“I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.”
–WEB DuBois, whose 141st birthday was yesterday.
Rushing out the door right now, but here’s a roundup of all TWENTY-SEVEN recent British university occupations, and links to two UK articles about that wave of protests.
Students protest fees and crowding in Zimbabwe.
Why the FAFSA form sucks, and why it’s going to be hard to make it better.
A critique of the anti-feminist panic over “hookup culture.”
A new national organization of adjuncts is being formed.
Another news story from Britain on the rise of student activism there. Here’s how this one starts:
They are the iPod generation of students: politically apathetic, absorbed by selfish consumerism, dedicated to a few years of hedonism before they land a lucrative job in the City. Not any more. A seismic change is taking place in British universities.
Around the UK, thousands of students have occupied lecture theatres, offices and other buildings at more than 20 universities in sit-down protests. It seems that the spirit of 1968 has returned to the campus.
While it was the situation in Gaza that triggered this mass protest, the beginnings of political enthusiasm have already spread to other issues.
John Rose, one of the original London School of Economics (LSE) students to mount the barricades alongside Tariq Ali in 1968, spent last week giving lectures on the situation in Gaza at 12 of the occupations.
“This is something different to anything we’ve seen for a long time,” he said. “There is genuine fury at what Israel did.
“I think it’s highly likely that this year will see more student action. What’s interesting is the nervousness of vice chancellors and their willingness to concede demands; it indicates this is something that could well turn into [another] ’68.”
I wrote a brief response on Wednesday to the article “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors” by Ellen Greenberger et al, promising more soon. Then the NYU occupation hit, and I didn’t get back to it as quickly as I’d hoped. But the article, which appeared in the November 2008 issue of The Journal of Youth and Adolescence, is riding a wave of media attention, and there’s a lot more that needs saying about it.
The crucial problem with the article is in its methodology. It’s not at all clear that it measures what it claims to be measuring, and it presents its findings in such a way as to seriously mislead the casual reader as to what the students it surveyed actually said. I’ll dig into those issues in an upcoming post.
For now, though, I’d like to point out one narrow fact: Greenberger’s findings are based on an extremely unrepresentative sample of American college students.
As many academics do, Greenberger and her colleagues found their research subjects by advertising among students on their home campus — they put up flyers asking students to participate in a study, and gave a questionnaire to the students who responded. In this case, the home campus was University of California at Irvine, a highly-competitive university whose entering students have an average high school GPA of 3.95.
For this particular study, the researchers posted flyers in the UC Irvine Social Sciences Human Subjects Laboratory, and posted a notice at the lab’s website.
As they report in their article, these postings brought in 466 student participants. Of those students, 364, or 78.1%, were women, and 269, or 57.7%, were of Asian or Pacific Islander descent. Nearly all were social science majors.
The sample, then, was unrepresentative of the nation as a whole, and unrepresentative in ways that the authors acknowledge may have influenced the study’s results — they note, for instance, that students of Asian descent returned higher scores on measures of what they call “Academic Entitlement” than non-Asians, and that students who were not born in the US returned higher scores than those who were.
So this was a study of social science majors at an extremely selective, extremely competitive research university. It was a sample that was demographically unrepresentative of the nation as a whole. And yet its findings have been eagerly reported as evidence of what American students, as a group, believe.
All of this is significant to our interpretation of the study, but it’s just a lead-up to my favorite tidbit about the way the sample was assembled. More on that in my next post.
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