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I’ve known about Scarleteen for a few years now, and I’m still bowled over by them. Scarleteen is a sexuality education and advice organization for young people, and it’s absolutely incredible. It’s a website with a huge library of great information. It’s a set of online forums where young folks can go to ask hard questions and get thoughtful answers. It’s a Twitter feed and Facebook page with tens of thousands of followers, and a database of right-on service providers. Above all it’s Heather Corinna, who’s an amazing resource for young people and people who care about them.
Scarleteen is a national treasure, seriously. All oriented toward one project — helping young people navigate issues of sexuality and sexual identity in a healthy, sustaining, affirming way.
And here’s the most astounding part: The organization reached five million people last year … and they did it with a total budget of less than $45,000.
It’s incredible. But unfortunately it’s not sustainable. In order to keep Scarleteen going and make it everything it can and should be, the organization needs more resources, which means it needs more money.
If you’re a regular reader of this site, you know that asking for money isn’t something I do. It’s not my thing. But for Scarleteen I’ll make an exception.
If you give Scarleteen a penny — a single penny — you give them the resources to reach one person. A dollar reaches more than a hundred. Ten bucks keeps them going for a whole hour.
An hour of Scarleteen, a thousand people helped, for ten bucks. Which means that if you give them twenty bucks a month for a year, then for one entire day all of Scarleteen, the whole thing, will happen because of you.
Maybe you won’t save someone’s life, but maybe you will. Maybe you won’t keep someone from getting pregnant, but maybe you will. Maybe you won’t help a fifteen-year-old get out of an abusive relationship, or help someone come out to their dad, or let someone know they can love their body, but maybe you will.
I don’t remember the last time I did a charitable solicitation on this blog — maybe never. But this is a big deal. I support Scarleteen, and I hope you will too.
Click here for more info on what Scarleteen does and how you can help. Click here to read what folks they’ve helped have to say about them. And then click here to throw them some money.
And if you do give them some money, any amount at all, let me know here or on Twitter, and I’ll give them another dollar myself.
A few weeks back I wrote up some thoughts on one of the classic essays in American student activist history — Ray Glass’s “Are Student Governments Obsolete?” In that piece I argued that there was a strange paradox lurking in Glass’s repudiation of the student government model in favor of voluntary student unions, since Glass himself had helped to found one of the most important and effective statewide student associations the nation has ever seen — an organization funded through mandatory dues with student governments as its membership base.
In the course of exploring this contradiction I took issue with some of Glass’s criticisms of mandatory dues structures in the labor movement, quoting one historian’s suggestion that if “the price of civilization is taxes, the price of unionism is solidarity. And, yes, that does involve coercing people to contribute to the union.”
Patrick St. John at For Student Power has written a really worthwhile response to that, in which he pushes back — quite convincingly — against my assessment of the role of mandatory dues in the labor context. “When an organization’s bureaucracy has become calcified and disconnected from its members over the years, thanks to guaranteed revenue,” Patrick writes, the organization can “collapse under its own weight” at the first moment of challenge.
He continues:
“Like most unions, student governments are handed a large pot of money at the beginning of the year without necessarily having done anything to actually earn it — regardless of whether the last election had 90% turnout or 2% … understanding the conservative and bureaucratic tendencies that automatic dues can engender is crucial to avoiding the pitfalls that so many fighting organizations inadvertently run headlong into.”
This is important stuff, and well worth saying. Anyone who’s ever spent any time at all around student government is familiar with the phenomenon Patrick describes, and the insularity, disconnectedness, and lack of accountability that typifies student government is surely one of the American student movement’s greatest challenges. But even so, as Ray Glass himself demonstrated, such student governments can be mobilized to do great things, and I think it’s worth spending some time contemplating why that is — and under what circumstances it happens.
It makes sense to criticize student governments’ lack of accountability, as Glass and St. John do, but in some weird ways that lack of accountability may be worth standing up for. A student government isn’t just its elected leadership — not just the president and officers and assembly that get so much deserved and undeserved flak. It’s also the other projects that those folks facilitate — on my undergraduate campus, SUNY Binghamton, the student activity fee, administered by our student association, funded not only all our student clubs, but also the student newspaper, and the radio station, and a campus bus service, and all sorts of other stuff as well. (For a while we controlled the budget for campus athletics, too, but that’s a story for a different day.)
The mandatory activity fee is a large pot of money, but even in poorly-run student governments a tremendous amount of that money typically winds up going to vitally important student organizations that wouldn’t find much funding any other way. At Binghamton today (according to a 2010 budget I just Googled), the student-run bus system gets more than $400,000 a year, a student-run ambulance service gets $100,000, and programming gets nearly $200,000.
And that’s before you get to the three quarters of a million dollars a year that goes to Binghamton’s hundreds of student clubs. More than twenty thousand each to the Black Student Union, Asian Student Union, Latin American Student Union, and Jewish Student Union. Seventy-five hundred to the Rainbow Pride Union. Thousands apiece to Students for Students International and the Women’s Center and the Children’s Dance Theater and the Thurgood Marshall black pre-law organization. And a few hundred each to dozens more, from the Society of Women Engineers to the College Libertarians.
That’s a huge amount of under-the-radar grassroots student activity, and most of it would disappear if even half of Binghamton’s students declined to pay a voluntary student fee. (Student government election turnout at Binghamton today averages about 15%, which means that non-voters supply the student association with nearly $1.9 million of its annual $2.2 million budget.)
