Okay, it’s a bit of a made-up stat. But as the Washington Post reports, there are going to be a lot of students at the inauguration next week.
On January 5, Malia and Sasha Obama enrolled at Sidwell Friends school in Washington, DC.
Sidwell Friends is a quaker school, founded in 1883. For more than seventy years Sidwell was whites-only, but in 1956 the school’s trustees announced that they would allow African Americans to enter the following year. The class of 1957 was thus the last to experience Sidwell as an all white school.
William Zantzinger was among the graduates that year.
Zantzinger was the son of a prominent Maryland tobacco farming family. In the years after he graduated from Sidwell, he married and took over the operation of the family plantation. On the evening of February 8, 1963, Zantzinger and his wife went out to dinner and a society ball.
Zantzinger drank quite a bit at dinner, and quite a bit more at the ball. Over the course of the evening, he verbally and physically harassed several black serving staff. At about one-thirty in the morning, annoyed that she hadn’t returned quickly enough with a bourbon he’d ordered, Zantzinger struck African-American barmaid Hattie Carroll in the head with a cane.
Hattie Carroll was fifty-one years old, and the mother of eleven children. She collapsed not long after Zantzinger struck her, and was taken to the hospital, where she died of a brain hemorrhage the following morning.
Zantzinger was indicted for murder. He said he was so drunk at the time of the assault that he didn’t know what he was doing. His lawyers said it was stress, not physical injury, that caused Hattie Carroll’s death.
After a three-day trial, Zantzinger was convicted of manslaughter. He was fined $500, and sentenced to six months in jail, with the sentence to begin after the tobacco harvest. (While he was still in jail, Bob Dylan wrote and recorded a song about his crime.)
On January 3 of this year, William Zantzinger died.
On January 5, Malia and Sasha Obama enrolled at Sidwell Friends school in Washington, DC.
Inside Higher Ed has an interesting interview up with Ana Martínez Alemán, co-author of the new book Online Social Networking on Campus: Understanding What Matters in Student Culture.
Alemán reminds snooping administrators that “Facebook is student space,” lays out a few reasons why faculty should hesitate before friending students, and considers the future of social networking on campus.
Worth a read.
The leadership and bargaining team of CUPE Local 3903, the union representing strikers at Toronto’s York University, have released a statement to their membership urging them to reject the university’s latest contract offer.
“Once the membership rejects not only this offer,” the letter says, “but also the offensive manner in which it is being forced on us, we will be in an exceptionally strong position to come to a speedy resolution of the strike.”
To keep tabs on our ongoing coverage of the York strike, check out our Labor category archives, or just bookmark our main page.
The Economist looks at the changing economics of going to college, and how the financial crisis is going to change them more.
Key passage: Private borrowing for college has increased sevenfold in the last decade, and is set to rise even more. But if “a student is going to borrow, it is generally better to go through the government.” As a spokesperson for The Institute for College Access and Success puts it, private loans “really are not a form of student aid … they’re an expensive form of credit.”
The Economist‘s conclusion? “By bailing out some of the private lenders, [Treasury Secretary] Paulson risks giving the seal of government approval to a sometimes dodgy business.”
Update: When a center-right magazine like The Economist sides with students over banks, they’re going to provoke some interesting responses. Here’s my favorite screech from the comments on that piece:
The reality is too many people go to college, it lasts too long (+4 years in the US, only 3 in the UK), too many students study nonsense, and college professors teach too much nonsense. Students spend their 4-5 years taking classes in wine-tasting and astrology to round out their majors in Marxism or Interpretive Dance Theory. […] We NEED student loans to dry up because we need our terrible education system to die and be replaced by something better.
studentactivism.net 
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