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Two American university campuses — the University of Texas at Austin and North Dakota State University — are being evacuated at this hour after administrators received early morning bomb threats. It’s not yet known if the threats are related.
UT Austin is the flagship campus of the University of Texas system, with some 50,000 students, 16,000 employees, and a 420-acre campus. It was the site of the 1966 Charles Whitman shootings, then the worst mass murder in American history.
Update, 11:22 am (ET): It has just been reported that the UT Austin evacuation was prompted by a telephoned bomb threat from a man with a “Middle Eastern accent” who claimed that he was connected to Al Qaeda and had planted multiple bombs throughout campus. The call came in at 8:35 am local time and claimed that the bombs were set to detonate in 90 minutes, which would have been approximately 15 minutes ago.
11:25 am: UT Austin says campus is being checked for bombs, no decision yet made on afternoon classes. Next update scheduled for 10:45 am local time, 20 minutes from now.
11:35 am: NDSU evacuation order appears to have been posted at 9:49 am local time, at almost exactly the same time as the UT Austin evacuation order. It’s always important to be careful in drawing conclusions based on early reports in such situations, but it seems — right now — somewhat unlikely that either threat was a copycat, or that the two were coincidental.
11:50 am: UT Austin still clearing buildings, latest update confirms that time specified in threat has passed. No bombs found so far, no decision made on when campus will re-open.
11:40 am: The NDSU incident is the third major bomb threat this week in eastern North Dakota, following threats at two nearby airports on September 11 and 12.
11:55 am: There’s a rumor going around that these threats might be in some way related to last season’s college football championship, in which North Dakota State beat (it’s said) UT for the national title. But they didn’t — they beat Sam Houston State, a college located some 150 miles away from UT Austin.
12:07 pm: Just tweeted: “An hour and 15 minutes after original NDSU warning, no updates. @UTAustin has updated twice on Twitter and given addl info to press.”
12:25 pm: An alert posted on the website of Valparaiso University in Indiana says there’s been a non-specific threat made there this morning via graffiti:
An unspecific threat to campus was made through a graffiti message alluding to dangerous and criminal activity alleged to be carried out during the chapel break period on Friday. The broad threat provided no details with respect to location or type.
No evacuation at Valparaiso at this time.
12:45 pm: All activities at UT Austin except for classes will resume at 5 pm today, according to a tweet from the university’s vice president for student affairs. Classes are cancelled for the day.
1:00 pm: First update from NDSU, posted about 15 minutes ago, says campus is still closed and that administrators expect to have another report “within the hour.”
1:15 pm: UT press conference going on now. Campus has reopened, administrators seem confident there was never a legitimate threat. UT Austin doesn’t kid around with campus crises, by the way — their warning went out via text, Facebook, Twitter, siren, website, media, and campus CCTV.
1:35 pm: NDSU has reopened, classes will resume at 2 pm local time. Between this and the hints dropped at the UT Austin press conference, I strongly suspect that the same person (or people) was behind the two threats, and that law enforcement knows a lot about who it was.
Pell Grant expenditures by the federal government fell by more than six percent last year, according to new figures from the federal government, despite the fact that they were expected to rise by some $4.4 billion.
The $2.2 billion (or $6.6 billion, depending on how you look at it) savings won’t be fully explained until more detailed numbers are released, but there are likely three overlapping explanations.
The first, and likely largest, factor was the government’s elimination of year-round Pell eligibility last year. Congress zapped summer Pell Grants as a cost-saving measure, and that policy change was expected to reduce outlays by some $4 billion.
Another $1.4 billion of the gap came from declining grant awards to for-profit colleges, which saw Pell enrollment fall by more than a hundred thousand students, or about five percent.
As for the rest? Experts interviewed by Inside Higher Ed suggested that it might have come from a shift from full-time to part-time enrollment, possibly spurred by higher costs of attendance.
The elimination of year-round Pell was obviously a setback for higher ed access, and if students are dropping down to part-time for financial reasons that’s troubling too. But the shrinkage of for-profit enrollment is good news for a few reasons.