Yes, it would be possible to keep rates of participation in a voluntary fee up, and yes the organizing work required would likely bring a higher profile and greater engagement to the work of the student government. But it would also consume a tremendous amount of time and energy, time and energy that was devoted to restoring most of the funding that nearly every American student government — the finest and most engaged as well as the least competent — now wields as a matter of course.
When I served on Binghamton’s student association budget committee as a 20-year-old undergraduate, I was one of a dozen elected students who spent two weeks meeting with representatives of nearly two hundred clubs to recommend how to divide up more than a million dollars in student money. When we got done, we presented our proposal to the student assembly, who spent some ten hours hearing from dozens of those groups again, going over the budget line by line, hammering out a plan to provide students with the support they needed to do all of the hundreds of different things — from tutoring struggling undergrads to providing safe spaces for underrepresented student communities to playing intramural touch football — that they wanted to do in the coming year. (What they wanted to do. Not what some student affairs administrator wanted them to do, what they wanted to do, and what their fellow students wanted to support them in doing.)
That’s student community. That’s student engagement. That’s student organizing. That’s student power. And it’s made possible by student government, an institution that many activists — back then and today — spurn as pointless, ineffectual, and hollow.
Those criticisms aren’t completely misplaced, of course — much of the work that student governments do is pointless, ineffectual, and hollow. But if you believe, as I wrote in my Ray Glass essay,
that every American campus should have a student union “which so overwhelmingly speaks for students that it becomes recognized by the university as the exclusive collective bargaining agent for students on all matters affecting the students of that university as students,” then the events of the last four decades suggest that you have to entertain the idea that building a robust, democratic mechanism for implementing mandatory dues schemes is a valid, even essential, organizing goal. And if that’s your goal, you have to at least contemplate the possibility that student government organizing may be the path most likely to get you there.
In my next post I’ll talk a bit more about why I believe in that route, and what shape I picture such organizing taking.
Opposition to a panel on Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians scheduled to take place at Brooklyn College tomorrow has led a surprisingly long list of New York City politicians to threaten funding to that CUNY college, and though some are backing down in the face of criticism from supporters of free speech and academic freedom, others are stepping up their attacks.
In a January 29 letter to Brooklyn College president Karen Gould, ten members of the New York City Council said that the event — a discussion of the pro-Palestinian Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) movement — was not “what the taxpayers of this city … want their tax dollars to be spent on.” Though they “believe in the principle of academic freedom,” the signatories declared, “we also believe in the principle of not supporting schools whose programs we, and our constituents, find to be odious and wrong.”
This barely-veiled threat to public funding for the City University of New York was greeted with shock and outrage by many members of the university community. Gould subsequently re-iterated her support for the panel’s campus sponsors, while CUNY chancellor Matthew Goldstein said that although he was “appalled by the aims of the boycott, sanctions, and divestment movement,” he was “committed to the expression of the full complement of perspectives on critical issues,” and urged those who had not yet shown their support for Gould and Brooklyn College “to stand up and be heard.”
In the days that followed, two of the ten signers of the city council letter withdrew their endorsement of it, and a third is rumored to be ready to follow. Just yesterday, however, State Assembly member Dov Hikind declared that he had “reached out to individual Brooklyn College trustees and major donors in an effort to convince Brooklyn College President Karen Gould of her grave error.”
With the panel now just thirty hours away, and the top officials of the college and university on record in staunch support of its being held as scheduled, prospects for cancellation or alteration seem remote. If the event is held as scheduled, the politicians who have threatened CUNY’s funding will need to decide whether they are actually willing to harm New York City’s most important higher educational institution over a political dispute.
From Notre Dame’s official statement on the apparent hoaxing of their star player by a woman pretending to be his online girlfriend:
“While the proper authorities will continue to investigate this troubling matter, this appears to be, at a minimum, a sad and very cruel deception.”
From Notre Dame’s football coach’s official statement on the suicide of a nineteen-year-old who had nine days earlier reported being sexually assaulted by a member of his team:
“I am not going to get into the specifics.”
You can read the full statements by Notre Dame and their football coach on the death of Lizzy Seeberg here. Neither expresses sorrow, regret, or anger at her death.
The player alleged to have sexually assaulted Seeberg was never disciplined by the team or the school. He remains on the team today, and played in its national championship game last week.
The academic journal repository JSTOR, whose archives Aaron Swartz was under federal indictment for allegedly breaching when he committed suicide yesterday, released a supportive and laudatory statement on his death this evening. In a strange and somehow beautiful irony, the traffic to that statement crashed their servers.
Here it is, via Hacker News.
We are deeply saddened to hear the news about Aaron Swartz. We extend our heartfelt condolences to Aaron’s family, friends, and everyone who loved, knew, and admired him. He was a truly gifted person who made important contributions to the development of the internet and the web from which we all benefit.
We have had inquiries about JSTOR’s view of this sad event given the charges against Aaron and the trial scheduled for April. The case is one that we ourselves had regretted being drawn into from the outset, since JSTOR’s mission is to foster widespread access to the world’s body of scholarly knowledge. At the same time, as one of the largest archives of scholarly literature in the world, we must be careful stewards of the information entrusted to us by the owners and creators of that content. To that end, Aaron returned the data he had in his possession and JSTOR settled any civil claims we might have had against him in June 2011.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service and a member of the internet community. We will continue to work to distribute the content under our care as widely as possible while balancing the interests of researchers, students, libraries, and publishers as we pursue our commitment to the long-term preservation of this important scholarly literature.
We join those who are mourning this tragic loss.
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