Category Archive

A new book with the provocative title Affirmative Action for the Rich takes aim at legacy admissions, the policy by which the children of elite college graduates get preferential treatment when applying to the schools their parents attended.

Legacy admissions have always perpetuated ethnic and economic inequalities in American higher education, and they continue to exert a powerful effect on the demographics of  many of the country’s most competitive colleges and universities. Anyone who wants to talk cogently about affirmative action, financial aid, or the impact of alumni giving on university governance needs to understand the legacy system.

And now you can. Because the authors of Affirmative Action for the Rich have boiled their thesis down to ten bullet points, and unlike most content posted at the Chronicle of Higher Education website, this piece isn’t subscribers-only.

Read Ten Myths About Legacy Preferences in College Admissions. Every senior administrator at your campus already has.

Jim Russell, the Republican Party’s 2008 nominee for Congress in New York’s 18th District — who was, until yesterday, on the party’s congressional ballot again — opposes racially integrated schooling because he believes it will lead to cross-racial sex and thus to “miscegenation.”

In a 2001 essay Russell suggested that school integration proponents “deliberately exploit a biological theory of sexual imprinting at the critical period of sexual maturity,” reinforcing the work of “media moguls who deliberately popularize miscegenation in films directed toward adolescents and pre-adolescents.” Movies with cross-racial romances are, he says, a deliberate plot to undermine “appropriate ethnic boundaries” in the sexual preferences of “white pre-adolescent girls and adolescent young women.”

Really.

Russell, who lost in a landslide in 2008, has been dumped by the Republicans, but remains the Conservative Party candidate for the seat. The district he seeks to represent borders New York City, and more than thirty percent of its residents are people of color.

Update | The article quoted above was published in a white supremacist magazine, and appears to have flown under the radar until this week. But Russell has hardly made his creepy racial/sexual obsessions a secret in his own community. In a 1996 letter to his local daily newspaper, he declared that a “fundamental function” of racial difference in humans was to “protect each race” from cross-mating “as it evolves into a full-fledged species of its own,” and that racial integration was an effort to “deliberately disrupt this natural process” that could easily have “disastrous consequences.”

It should be noted as well that Tom Bock, a Republican candidate for the New York State Assembly, is vouching for Russell, saying he respects the former nominee “for what he stands for and what he does.”

Election Night Update | The Republican Party was ultimately unable to remove Russell from the ballot, and he remained their candidate for the seat. At this writing, incumbent Nita Lowey is beating Russell by a 63-37 margin with 37% of precincts reporting, and is projected to win re-election. Tom Bock, the Assembly candidate who defended Russell, is trailing his opponent as well.

This post is the last in a series of twelve counting down the top dozen student activism stories that will be making news on the American campus in the new academic year. Follow Student Activism on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with all these stories and many more!

When I first conceived this series almost a month ago, I had only a rough idea of which stories would make the cut. It took me about a week to come up with a stack of candidates, and a few more days to cull the list down to twelve. Even after I started writing, I kept messing with the list — bumping some stories up, others down. I even pulled one or two at the last minute to make room for others I’d missed in my first draft.

But there was never any question as to which story was going to take the top slot.

The crisis now facing American public colleges and universities is actually two crises — an ongoing crisis, decades in the making, and an acute crisis now entering its second year.

Public funding for public higher education is disappearing. Tuition and fees are soaring, class sizes are climbing, faculty lines are disappearing. Programs are being slashed. Whole institutions are contemplating abandoning their identity as public colleges and universities.

We are at a crossroads in American public higher education. No story is bigger.

Most of you have probably already seen this, but those of you who haven’t need to.

I posted last week about the ongoing epidemic of anti-gay bullying in our nation’s schools, and about what I’m doing to help stop it. Queer youth are targets for an incredible amount of abuse, and the effects are devastating — a recent wave of highly-publicized suicides are just the tip of the iceberg.

And that’s why I’m so impressed by Dan Savage’s It Gets Better project.

What Dan and his husband have done is put up a video on YouTube talking honestly about their experiences as gay teens — what they faced from their families, their schoolmates, their teachers — and then talking, in detail, about when and how it got better. About how they found communities of support. About how they left the bullies behind. About how their parents’ initial hostility slowly melted into deep love and acceptance.

And then they invited other lesbians, gays, and bisexuals to post their own stories about how things got better for them. It’s a great idea. It’s a great resource. It’s amazing. Yay.

Last Friday I slotted in California’s crackdown on student protest as number four on my list of the top student activism stories of the new year, and that story is already beginning to heat up.

As the invaluable blog Reclaim UC reports, Berkeley held a series of pre-hearing conferences with student protesters last week. By RUC’s account violations of Berkeley’s judicial procedures were rampant — administrators ignored a deadline for bringing charges, scheduled conferences in conflict with confidentiality rules, and adopted internally inconsistent policies as to which version of the code of code of conduct they were relying on.

These issues seem to have prevented the pre-hearings from going forward as originally planned, but a Twitter report from campus says that actual hearings themselves are beginning today nonetheless.

Update | Reclaim UC says today’s hearing has been canceled.