For-profit colleges charge students more than publics, and they pass those costs on to the government. Because average Pell outlays to students at for-profits are higher than those to students at the public colleges they’d most likely be attending otherwise, for-profit colleges have for years consumed a disproportionate share of Pell Grant spending. A decline in for-profit colleges — which often engage in predatory enrollment tactics, deliver shoddy instruction, and dump students into loan default after graduation — is good for students, good for the economy, and good for the government’s bottom line.
The primary purpose of a political convention is to advance that party’s chances of winning the next election. This is hardly a counterintuitive proposition, but it bears repeating occasionally, particularly in the face of complaints like those offered by Gawker editor Hamilton Nolan today.
Nolan is offended. He’s offended that Michelle Obama sometimes affects a stutter she doesn’t naturally possess, and by the production values of the DNC, and that “no political party stands for honesty.”
“Both parties,” he writes, “and their candidates, and their party machines, and their loyalists, and we in the media that create and nurture the narrative that accompanies all of them, have forsaken all attempts at sincerity. The conventions are a pageant. The speeches are performances.”
Well, yeah. But what else should they be? The point of a convention is to help its candidate get elected. That’s what it’s for. If it didn’t exist to do that, it pretty much wouldn’t need to exist at all. (The last major party convention that selected a presidential candidate was the Democrats’ in 1952. It ended badly for them.)
“It is considered gauche, juvenile, ignorant, downright simple,” he continues, “to insist that the process of selecting the most powerful person in the world be conducted in an adult manner, with a serious conversation between the candidates and the country on the serious issues that we, collectively, face.”
If I had Nolan here in front of me, I’d ask him to walk me through this. Because it seems to me that he’s saying one of two things, and neither of them makes much sense. On the one hand, he could be saying that a “serious” convention — one with less artful stuttering and crappier production values and a more adult approach to the issues — would be more likely to be successful electorally. But that doesn’t seem particularly likely, and it’s not an argument he even advances explicitly.
The second possibility is that he’s saying that parties should take this more “adult,” less-calculated approach even if it harms their chances at the ballot box. And that I just don’t get at all. You run candidates in elections because you want to win them. And if giving your candidate elocution lessons and hiring talented producers helps you win, then by all means, do that. Right? If not, why not?
Like Nolan, I wish the Democratic party weren’t the drone party. But the Democratic party is the drone party, and since they are, I don’t have a hard time understanding why their leaders (and their base, pro-drone or anti-) prefer not to talk about drones at their convention. That’s not what they’re in North Carolina for, to talk about drones.
Talking about drones during the DNC is probably good for Nolan’s blood pressure, and it may even be good for the country. But it’s no more noble to talk about drones during the DNC than before or after, and just talking about drones isn’t likely to do anything to stop the drones anyway. Because as much as I wish it was, the president’s drone policy isn’t an aberration in Democratic party policy.
One of the most praised moments of the DNC’s first night was for me one of the fakiest — Deval Patrick’s rousing call for Dems to at long last “grow a backbone.” Set aside the fact that Patrick, who most recently made headlines defending Mitt Romney’s vampire capitalism from Obama’s attacks, is hardly a credible messenger on the topic. Set that aside, like I say, because the big problem that folks like Nolan and I have with the Democratic Party isn’t that it doesn’t have sufficient backbone, it’s that the folks who run things don’t want to do a bunch of the stuff that we want them to do.
There’s a lot of stuff that Democrats do that I want them to do, like supporting abortion rights (kinda, mostly), and funding workplace safety inspections and appointing demonstrably-less-horrid judges to the federal bench. We’ll be worse off as a country if the Republicans win the presidency and control of Congress this fall. I believe that.
But replace a few dozen of the Republicans in the House and the Senate with moderate Democrats and we still don’t get a bunch of the stuff that I — and the folks who cheered the backbone line the loudest — want to get, because moderate Democrats (and Obama is one) aren’t interested in that stuff. That’s the problem with being a left-leaning Democrat, and it’s not a problem that gets solved by making the DNC more of a downer or Michelle Obama a less effective speaker. It’s a problem that gets solved, if it gets solved at all, by organizing — inside the electoral arena and outside it as well.
