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Here’s an excellent project.
Students for a Democratic Society has set up a wiki page for links to news coverage of SDS events and actions. The page is set up chronologically, so it’s easy to see what’s new, and easy to check up on what was going on at any particular time.
Since it’s a wiki, of course, anyone can add anything to it whenever they like. And it’s not just for traditional media coverage, either — I learned about it when the page linked to a December post of ours on the aftermath of a Brown SDS protest.
The page is part of a larger SDS wiki that I haven’t had a chance to explore much yet, but what I have seen I really like.
A morning grab-bag of stuff on the York University strike…
- Our post from last night on the announcement that a date has been set for the contract vote.
- An article from the Globe and Mail newspaper about an anti-strike Facebook group.
- A union parody of the York University website.
- The York Federation of Students has established a strike relief fund.
- The Toronto Star is running a series of profiles of students affected by the strike.
To keep tabs on our ongoing coverage of the York strike, check out our Labor category archives, or just bookmark our main page.
Last August, Mother Jones magazine ran a spread on campus activism that included a timeline of “Student Activism Firsts.”
It was a fluff piece, obviously thrown together pretty quickly and without much interest in historical accuracy, and like many such pieces it treated student activism as something that began in the sixties. I took a few notes with the idea of putting up an annotated version of the timeline, pointing out some of the more obvious mistakes, but I never got around to finishing it.
As I was preparing the Hillary Clinton/Carry Nation story last month, though, I stumbled across something that really jumped out at me.
In the course of researching that post, I Googled temperance campus prank photo, trying to remember what campus the Carry Nation prank had taken place on. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did find this.
That’s the index of the Oberlin College Archives, and as I flipped through it looking for temperance materials, I stumbled across a reference to a folder titled “Temperance ‘Sit-in,’ 1882.”
Huh.
As the strike at York University moves into its third month, the university has moved to force a vote on their latest offer, against the wishes of the union they have been negotiating with.
Under Ontario law, the university may call a vote on an offer on the table once during negotiations. The Ontario Labor Relations Board will now make arrangements for the vote, which is expected to take place in the next seven to ten days. It has been estimated that it will take 72 hours to reopen the university after any agreement is reached.
Each of the three striking units — Teaching Assistants, contract faculty, and Graduate Assistants — will vote separately on the plan, with a majority “yes” vote required to approve the contract for each unit.
York used the same tactic in a similar strike eight years ago. Then, contract faculty approved the offer but TAs rejected it, negotiating a separate settlement.
Update: Here are the university’s statement on its decision to force a vote, and the union’s response, taken from its strike blog.
Second Update: This post is just one in a growing series of studentactivism.net posts on the York University strike, but somehow it wound up with pride of place in Google. To keep tabs on our ongoing coverage of the strike, check out our Labor category archives or our main page.
Here’s the latest on the strike at Toronto’s York University, which has largely shuttered the campus since November 6:
The striking union rejected the university’s latest offer last night, and negotiations are set to resume today. Some university community members have called on the Ontario legislature to force the strikers back to work, but the legislature is currently in recess, and will be for another month.
And here are some local resources on the strike:
A student blog that describes itself as “a neutral atmosphere for discussions about the strike.”
The website and facebook group of a group calling for binding arbitration to resolve the dispute — a position the university endorses and the union opposes.
The official websites of York University and the striking union local, and the union’s strike blog.
To keep tabs on our ongoing coverage of the York strike, check out our Labor category archives, or just bookmark our main page.
studentactivism.net 
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