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Former US Senator Claiborne Pell died on New Year’s Day, at the age of 90.
Pell wrote the laws that created the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, but as his New York Times obituary noted, he is best known as the father of Pell Grants.
Pell Grants, federal need-based grants to college students, today provide assistance to almost one-third of all those who attend American colleges. Claiborne Pell was the Senate’s greatest champion of the program, and an editorial appreciation of Pell Grants appeared in yesterday’s Times as a tribute to him.
But the Pell Grant program, passed by Congress in the summer of 1972, was not simply the product of Pell’s vision. It was also the first great victory in the American student movement of the 1970s.
On June 30, 1971, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, guaranteeing the vote to Americans between the ages of 18 and 20. With the lowering of the voting age, college students became a significant voting bloc in American politics. In the 1970s, for the first time, students could exercise political power not just in the streets, but in the voting booth as well.
A new kind of student politics demanded a new kind of organizing, and so 1971 also saw the creation of the National Student Lobby, America’s first national student-funded, student-directed, professionally-staffed student lobbying organization.
Created by students in the service of the students’ interest, NSL was a milestone in American student history … and the passage of the Pell Grant program was its biggest priority.
Ken Blackwell, a candidate for chairman of the Republican National Committee, is calling for the RNC to devote “unprecedented” financial resources to the College Republicans “to build vibrant College Republican chapters on every major university campus in the nation.”
The president of Carnegie Mellon’s College Republican chapter is telling him not to bother.
Throwing money at the College Republicans “will do nothing to win over young voters,” says Aaron Marks, and it may actually make things worse.
Until the GOP starts conducting more thoughtful outreach efforts, running younger candidates, and letting go of demographically toxic positions such as opposition to gay marriage, he says, it will never win the youth vote.
Carol Elliott, Treasurer of New Hampshire’s Grafton County, was defeated in a bid for re-election this month by a twenty-year-old Dartmouth undergrad. And she’s not happy about it.
Elliott, a Republican who lost by five hundred votes to Democrat Vanessa Sievers, a Dartmouth junior, told a local newspaper that “it was the brainwashed college kids that made the difference” in the election. “I’m concerned for the citizens of Grafton County,” she said. “You’ve got a teenybopper for a treasurer.”
Sievers, a history and geography major, has experience as a bookkeeper and had worked on various New Hampshire political campaigns before running for office herself.
Elliott said she’s considering a run for the NH state legislature, so that she can “change the law” that allows college students to run for public office.
An effigy of Barack Obama was found hanged from a tree on the campus of the University of Kentucky today. The effigy was discovered and reported by a faculty member early this morning, and an investigation by campus and local police is underway.
In a statement, UK president Lee Todd called the act “despicable.”
This is the second such incident to occur on a college campus this year. In late September, an effigy of Obama was hanged on the campus of George Fox University, a small Christian college in Oregon.
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.
studentactivism.net 
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