Hamilton Nolan’s piece today is called “Stuttering and Sincerity.” I don’t know if he chose that title or not, but I’m not expecting to see him disavow it, either. And nor should he. Though alliteration is, like the hitch in a faux-choked-up first lady’s voice, a contentless rhetorical move, that doesn’t mean it’s evil. It’s a tool like any other, and I’d no more ask a writer to give up his rhetorical tools than I would a conventioneer.
Harvard University announced yesterday that it is investigating more than a hundred students in a single section of an introductory Poli Sci course on suspicion of cheating on an open-book final exam. When the news broke I tweeted my suspicion that the structure of the final might have contributed to the temptation to cheat, and a new article in the Harvard Crimson appears to confirm my suspicion.
The final exam in professor Matthew Platt’s “Introduction to Congress” course was designated as “completely open-book, open-notes, open internet,” but students were warned “not [to] discuss the exam with others,” including their fellow students, tutors or anybody else.
The test included what the Crimson describes as “three multi-part short answer questions,” questions that one anonymous student — who is not suspected of cheating — described as “find the answer and basically say why this is the way it is.” Students were apparently confused by at least two of these questions, with one writing in a course evaluation that more than a dozen had descended en masse on a teaching assistant’s office on the day the assignment was due:
“Almost all of [us] had been awake the entire night, and none of us could figure out what an entire question (worth 20% of the grade) was asking,” that student said. “On top of this, one of the questions asked us about a term that had never been defined in any of our readings and had not been properly defined in class, so the TF had to give us a definition to use for the question.”
The professor’s own office hours that day were canceled on minimal notice.
Students have an ethical obligation not to cheat, of course. But faculty also have an obligation not to create situations in which cheating is likely to occur. To give an “open internet” take-home exam in which any conversation with your classmates is defined as “cheating” is — even in the best of circumstances — to establish a context in which some cheating is all but inevitable, and virtually impossible to detect. When you declare behavior that you can’t police, behavior that may be entirely benign, to be cheating, you erase the bright-line distinction between proper and improper behavior that is essential to academic integrity. And when you craft a take-home test that’s potentially confusing and deny students any licit mechanism for resolving their confusion, you place students in an entirely untenable position.
The summer lull in this year’s Quebec student protests is coming to a close, and the next few weeks are likely to be crucial ones for the future of the movement.
To recap: Quebec’s ruling Liberal Party announced plans for multi-year tuition hikes last February, prompting students to walk out of classes throughout the provinces. Those walkouts quickly developed into ongoing student strikes, with many campuses closing entirely after student strike votes at general assemblies. College administrators generally respected the strikes, even — in some cases — refusing to comply with court orders that their campuses be reopened. Suddenly the red square, symbol of the movement, was everywhere.
In mid-May the government brought forward a proposal to end the strike, but it offered only minimal concessions and its plan was overwhelmingly rejected in a series of campus votes. After that debacle the Liberal Party put forward Bill 78, a law that criminalized much protest in the region and imposed stiff penalties on student organizations that supported campus closures. Bowing to the reality of widespread campus closures, Bill 78 suspended the spring semester at colleges shuttered by the strike, mandating that they resume meeting in mid-August. (The law passed on a party-line vote after a hectic marathon session.)
Defiance of Bill 78 was widespread, and its provisions have generally not yet been implemented. Hundreds of thousands of Quebecois took to the streets in the aftermath of its passage, and protests have continued throughout the summer on a somewhat smaller scale.
That’s what’s happened. Here’s what’s coming:
Rumors have been swirling for months that Quebec’s ruling Liberal Party will announce on August 1 that they will be holding provincial elections on September 4, and news reporting is increasingly treating a Wednesday announcement as a done deal. Polling has been sparse so far, but the most recent data show the LP and the Parti Quebecois virtually deadlocked, with one poll aggregator showing the LP likely to win some 60 seats in the new legislature — a six-seat loss from their current standing, and a decline large enough to rob them of their current majority in the 125-seat body.
But the situation could change dramatically between now and the election, particularly since Bill 78 mandates that the province’s striking colleges re-open their doors on August 17. A student lawsuit to block implementation of the Bill was rejected earlier this month, but another challenge is still pending — this one from professors who say the government does not have the right to unilaterally impose a new teaching schedule on them.
Mark your calendars: This year, campus activism for the new academic year starts in Quebec, and it’s starting early.
studentactivism.net 
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