An interesting background piece from the First Amendment Center on the organizational relationship between student newspapers and campus administrators. The piece gives particular attention to the trend toward student papers organizing themselves as non-profit corporations independent of the universitites they cover.
The nuts-and-bolts assistance programs that student governments run for the students they serve may not be the most exciting aspect of campus activism, but they are activist endeavors. They represent students working for students to advance a student-centered agenda, independent of the priorities of the university administration.
Stories like this one are small stories, in other words, but important stories.
Back in May, we reported on an online survey that Mother Jones magazine was conducting on contemporary student activism. (At the time, we noted that the survey’s title, “Are Today’s Student Activists Lazy?”, seemed oddly hostile to student organizing.)
Well, it’s back-to-school time, and the survey results have been posted, along with a cartoon guide to the varieties of present-day campus activists and a handful of other sidebars.
We’ll be posting an annotation of their “Student Activism Firsts” timeline later this week, and we’re interested in hearing your thoughts on that and the rest of the feature — feel free to post them here, or in the comments section over there.
Many American college campuses are ghost towns in June, July, and August, as administrators well know. As a result, summer tends to be a busy time for the implementation of decisions that would likely meet with student protest if announced during the school year.
So officials at the University of Washington must have been surprised when more than a dozen banner-toting students appeared in the university president’s office last Thursday to protest UW’s just-concluded deal to extend its contract with Nike to provide the school’s athletic equipment and uniforms.
“President Emmert has a clear choice,” UW senior Ashley Edens, a spokeswoman for the protesters, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “He can repudiate his commitment to workers rights and sign a contract with Nike that would guarantee that UW apparel is produced in sweatshop conditions of the next 10 years. Or he can listen to concerned students and their allies, and recommit to a comprehensive set of labor stands that would ensure that UW’s Nike apparel would be produced under fair conditions.”
Students expect the contract to be presented to the UW Board of Regents next month, and we’ll be following this story as it develops.
(Thanks to Rod Palmquist of United Students Against Sweatshops for the heads-up.)
History geeks may want to check out the Free Speech Movement Digital Archive, a collection of documents from, and writing about, the historic Berkeley protests of 1964-65.
We’ve added the link to our collection at left.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments