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The second day of the USSA Congress got underway with meetings of the Association’s regions, where delegates planned strategy for the Congress and began the process of choosing regional officers. Next up on the agenda was a “Triple SAC” session — a meeting of the State and Systemwide Student Association Coalition (SSSAC).
State and systemwide student associations have been a major force in American student organizing ever since the voting age was lowered to 18 in the early 1970s, allowing undergraduates to take a direct role in lobbying and electoral organizing for the first time. SSAs have long been a backbone of USSA, serving as a link between the campus and the national organization and providing student activists with experience organizing and politicking beyond the campus. More than fifty students from at least seven SSAs from around the country were present at yesterday’s Triple SAC meeting, where the group agreed on a set of proposals to present to Friday’s plenary and nominated candidates for SSSAC’s chair and vice chair, who serve on the USSA board of directors.
Nominations for USSA’s officers followed at lunch. Sitting vice president Gregory Cendana declared his candidacy for presidency, as has become traditional in the Association, and was unopposed. Also unopposed is vice presidential candidate Lindsay McCluskey, a recent graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the chair of USSA’s New England region. As an undergrad Lindsay helped found her state’s new SSA and served as student representative to the University of Massachusetts board of trustees.
In the early afternoon USSA’s National Women’s Student Coalition (NWSC) and National People of Color Student Coalition (NPCSC) met in back-to-back sessions, with “ally” meetings held at the same time. USSA’s ally meetings are an opportunity for students who are not members of the Association’s identity-based caucuses, but consider themselves supporters of those caucuses’ work, to meet to discuss issues relating to the caucuses’ missions. I attended both of yesterday’s ally sessions, helping to facilitate the white students’ meeting, and came away impressed as always.
Dinner on Wednesday was a banquet sponsored by Google, who sent a representative to talk about the company’s Google Books service, which is currently awaiting judicial review of a proposed settlement to a lawsuit filed by authors’ and publishers’ groups. Google is looking to dramatically expand online access to books that are in copyright but out of print, but court approval of their proposal is not yet assured.
More caucus sessions followed dinner, including meetings of the National Queer Student Coalition and eight smaller caucuses. Two of five evening workshops discussed the DREAM Act, a bill that would provide a path to legal permanent residency for many undocumented immigrant youth. The DREAM Act was a major USSA legislative priority in 2008-09, and will likely come to a vote in the House and Senate in the coming year.
The Congress agenda for Wednesday wrapped up after midnight, and sessions began again at 9 o’clock this morning. Today sees more workshops and caucus meetings, along with the deadline for submitting proposals for tomorrow’s plenary sessions. The candidates for USSA’s presidency and vice presidency will make speeches and answer questions over lunch.
Previously: USSA Congress 2009, Day One
As I noted in my last post, the 62nd annual USSA Congress kicked off yesterday.
Final registration numbers aren’t in yet, but it’s already clear that the Congress is bigger and more representative of the nation’s students than it’s been in quite a while. There are something like two hundred students here, from all corners of the United States — research universities and community colleges, urban and rural schools alike. It’s a good, robust, dynamic crowd.
The first item on the Congress agenda was an afternoon meeting of the 2008-09 USSA Board of Directors, followed by a dinner at which the Association’s officers and David Barrow, the president of the Australian National Union of Students, spoke. Barrow gave a strong speech on the need for global student solidarity, which I’ve invited him to publish on this blog.
After dinner the delegates split into five groups for informational sessions on USSA, the Congress, and how to run an organizing campaign back on campus in the fall.
Today begins with regional meetings, and continues with workshops and meetings of the Association’s largest caucuses, which known as affiliates: the State and System Student Association Coalition, the National Women’s Student Coalition, the National People of Color Student Coalition, and the National Queer Student Coalition.
For the last three of these, “allies spaces” in which students who are not part of the affiliates but identify as allies of their organizing will be held while the affiliate meetings are going on. (I’m going to be co-facilitating the allies space of the National People of Color Student Coalition, and I’m really looking forward to it.) Officer nominations are also today, at lunch.
Update: Obviously I can’t be everywhere at once, so if I’ve missed anything, Congress participants should feel free to post about their own experiences in comments.
More than a quarter of American colleges are now charging processing fees to students who pay their tuition with credit cards, and the practice is becoming more common.
Colleges typically pay credit card companies a 2% fee to handle such transactions, and with budgets shrinking, they are increasingly passing those fees — along with a surcharge, in some cases — on to students.
Virginia’s George Mason University, where half of all students pay by credit card, is imposing a new 2.75% fee for credit card use. The university’s controller expects that the change will produce revenue of $1.5 million a year.
July 14 update: Now comes word (from @globecampus on Twitter) that some Canadian students are banning such transactions entirely. As of September, Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia will prohibit the use of credit cards for tuition payments, in a move that may generate as much as $1 million in annual savings.
A San Jose State University computer science student has won a victory in a struggle over control of his academic work.
Kyle Brady was threatened with punishment by a professor for posting code he had written for a class assignment online. (Brady wanted to make his code available to other programmers, his prof thought that making it public would facilitate cheating among students who were given the same assignment in the future.) Brady appealed his prof’s decision, and the university took his side.
As Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow says, this ruling affirms fundamental principles about the teacher/student relationship:
Profs — including me, at times — fall into the lazy trap of wanting to assign rotework that can be endlessly recycled as work for new students. But the convenience of profs must be secondary to the pedagogical value of the university experience. … Students work harder when the work is meaningful, when it has value other than as a yardstick for measuring their comprehension.
That’s worth saying again, I think. “The convenience of profs must be secondary to the pedagogical value of the university experience.” Exactly.
A study of forty thousand American college students finds that gays, lesbians, and bisexuals are more likely to place importance on political activism than straights, and that gay and bisexual men are more likely to be involved with student organizations. (LGB students were also more likely to value participation in the arts.)
The study, which was just published in the Economics of Education Review, is only available publicly as a pricey ($31.50) download. The above info is from the article’s abstract, and if I can get library access to it, I’ll bring you more details.
studentactivism.net 
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