Kennedy’s life. It will not be mentioned in most of his obituaries. And of course Kennedy was just one part of the process that brought that transformation into being — the overwhelming majority of the work of the Seventies student revolution was carried out by student activists whose names are lost to history.
But Senator Kennedy did play a crucial role at a crucial moment, and in that respect these changes are part of his legacy as well.
Via Kevin Prentiss (@kprentiss on Twitter) comes a link to the University of North Alabama’s Sidewalk Chalk Reservation Form.
The form states — in all caps, bolded, and underlined — that “chalking on university sidewalks requires reservations and approval from designated building supervisors or other assigned personnel.”
Chalking also requires, according to the form, advance notice and reservation of space. It requires compliance with a five-point list of restrictions, including a prohibition on chalking near doorways, near the university amphitheater, or with non-pastel chalk. “Chalking,” it states, “is only to be used to beautify the image of the UNA campus and to promote the organization using it.” Violation of any of the above rules will, according to the form, subject the organization responsible to a fine “in excess of $150.”
Over on Twitter, Kevin is a little abashed about linking to the form (“Apologies to the uni involved. I’m sure this is common.”), but I’ve got no such qualms. This is no way to run a university. Hell, it’d be no way to run a junior high.
The university is a community, and its public spaces are, in a very real sense, student space. If a little chalk dust gets tracked into the dining hall, or folks attending a concert at the amphitheater have to run a gauntlet of chalked announcements for Take Back the Night and the chemistry club semi-formal, that goes with the territory. It’s part of being a university.
UNA hands out the Sidewalk Chalk Reservation form — and free chalk! — at its Office of Student Engagement. But you can’t foster student engagement by treating students like guests. When you make students fill out a form to reserve sidewalk space for chalking. You’re telling them that they’re interlopers on campus. You’re telling them that this is your university, not theirs.
And you shouldn’t be surprised when they decide to take it back.
There’s a great article up at the MediaShift blog about student newspapers and online publishing.
According to one recent study, more than a third of college papers are still print-only. The MediaShift post looks at why that is, what the barriers to publishing online are, and why it’s so important to make the effort.
The whole thing is worth reading, but here are a few excerpts:
Make no mistake, college news is a messy business. Students are learning, and their mistakes all too often show up in print. An online presence will broadcast those mistakes to the world, so the theory goes. Also, a college that supports student press freedoms when distributed to 2,000 people on campus might not be so keen to distribute “bad news” about the campus when the whole world is watching.
[But] staying offline is a disservice to student journalists who cannot use the online tools now widespread in the industry. A student who can’t put material online can’t really understand the impact of social networks like Twitter or Facebook to spread news. They can’t really understand what it is to create a personal brand. And they can’t really understand the challenges of multimedia production.
A college that will not allow their student journalists to practice online journalism in a “real world” setting is abandoning its commitment to education in order to save face. And that is a tragedy not only for the college, but for the students who look to higher education to prepare them for the future.
Good stuff. And I’d add that a paper-only student newspaper is going to lose on-campus readership, particularly at a commuter campus, sequester itself from broader regional and national debates, and cut itself and its readership off from its own history.
Keeping a student paper offline isn’t just a disservice to the students who work on the paper, it’s a disservice to students who are doing organizing and activism on the campus as well.
Update: Butch Oxendine makes some excellent points in comments. An excerpt:
[Student newspapers] will maintain their relevance by specifically writing about campus-based issues, problems, and news that no one else is covering and reporting on. They will maintain their relevance by pulling the plug on the use of “wire” service reports from the Associated Press, etc.
Student newspapers must evolve. They’re not doing it well now. In tight economic times, more of them every year are being shut down. If they don’t have a web presence, they won’t be ready for this transition.
I haven’t posted much about the Russell Athletic story this last while, but I got an email yesterday from United Students Against Sweatshops that demonstrates that their work has really been moving forward.
When I posted last, in early May, USAS had won fifty-seven campus disaffiliations from Russell over the course of the spring semester in protest of the apparel company’s labor policies in Honduras, specifically its decision to close a newly-unionized factory Jerzees de Honduras factory in the wake of its unionization.
Since then, nearly thirty more campuses have joined the Russell boycott, bringing the total to eighty-four. New recruits to the cause include merchandising bigwigs the University of Arizona, Brown, Louisville, the University of Florida, and North Carolina State. USAS is now calling this “the largest collegiate boycott of an apparel company in history.”
You can follow the story as it develops at USAS’s Boycott Russell Athletic blog, which I’ve added to our blogroll today.
studentactivism.net 
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