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On this day in 1939, the Nazis shut down Czechoslovakia’s colleges and universities, executing nine student and faculty leaders and sending another 1200 to concentration camps.
On this day in 1973, the Greek junta staged a tank attack on Athens Polytechnic university to put down a student uprising, killing least two dozen people.
It’s International Students’ Day. Follow along with what’s happening on the #N17 Twitter hashtag.
The passage of Proposition 30 in California last Tuesday saved the state’s three public higher education systems from devastation, providing funding to forestall huge tuition increases and enrollment cuts. Young voters made the difference in that vote, amounting to nearly a third of the electorate and supporting Prop 30 by a two-to-one margin.
But the struggle over college accessibility in California is far from over, as new proposed fees at Cal State demonstrate.
On Thursday, Cal State administrators unveiled three new fees for CSU students, intended — in the LA Times‘s gloss — “not primarily to generate revenue but to change student behaviors.” But those “student behaviors,” as the Times goes on to make clear, are only even arguably problematic because the system is so badly underfunded.
Here’s what’s up:
First, Cal State wants to charge a $372 per unit (“credit,” for non Californians) to super-seniors who have already taken more than 150-160 units worth of classes. This fee would raise tuition for super-seniors by more than $10,000 a year, bumping in-state students up to the same tuition rate as out-of-staters.
Second, they’re looking to impose a $91 per-unit fee on students who repeat classes, which they estimate is happening at a rate of about 40,000 times a semester, system wide.
And finally, they’re proposing a $182 per-unit fee on courseloads above 18 units. (This would amount to a $3640 surcharge on a 20-unit semester.)
Cal State claims that the practices they’re targeting are clogging up the system — because students are lingering beyond graduation eligibility, retaking favored classes, and overloading their schedules so they can drop courses later, they say, some 18,000 applicants a year are being turned away.
But thanks to budget cuts, students are regularly shut out of courses they need for their majors, and forced to fill up their schedules with electives to maintain financial aid eligibility. Cal State already bans students who have received a grade of C or better in a course from taking it again. And of course many students who sign up for heavy courseloads are doing it not so they can drop classes later, but so they can finish more quickly — in most cases, at least in part, as a way of saving tuition money.
And even if this weren’t the case, the student who changes majors in their senior year, the student who retakes a course to master the material, the student who adds an extra class to have a safety valve if one doesn’t pan out — these students should not be punished. All these “behaviors” are a legitimate, healthy, even commendable part of the college experience.
As the Sacramento Bee editorialized yesterday, this is outrageous. The Cal State trustees have the opportunity to reject these fees when they meet tomorrow.
They should.
Tuesday Update | Well, the trustees didn’t reject the fee proposals, but they’re not adopting them either — at least not yet. According to a statement from the CSU chancellor, the proposals have been removed from the agenda of today’s meeting and will “be reviewed at a later date after Trustees gather additional information and input from stakeholders.”
Sorry about the lack of signal in the last couple of weeks, and apologies to all the amazing activists I’ve only been cheerleading on Twitter (or not at all). Though I didn’t lose power in the storm, my kids were home from school for a week, and in the middle of that we had a very technically challenging Halloween, and then on Friday we started packing for a campaign-work road trip.
And on top of all that, and preceding it, I’ve been sick for the last two months. Nothing dire, in the grand scheme of things, just whooping cough, then bronchitis, and now a cold, but they’ve all overlapped, and they’ve all sapped my energy, and they’ve all kept me from doing anywhere near as much as I’d have liked on all sorts of different fronts.
Anyway, I’m typing this from a guest room in Washington DC. This morning I’m going to put together an election post, then heading out to the drugstore for some meds, then hitting the sights — my kids have never done the DC tourist thing. Tomorrow we’ll be spending the day flyering for marriage equality and the MD DREAM Act at a Maryland polling place to be named later. And then we watch the returns and then we get up in the middle of the night to drive home and then I teach and then I collapse and then sometime around Thursday I hope I get back to writing — here and elsewhere.
See you in a bit.
In a blogpost yesterday on the Electoral College, NY Times columnist Ross Douthat reported that “if you believe Sean Trende’s fascinating analysis,” Richard Nixon won the popular vote in the 1960 presidential election. I hadn’t seen this claim before, and I’m a dork, so I popped over to take a look.
Trende’s piece, published over the weekend, notes that in 1960 Alabama voters didn’t vote for presidential candidates, but for individual electors, and that they we allowed to split tickets. There were eleven Democratic electors and eleven Republicans, and voters could choose anywhere from one to eleven candidates from the two columns.
Five of the Democratic electors were “loyal,” or pledged to Kennedy, while six were unpledged and eventually wound up voting for Senator Harry Byrd. Those eleven electors all won, and the Republican electors all lost.
The question Trende asks is how we should count these votes. (Since far more votes were cast than there were voters, we can’t just tally up the scores for each slate and do it that way.) The traditional approach has been to credit Kennedy with the number equal to his highest scoring elector, and Nixon with the corresponding total for his, but as Trende notes, that results in Byrd getting no votes in a state where he obviously had substantial support.
Instead, Trende suggests, it makes more sense to give all the Democratic votes to Byrd instead of Kennedy, or split them on the basis of how many electoral votes each received. In either case, he notes, the result is a Nixon victory in the overall popular vote. Nixon won!
But no, he didn’t. Here’s why:
Nationally, according to the source Trende himself relied on, Nixon received 34,108,157 votes in 1960, and Kennedy received 34,220,984. If we set Alabama aside — take all their votes off the table, and tally up the rest of the country without them, here’s what we’re left with:
Kennedy: 33,902,681
Nixon: 33,870,176
That’s a Kennedy victory of more than 32,000 votes. So in order to claim that Nixon beat Kennedy nationally, we have to argue that Nixon beat Kennedy by nearly 32,000 votes in Alabama. And that’s not what happened — Kennedy’s poorest-performing elector in Alabama received 316,934 votes. Nixon’s best-performing elector received 237,981.
It’s not easy to say how the votes should be carved up, since Kennedy had fewer electors on the ballot than Nixon. But the evidence suggests that the vast majority of those who went to the polls voted for all the electors they could. In a senate race on the same ballot, the two candidates received a total of 554,064 votes. If you divide the total number of votes cast in the presidential race by 11 — the maximum number of electors a single voter could support — you get 555,592.3 people voting, almost exactly the same.
The vast majority of Alabama voters in 1960 voted for a full slate of electors, and the strong majority of those chose the Democratic slate. Perhaps ten thousand or so voted only for Harry Byrd’s electors, and not for Kennedy’s, but the overwhelming number took what they were given from the party they supported.
Still not convinced? Let’s look at it another way. Figure that 600,000 Alabama voters went to the polls in 1960. That’s almost certainly too high, but it’s within the realm of plausibility, and approximates the best-case scenario for the ticket-splitting hypothesis. In that scenario, John Kennedy’s worst-performing elector received the support of 53% of the state’s voters, and Nixon’s best-performing elector received the votes of 40% of them.
Kennedy beat Nixon in Alabama. Kennedy beat Nixon outside of Alabama. Kennedy beat Nixon.
There’s no other way to spin it. Sorry.
Just a quick weird note.
Over the weekend I noticed that ersatz punk mall-store chain Hot Topic had a selection of Free Pussy Riot shirts for sale, and tweeted about it. A few folks tweeted back to wonder whether PR was seeing any of the proceeds, so I wrote to HT to ask. And this morning I got an email back:
“Yes, we purchased the shirts through the band management’s merchandising company.”
So there you go. The shirts are legit, and Pussy Riot is getting their cut. Good to know.
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