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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.
Okay, it’s a bit of a made-up stat. But as the Washington Post reports, there are going to be a lot of students at the inauguration next week.
Inside Higher Ed has an interesting interview up with Ana Martínez Alemán, co-author of the new book Online Social Networking on Campus: Understanding What Matters in Student Culture.
Alemán reminds snooping administrators that “Facebook is student space,” lays out a few reasons why faculty should hesitate before friending students, and considers the future of social networking on campus.
Worth a read.
The leadership and bargaining team of CUPE Local 3903, the union representing strikers at Toronto’s York University, have released a statement to their membership urging them to reject the university’s latest contract offer.
“Once the membership rejects not only this offer,” the letter says, “but also the offensive manner in which it is being forced on us, we will be in an exceptionally strong position to come to a speedy resolution of 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.
The Economist looks at the changing economics of going to college, and how the financial crisis is going to change them more.
Key passage: Private borrowing for college has increased sevenfold in the last decade, and is set to rise even more. But if “a student is going to borrow, it is generally better to go through the government.” As a spokesperson for The Institute for College Access and Success puts it, private loans “really are not a form of student aid … they’re an expensive form of credit.”
The Economist‘s conclusion? “By bailing out some of the private lenders, [Treasury Secretary] Paulson risks giving the seal of government approval to a sometimes dodgy business.”
Update: When a center-right magazine like The Economist sides with students over banks, they’re going to provoke some interesting responses. Here’s my favorite screech from the comments on that piece:
The reality is too many people go to college, it lasts too long (+4 years in the US, only 3 in the UK), too many students study nonsense, and college professors teach too much nonsense. Students spend their 4-5 years taking classes in wine-tasting and astrology to round out their majors in Marxism or Interpretive Dance Theory. […] We NEED student loans to dry up because we need our terrible education system to die and be replaced by something better.
studentactivism.net 
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