I’ve often said that the most common question a historian of student activism gets asked is “why isn’t there any activism on American campuses today?” (I even took a few pages in my dissertation to explain why it’s such a wrongheaded query.) But recently another question has been gaining ground:

“What are the big issues that students are organizing around today?”

The last couple of years have seen a real boom in campus organizing on the local, state, and national level. Much of this work has been a response on the current financial crisis in higher education, but a long list of other concerns have motivated student organizers as well. And as students (and others) begin to gain a sense that this is a major moment for American student activism, student activism has flourished even more.

There’s a lot going on.

So over the next few weeks I’ll be posting a list of the top dozen student activism stories of the new academic year. Some are national, some are campus-specific. Some are ongoing, some are short-term.

This post will be the homepage for the list as it grows. Be sure to follow Student Activism on Facebook and Twitter to get all the updates as they come in.

1. The Crisis in American Public Higher Education
2. October 7
3. The Midterm Elections
4. California Crackdown
5. The DREAM Act
6. Students and Workers
7. Israel Divestment
8. The For-Profit College Fight
9. SB 1070
10. The UC Irvine Muslim Student Union
11. SUNY Tuition Policy
12. The BP Oil Spill and the Environment

Off for a week camping with my kids. Fall semester posting will rev up when I get back, starting with a list of the ten must-follow student activism stories for 2010-2011.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin to say something in my own voice and that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.”

–Virginia Woolf (diary entry, July 26, 1922).

The facultyosphere has been buzzing recently about this YouTube video of a young prof’s public comment at a meeting of the University of Minnesota board of regents. Just three minutes long, the clip presents an powerful case against the budget cuts that have been sweeping the UM system — and the nation.

It should be said that Eva Von Dassow, a professor of Classical and Near Eastern Studies, has a somewhat theatrical delivery. She goes in for language a little more flowery than you’ll see at most student protests — “financial stringency leaves undiminished the numbers of vice presidents, not to mention the salaries of top coaches” is a representative passage, and the words “etiolated” and “verbigeration” make appearances in her speech.

But her arguments are impassioned, informed, and convincing. “The present financial crisis” is, she says, being “deployed … as a tool for starving certain parts of the university in order to feed others.”

What we’re facing in American higher education today is not merely a retrenchment but a restructuring. Von Dassow lays out the facts of that restructuring cogently, and with an admirable focus on the undergraduate experience.

Her speech is well worth a listen.

Last week’s season premiere of Mad Men included an oblique mention of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, the three young civil rights activists who were murdered in Mississippi during the summer of 1964. As noted on the show, Andrew Goodman — born and raised on the Upper West Side, enrolled at Queens College — was a New York City native.

But it’s not pop-culture name checking that situates the new season in the Sixties of myth and memory for me.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the back cover of New York’s alternative newspaper The Village Voice was taken up with short text ads. In a few words, for a few cents, readers could send Valentine’s wishes, plug an upcoming show, or say pretty much whatever they wanted.

The Voice‘s back-page ads still exist today, and the mix remains about the same. Even a cursory peek at the ads of that era, though, reveals one big difference.

Runaways.

In the late sixties and early seventies, several ads a week were pleas from parents for their kids to come home. Teenagers would run away to join the hippies in St. Mark’s Place, and their parents — knowing or suspecting or guessing that that’s where they’d wound up — would post ads begging them to come back, to call, to write a letter. Of course, young people still run away today. But at that time, they were leaving home in huge numbers, often leaving no word at all.

Sally Draper, ten years old in 1964, will be sixteen in 1970.