Our ongoing coverage of the NYU takeover continues here and on our twitter feed.
Students at New York University took over the Kimmel Center Marketplace, a dining facility on campus, late last night.
The occupation website is here, and a list of the students’ demands follows…
Note: I’ve put up a second response to the Greenberger article, addressing the skewed demographics of the sample it relied upon, here.
A journal article by Ellen Greenberger et al, “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors,” got a big writeup in the New York Times this morning, and it’s been making a pretty serious splash online as a result.
In a nutshell, the article explores what it refers to as the “sense of entitlement” that many professors believe students today exhibit. It reports the findings of a study in which students at one California university were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with fifteen statements regarding their “expectations of special consideration and accommodation by teachers,” and examines some of the factors that may underly such expectations.
I read the study this afternoon, and I’ll have more to say about it tomorrow, but for tonight I just want to highlight one aspect of how it’s been reported. Here’s a passage from the Times article that summed up what many journalists took away from the study:
A third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.
Pretty startling, I’ll admit. But it’s a serious misrepresentation of the original article’s findings. Here’s why.
As I noted above, the folks who conducted the study asked students to respond to fifteen statements designed to determine their level of “Academic Entitlement.” Two of those fifteen statements were these:
If I have attended most classes for a course, I deserve at least a grade of B.
If I have completed most of the reading for a course, I deserve a B in that course.
For each statement, students were asked whether they strongly agreed, agreed, slightly agreed, slightly disagreed, disagreed, or strongly disagreed. The study’s authors aggregated all of the “strongly agree, agree, and slightly agree” responses into a percentage, and that’s the percentage the Times used as the basis for the passage quoted above.
Let’s set aside for the moment whether the phrase “If I have attended most classes for a course, I deserve at least a grade of B” means the same thing as “I expect B’s just for attending lectures.” I’m not certain that it does, but let that go for right now. The more important point is that the Times reporter, following the lead of the study’s authors, interpreted even slight agreement with the first statement as identical to the second.
There are other problems with the study, but this is a big one.
Quoting Amy Goodman:
An unprecedented case of judicial corruption is unfolding in Pennsylvania. Several hundred families have filed a class-action lawsuit against two former judges who have pleaded guilty to taking bribes in return for placing youths in privately owned jails. Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan are said to have received $2.6 million for ensuring that juvenile suspects were jailed in prisons operated by the companies Pennsylvania Child Care and a sister company, Western Pennsylvania Child Care. Some of the young people were jailed over the objections of their probation officers. An estimated 5,000 juveniles have been sentenced by Ciavarella since the scheme started in 2002.
High school girls in an auto repair class in Central High School, Washington DC, 1927.
The Negro History Club of Albany State College in Georgia, 1940.
Nelson D. Schwartz, “Job Losses Pose a Threat to Stability Worldwide,” The New York Times, February 15:
High unemployment rates, especially among young workers, have led to protests in countries as varied as Latvia, Chile, Greece, Bulgaria and Iceland and contributed to strikes in Britain and France.
Ian Traynor, “Governments Across Europe Tremble As Angry People Take to the Streets,” The Guardian, January 31:
Europe’s time of troubles is gathering depth and scale. Governments are trembling. Revolt is in the air.
Hugo Rifkin, “Student Activism Is Back,” The Times of London, February 16:
For decades, student activism has been in the doldrums in this country. It is hard to think of any large-scale student protests since busloads descended on the capital in the late 1980s in a wave of anti-apartheid rage. But that may be about to change.
studentactivism.net 
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