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When I was in Minneapolis giving my talk last weekend, I mentioned one of my favorite books on American students: Sex in the Heartland
A lot of folks at the conference were interested in what I had to say about Bailey’s work, and a number of them asked me for information about the book, so if you click the link above, it’ll take you to a page where you can order Sex in the Heartland through Amazon. It’s a great book, and I very much recommend it.
So last night, in the final question of the final debate, the presidential candidates finally got around to discussing education. A full debate transcript is available here, and I’ve cut-and-pasted the higher education portions of their answers behind the cut.
I’m going to be giving a keynote address at the fall conference of the Minnesota State College Student Association this weekend, and one of the things I’ll be talking about is the effect of voting rights on the history of American student activism.
Until the passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment in 1971, the voting age in the US was 21, which means that throughout the huge waves of campus activism of the 1930s and 1960s, the vast majority of American college students were denied the vote on the basis of their age.
The effect of this disfranchisement on the course of student activism has received little attention in most histories of American student protest, and the effect of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment on the course of later activism still less. It’s a topic I devote a bit of attention to in my dissertation, and one I’m looking forward to discussing with the folks in Minneapolis.
The New York Times reported yesterday that the troubled Wachovia bank has restricted colleges’ and universities’ access to a $9.3 billion fund in which more than a thousand American higher education insitutions have money invested.
On Monday, Wachovia announced that it has cash on hand to cover just 26% of investments in the fund, and that it would be capping withdrawals from the fund at 10% of any institution’s stake.
For some small colleges the fund represents a major portion of their short-term investments. The University of Vermont, for instance, told the Times that half of its $79 million in liquid operating funds was held by Wachovia.
Monday’s action raised concerns about the safety of other investment funds serving colleges and universities in a general climate of financial uncertainty. In an unrelated move, Boston University on Tuesday announced that it was suspending all hiring except for public safety officers effective immediately, and that it was halting all new construction on campus for the indefinite future.
It was reported last night that Sarah Palin, when asked by Katie Couric to discuss a Supreme Court case other than Roe v. Wade, couldn’t come up with a single one.
In the course of a discussion of this piece of news, a friend of mine mentioned the case Wisconsin v. Yoder, which I was vaguely familiar with, but hadn’t ever read, and so I went and looked it up.
Yoder was a 1972 case in which, to quote Wikipedia, “the United States Supreme Court found that Amish children could not be placed under compulsory education past 8th grade, as it violated their parents’ fundamental right to freedom of religion.” The case was decided in a unanimous 7-0 ruling, but Justice William O. Douglas filed a partial dissent, and it’s that dissent which makes the case relevant to this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The Court’s analysis assumes that the only interests at stake in the case are those of the Amish parents on the one hand, and those of the State on the other. The difficulty with this approach is that, despite the Court’s claim, the parents are seeking to vindicate not only their own free exercise claims, but also those of their high-school-age children. … On this important and vital matter of education, I think the children should be entitled to be heard. While the parents, absent dissent, normally speak for the entire family, the education of the child is a matter on which the child will often have decided views. He may want to be a pianist or an astronaut or an oceanographer. To do so he will have to break from the Amish tradition. It is the future of the students, not the future of the parents, that is imperiled by today’s decision. … It is the student’s judgment, not his parents’, that is essential if we are to give full meaning to what we have said about the Bill of Rights and of the right of students to be masters of their own destiny. If he is harnessed to the Amish way of life by those in authority over him and if his education is truncated, his entire life may be stunted and deformed. The child, therefore, should be given an opportunity to be heard before the State gives the exemption which we honor today.
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