Chronicle of Higher Ed Outs Essay Mill Customers

March 16, 2009 in Media, Students | by | Leave a comment

In a new investigative article on a company that writes students’ papers for cash, the Chronicle of Higher Education outed four of the company’s customers.

The article, which is behind the Chronicle‘s subscription wall, gives the name, college, and field of two undergraduates and two grad students, including a PhD candidate in public policy who, they say, outsourced the literature review section of his dissertation to the paper mill Essay Writers. The article also names that student’s blog, which was last updated in July 2008.

The Chronicle was able to identify the students through personal information they posted to the company’s private website.

Quote of the Day.

March 16, 2009 in Quotes | by | Leave a comment

Via Jill at Feministe:

“Thus I have at a comparatively early age lost all my motivating faiths, faith in the righteous cause of women, faith in the recreating powers of science, faith in the ennobling possibilities of education. This is indeed a very sad state. Worse, I have become that futile creature, a writer. I had rather make small black marks on paper than go through any experience I can name. The sensory pleasures have pretty largely ceased to be; I can sit here in my quiet study and desire to desire something, something to touch or taste or see or hear, but the desire does not come. If I were building a Utopia, I would take away our memories, so we would start fresh every day, and then I would endow each of us with strong, lusty desires, and I would give us strong, eager feet with which to run swiftly and determinedly after our desires. I would leave principles out of my Utopia, even feminism; in place of principles I would give us all a magnificent and flaming audacity.”

–Lorine Livingston Pruette, circa 1926.

Statewide CA Rally Against Budget Cuts Monday

March 15, 2009 in Access, Campus Protests, Finances, Politics, Student Power, Tuition and Fees | by | Leave a comment

Reader Suzanne passed along word last night that there’s going to be a massive statewide rally in California tomorrow against higher ed budget cuts and fee hikes, with students from across the state busing in to Sacramento. Between six and seven thousand are expected to participate.

Accordng to iwillmarch.com, the march will begin at 10 am, with a rally at the State Capitol at noon and lobby visits beginning at 2 pm.

Quote of the Day.

March 15, 2009 in Media, Politics, Quotes | by | Leave a comment

From Clay Shirky’s new blogpost Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable:

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

There aren’t many writers pithier than Clay.

Snapshot: One Week of Student Protest

March 14, 2009 in Campus Protests, Student Power, Students | by | 5 comments

Here’s some of the stuff that happened in the world this week…

On Monday, two hundred French students blockaded the entrance to the main campus of the Sorbonne, forcing administrators to cancel classes at that university for the day. The students were protesting planned budget cuts at France’s state universities.

On Tuesday, thousands of students took to the streets of Nairobi, Kenya to protest police killings, including the shooting of a student demonstrator last week. (Here’s an interesting critical take on that protest from a professor at the University of Nairobi.)

On Wednesday, students at West Virginia University protested a speech on campus by J. Phillipe Rushton, who has claimed that race is linked to intelligence and other cognitive and behavioral traits. The same day, five hundred students at the University of Liverpool protested planned department closures.

On Friday, forty students from Grand Valley State University in Michigan staged a four-hour campus rally to protest the shooting of a GVSU student in a police raid on an off-campus apartment on Wednesday night, while — as I noted earlier — three hundred Finnish students occupied the main administration building of the University of Helsinki.

There was, of course, much more. That’s just a taste.

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

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