Scenes from the Global Struggle for Access to Higher Education

September 18, 2009 in Access, Finances, Tuition and Fees | by | Leave a comment

Earlier this week I posted news about student struggles for access to higher education in the US. Here’s a taste of what’s been going on in the rest of the world in the last seven days:

In Ireland, students camped outside of parliament overnight on Monday in a protest against government plans to introduce new university fees.

South Africa’s Witwatersrand University saw three days of protests this week over plans to raise tuition for the coming academic year. Demonstrations were suspended after the university threatened police action, but the country’s public university system is said to be exploring new revenue streams to alleviate student unrest over fee hikes.

Students shut down community colleges and secondary schools in Nepal for several days this week in protest against the commercialization of education, presenting a thirteen-point list of demands that included a cap on tuition charges.

A new law in Cyprus, put forward in response to student complaints, would require all public colleges in that nation to establish clear tuition rates when students enroll and prohibit increases during a student’s course of study.

SAFRA Passes the House!

September 18, 2009 in Access, Drug Policy, Financial Aid, Student Power | by | Leave a comment

SAFRA, the Student Aid and Financial Responsibility Act, passed the House of Representatives yesterday in a 253-171 vote. If passed by the Senate later this fall, SAFRA will end government subsidies to private student loan companies, move those loans federal direct loan program, and use the savings to increase aid to students and colleges by $8 billion a year.

This is a very big deal.

The House’s endorsement of loan reform is a huge step forward, but SAFRA contains another component that’s also worth paying attention to. Since 1998, the Higher Education Act’s Aid Elimination Penalty (AEP)  has denied federal financial aid to students with drug convictions on their records. Commit robbery or rape and you can still receive financial aid, but if you’re busted with pot you’re out of luck.

Two hundred thousand American students have lost financial aid because of this law since it went into effect a decade ago, but in the version of SAFRA passed yesterday, the AEP has been scaled back dramatically. If the House language makes it into the final bill, AEP will now apply only those students who are convicted of selling drugs while actually receiving financial aid.

Observers are predicting a tough fight for SAFRA in the Senate, where private lenders are gearing up to protect their turf. We’ll keep you informed as the situation develops.

SAFRA Moves Forward!

September 17, 2009 in Access, Financial Aid, Politics, Student Power | by | Leave a comment

The landmark Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) is moving toward a vote in the House of Representatives today.

SAFRA is the most significant piece of financial aid legislation to be taken up by the US Congress in decades. You can follow the progress of the bill at the United States Student Association homepage, or by checking in on the #SAFRA hashtag on Twitter.

I’ll be spending most of today teaching, but I’ll update here when I get the chance, and post news and links at the @studentactivism Twitter feed in the meantime.

John Brown and Whiteness, 150 Years Later

September 15, 2009 in Gender, History, Race | by | Leave a comment

A new exhibit on the white anti-slavery activist John Brown opens today at the New-York Historical society, 150 years (minus a month and a day) after he tried to start a slave uprising at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Brown was executed in December 1859 for his role in that raid, but his actions — at Harper’s Ferry and before — helped to spark the Civil War.

I’ve got a photo on my bookshelf, in a carved wooden frame I bought at a rummage sale. The photo is actually a postcard, though it’s been trimmed down and you can’t really tell.

It’s this photo. John Brown, swearing an oath.

John Brown was an abolitionist, of course, and that’s part of why I like him. But I’ve never really been explicit about why I like him so much, why I’m drawn to him as opposed to any other white abolitionist. I think I just figured it out, though.

In 1856 John Brown went to Kansas, where pro-slavery and anti-slavery whites were fighting. He wanted to intervene on the side of righteousness, and he did. He went to Kansas and he killed a bunch of white people. He killed white people who were standing in the way of racial justice.

Three years later, with the Civil War looming, he acted again. This time he raided a federal arsenal to try to liberate weapons for a slave uprising. He was caught, and hanged.

The photo I have is of the John Brown of 1856. (By 1859 he had a huge flowing beard.) The Brown in my photo was the Brown who saw racism and went to Kansas.

Now, I’m not big on killing people. Not at all. Not even in my most ludicrous fantasies of radical action am I big on killing people. It’s never particularly been the killing people part that attracted me to Brown.

It’s more, I think, that he went into the white community first. It sounds weird, phrased like that, since his work with white people consisted of murdering them, but that’s what he did. He took his whiteness and he used it in the service of racial justice, used it to do what a black person couldn’t have done, used it in his own community.

When I look at that photo in that frame, I’m reminded that I’m white. I’m reminded that whiteness is an identity, one among many. I’m reminded that whiteness is specific, not generic. And I’m reminded that as a white man, I’ve got important work to do.

Campus Cuts Spur Activism Nationwide

September 14, 2009 in Access, Campus Protests, Finances, Student Power | by | Leave a comment

The country’s ongoing financial crisis is hitting university budgets hard as the new year gets underway, and students across the United States are mobilizing to respond. Four recent reports from the National Student News Service paint the picture:

Students at UC Berkeley demonstrated last week in support of an upcoming faculty walkout. Faculty plan to stage the action on September 24, a week from this Thursday, in protest against state-mandated furloughs that will cut faculty pay for the current year without reducing their workload. Elsewhere in California, students at USC are scrambling in the wake of drastic last-minute reductions to their financial aid packages.

In Michigan, the MSU student government has appointed a Director of University Budgets to conduct an independent study of the university’s financial condition. The student government is meeting with university administrators to advocate for students’ interests in the budgeting process, and the DUB’s analysis will give them an independent student perspective on the numbers they receive from administrators.

Students also tried to roll back cuts at the University of Southern Mississippi, where administrators announced plans in August to dissolve the university’s Economics department and its technical and occupational education program next year, eliminating 12 tenured and tenure-track faculty positions. In that case, student and faculty protest led to a compromise in which five senior Economics faculty agreed to retire and four younger professors were found new homes in the university’s College of Arts and Letters. (The three affected profs in the technical education program were denied reappointment.)

The student fight for funding is shaping up to be the big campus activism story of the fall. More posts on the subject are in the pipeline, and if you’ve got news we may not have heard of, feel free to leave updates and links in comments.

About This Blog

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StudentActivism.net is the work of Angus Johnston, a historian and advocate of American student organizing.

To contact Angus, click here. For more about him, check out AngusJohnston.com.