Notes Toward an Essay: How are Students Brought Into a Movement?

May 10, 2009 in Campus Protests, Politics, Quotes, Student Government, Student Power, Students | by | 1 comment

On the subway home from this meeting, I sketched out the skeleton of a post riffing on the conversation we had there. I just came across those notes again, and though I don’t have time right this minute to write them up into a full essay, I figure I might as well put them out there anyway. I welcome comments and questions, and if you’d like to see the longer version, feel free to prod me.

How are students brought into a movement?

  1. By being met where they are.
  2. By being given a sense of the possible.
  3. By feeling their power.
  4. By confronting their powerlessness.
  5. By experiencing a one-to-one connection.
  6. By experiencing community.

(This is really less a set of six principles than three sets, each made up of two principles in tension with one another. As the physicist Niels Bohr once said, “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”)

Happy Mother’s Day!

May 10, 2009 in History | by | Leave a comment

I’d Like to Help You, Son, But You’re Too Young to Vote.

May 9, 2009 in Civil Liberties, High School, Litigation, Police, Politics, Student Bashing, Student Power, Students, Youth | by | 2 comments

A group of Florida high school students is waging war against a local curfew.

The law — which bars under-18s from downtown West Palm Beach after 10 o’clock on weeknights and eleven on weekends — is, they say, unconscionable age discrimination. But that’s not all.

The law exempts married young people, but not those who are out with parental permission. On the contrary, it imposes fines on parents who “knowingly permit or by insufficient control allow” their children to break the curfew. “Insufficient control” is apparently nowhere defined — is a parent whose 17-year-old is in college expected to exercise “sufficient control” to keep him or her indoors at night? 

The most bizarre — and, in a bizarre way, comforting — provision of the two-year-old law is one which exempts young people who are “attending or traveling directly to or from an activity that involves the exercise of rights protected under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution” from the curfew.

That’s right. The curfew as written only applies to those young people who don’t intend to speak while they’re out on the town. If you’re going to be exercising your freedom of speech (or assembly, or religion, or the press, or, you know, petitioning the government for redress of grievances), you’re golden. If you’re heading out to sit by your grandmother who’s in a coma, though, you’re getting a ticket.

(Only not really. The city is mostly just using the law as a mechanism for rousting young people rather than going through the hassle of ticketing them — as of the end of March it had issued a thousand warnings but only five citations.)

It’s ridiculous, is what it is, and the National Youth Rights Association of Southeast Florida is doing something about it.

NYRASEFL leaders Zach Goodman and Jeffrey Nadel (both 16) spent a big chunk of the spring explaining to the mayor and city commission just how farkakte the law is, but didn’t get anywhere. Then in late March they retained local civil rights attorney Barry Silver, who managed to get a law that criminalized feeding the homeless (yes, really) overturned last year. But so far he hasn’t had any luck either.

So on the evening of May 1, they took to the streets, letting the city know when and where they would defy the curfew.

During the protest they were tailed by two officers on Segways, but otherwise left alone. Their presence does seem to have gotten under the cops’ skin, though, as police ticketed several teens who were waiting for their parents outside a nearby movie theater as the protest was going on.

NYRASEFL intends to make one final effort to convince the city commission to repeal the curfew law before filing suit against the city. We’ll keep you informed as the story develops.

Update: As Justin Graham notes in comments, NYRASEFL is on Twitter, too.

Do Facebook Users Really Have Lower Grades? Nope.

May 9, 2009 in Administration, Faculty, Graduate Students, Media, Student Bashing, Students | by | 4 comments

It seems like every month or so there’s a big media buzz around another deeply flawed study that claims to confirm negative stereotypes about American college students. In February it was the one that explored students’ supposed “sense of entitlement” in the classroom, in March it was the one that claimed that students spend more time drinking than studying.

In April it was the one from Ohio State University researcher Aryn Karpinski that found that Facebook users have lower grades than students who aren’t on FB. It was only a draft paper, based on a small group of students from one college, but it made a huge splash all over the world.

And now it turns out that it’s pretty much worthless as scholarship.

A new response from three scholars in the field (Josh Pasek, eian more, and Eszter Hargittai) looks closely at the Facebook study, and finds it incredibly weak. In comparing the grades of students who use and don’t use Facebook, for instance, one needs a substantial number in each category, but this study’s sample only included 15 non-FB undergrads. It also found major differences in Facebook adoption across majors, but made no effort to determine whether it was those population differences, rather than an actual tie to Facebook use, that was responsible for grade variation.

At least as important, the response looks at data obtained from three large studies, and found no significant connection between Facebook use and low grades. Indeed, one set of data suggested that Facebook use was, as the authors put it, “slightly more common among individuals with higher grades.” 

As for Karpinski, despite the fact that she was quoted as saying that there was a “disconnect between students’ claim that Facebook use doesn’t impact their studies, and our finding showing that they had lower grades,” and despite the fact that she invited administrators “to find ways to limit access [to Facebook] … resulting in better academic performance,” she now says her findings were just “exploratory,” and that she never intended them to be seen as conclusive.

“People, she says, “need to chill out.”

Afternoon update: In the interest of fairness and completeness, here’s a link to Karpinski’s original conference presentation and to her rebuttal to the three scholars’ response to it. (She argues that their study has “serious methodological and statistical flaws” of its own.)

Late afternoon update: And here’s a link to Pasek, more, and Hargittai’s rebuttal to the rebuttal, courtesy of Hargittai.

Student Government Loses $900K on Jay-Z Concert

May 8, 2009 in Finances, Student Government, Students | by | Leave a comment

The Associated Students of the University of Arizona took a $917,000 hit when a concert they sponsored drew a smaller-than-expected crowd.

ASUC paid a total of $1.4 million to mount the show, and brought in barely a third that much in revenue. Jay-Z headlined the concert, whose bill also included Kelly Clarkson, Third Eye Blind, and The Veronicas.

The loss wipes out ASUC’s $350,000 emergency reserve fund. The remainder of the debt will be covered by the campus bookstore, which provides the student government with more than half a million dollars in support each year. For the next five years, those annual payments will be cut by $114,000.

The Jay-Z concert was ASUC’s first stadium show in more than thirty years, and the culmination of a four-year campaign by the student government to bring large-scale performances to campus.

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

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