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In a 2002 interview Judge Sonia Sotomayor said that she felt “isolated … and very unsure about how I would survive” as an undergraduate at Princeton, and that campus organizations for students of color “provided me with an anchor I needed to ground myself in that new and different world.”
Sotomayor grew up poor in the Bronx, and she discovered in her first semester at Princeton that her educational background “was not on par with that of many of my classmates.” She became involved in Accion Puertorriquena, a Puerto Rican student organization, and the campus’s Third World Center, and she credits “the third-world students who preceded me and those who had supported me while I was at Princeton” for helping her to thrive on campus.
The complete article, from Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education, is not online, but extended excerpts can be found here.
I’m going to be speaking at a media conference at Hunter College this Saturday, as part of a panel called “Media for Student Activism: Building Networks, Building Movements.”
The NYC Grassroots Media Conference will feature more than forty panels in four sessions, on subjects ranging from managing online communities to queer youth media. It’s going to be an amazing conference, and student registration is only fifteen bucks!
I’m really excited about our panel too. It’s called Media for Student Activism: Building Networks, Building Movements, and I’ll be talking about Twitter and blogs. We’ve also got a documentarian, a Labor Studies prof, and two undergraduate student activists on board, each of whom will be bringing something of their own to the group.
More on the panel (and the conference) later this week.
A new article on segregated high school proms in the Deep South — which are still going on today — reveals a lot about the myths and realities of racism in America.
The article, from today’s New York Times Magazine, concentrates on Montgomery County High School, a small school in a southern Georgia community that’s about two-thirds white. The school itself didn’t integrate until 1971, and its proms have been segregated ever since.
Or rather, its white prom has been segregated. The students refer to the proms as “the black-folks prom” and “the white-folks prom,” but the black-folks prom is open to anyone, and it’s not uncommon for a few white students to show up. As with historical segregation, the point of the whites-only prom is less to keep the races separate than maintain whites-only space.
Another important fact about the proms is that it’s mostly white parents, not white students, who are behind the segregation. As one student told the Times, white parents tell their kids, “if you’re going with the black people, I’m not going to pay for it.”
At the same time, though, the article doesn’t let the white students off the hook. As one black student notes, “half of those girls, when they get home, they’re gonna text a black boy.” That’s white privilege right there — participating in a exclusionary racist institution one moment, re-engaging with your black friends the next, and in many cases not even noticing the transition from one to the other.
Since their founding in the 19th century, California’s public colleges and universities have been tuition free for in-state students. For the last several decades, however, “tuition free” has been a hoax.
Over the course of the 20th century legislators and administrators imposed more and more new fees on California’s students, and in the 1960s and after those fees grew to match the tuition charged at other states’ universities. No politician wanted to be responsible for “ending free tuition” in the state, though, so today students pay nearly $4500 a semester in fees — including a $3130 “Educational Fee” — instead.
This kind of political cowardice is usually just annoying, but every once in a while it actually causes measurable harm to students, and right now is one of those times.
Congress passed a new GI Bill earlier this spring that pays the tuition of US veterans. The bill covers the full cost of tuition and fees at public institutions, and uses public tuition and fee rates to determine reimbursement rates for privates.
And yes, the tuition and fee rates are calculated separately.
So if you’re a California veteran and you get accepted to Stanford, the GI Bill will cover none of your $24,020 tuition. It will, however, cover all of your $84 student government fee. (In fact, it’ll cover up to $6,586.54 in fees every semester, far more than Stanford charges any student.)
There’s an effort underway to change the law, but no real movement yet.
Two fascinating elementary school stories this week: A Colorado third-grader has set up a gay rights rally as an independent study project for school, while a California sixth-grader was made to give an oral report on Harvey Milk at lunchtime, instead of in class.
The Colorado story pretty much speaks for itself, but the California one deserves a bit of explanation.
When Natalie Jones, a sixth grader at Mt. Woodson Elementary School near San Diego, chose Harvey Milk as the subject of a class presentation, the principal of MWES decided that her biographical project fell under the school’s “Family Life/Sex Education” regulations. That policy mandates that students’ parents or guardians be notified in writing “before any instruction on family life, human sexuality, AIDS or sexually transmitted diseases is given.”
But the principal didn’t just send out written notice to the parents of Jones’ classmates. She went further.
According to the ACLU, the principal told Jones that she wouldn’t be able to give the presentation at all, then a few days later rescheduled it for a lunch period. When she sent notice, she told them that students would only be allowed to participate with written parental permission.
Eight of Jones’ thirteen classmates attended her presentation.
The ACLU is demanding that the school apologize, clarify the “Family Life/Sex Education” policy, and allow Jones to give her presentation to the entire class in a regular class session. A PDF copy of Jones’ PowerPoint presentation can be found here.
studentactivism.net 
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