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The Providence, Rhode Island mayor’s proposal to slap a “student municipal impact fee” on the city’s college students is being introduced as legislation in the RI state legislature.
The student tax, which I discussed here last month, would be an assessment of $150 per semester for all undergraduate and graduate students at the city’s four private universities. It’s intended to help close a multi million dollar municipal budget deficit.
Mayor Cicilline also put forward an alternate funding mechanism — a bill that would allow the city to collect fees directly from its largest tax-exempt institutions (the four universities plus five private hospitals). That bill would permit the assessment of such fees up to twenty-five percent of the taxes that the institutions would pay if they were not exempt.
There’s a good short post up at the law blog The Volokh Conspiracy on the do’s and don’ts of bringing a speaker to campus. (It’s intended for Federalist Society clubs, but most of the advice is universal.)
Here’s the meat of it:
Debates seem to get more of a turnout than lectures.
If you can’t set up a head-to-head debate, set up a two-person panel, or a talk-plus-commentary.
Events that involve a local professor — a debate, a panel, or even the professor’s just introducing a guest speaker — will probably get more of a turnout.
Publicize, publicize, publicize, using all the tools at your disposal — e-mail, flyers in mailboxes, postings on bulletin boards, postings on class chalkboards, if your school allows that, and whatever else you can think of.
For topics, the usual sexy ones are good: affirmative action, gun control, abortion, church-state separation, campaign finance, and the like. Other topics can work as well, especially if you can find a well-known visitor. But generally speaking the old standards work well.
If you want to bring in a relatively prominent speaker from out of town, offer to coordinate with other chapters in your city, so that the speaker can give several talks on one trip.
Provide lunch — the better, the better.
June 4 update: Although it wasn’t the point of this post, I should probably mention that I’m available for campus speaking engagements myself.
These nine statements were the basis of my presentation at the NYC Grassroots Media Conference this afternoon. (And yes, they’re all 140 characters or less.)
1. IT’S EASY. It’s simple to join Twitter, and simple to post. You can do it at the spur of the moment.
2. IT’S IMMEDIATE. Readers will see what you write in minutes. If you’re making news, Twitter gets your news out NOW.
3. IT’S OPEN. Anyone interested in what you’re doing can find you, and you can find people talking about the same stuff.
4. IT’S CONNECTED. Twitter encourages conversation and builds relationships. It lets you make contacts outside your circle.
5. IT’S FLEXIBLE. Twitter lets you integrate media. You can post photos, video, links, blog content, use it as message board, chatroom.
6. IT’S CONCISE. 140 characters forces you to speak clearly and forcefully to an open-ended audience.
7. IT’S CUMULATIVE. Twitter followers tend to be “sticky,” so connections accumulate without intensive effort.
8. IT’S SUSTAINABLE. Blogging can be a chore, but since you don’t need to maintain by regular posting, Twitter isn’t an energy suck.
9. IT’S NEW. Nobody knows for sure where it’s going, and lots of folks are eager to find out. That’s an opening, in all sorts of ways.
On CNN yesterday, former GOP Congressman Tom Tancredo said that the National Council of La Raza, the Latino civil rights organization of which Judge Sonia Sotomayor is a member, is “a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses.” His evidence?
The logo of La Raza is ‘All for the race. Nothing for the rest.’
One big problem with that. The motto of the National Council of La Raza is “Strengthening America by promoting the advancement of Latino families.” (Their logo, if anyone’s wondering, can be seen in this photo of John McCain’s speech to their 2008 national convention.)
Oops.
The phrase Tancredo had in mind, “Por La Raza todo, fuera de La Raza nada,” appears in a 1969 poem/manifesto associated with the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), a Chicano student activist group.
MEChA is a loose federation of campus-based student organizations, some more radical than others. California politician Cruz Bustamente was a MEChA member as an undergraduate at Fresno State University in the 1970s, and he got in hot water with conservatives during his 2003 campaign for governor for refusing to repudiate the group.
MEChA and NCLR could hardly be more different.
I’ve just returned from my doctoral commencement ceremony. Posting will resume tomorrow.
studentactivism.net 
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