WireTap magazine has a fascinating interview up on youth electoral organizing. The interviewee is blogger Michael Connery, whose new book Youth to Power: How Today’s Young Voters are Building Tomorrow’s Progressive Majority is at the top of our reading list.
We’ve added Connery’s blog, Future Majority, to our blogroll.
Once a thriving country, Zimbabwe has tumbled into political and economic crisis in the last several years. Every aspect of national life has been affected by the collapse, and Zimbabwe’s universities have been no exception.
Ceaser Sitiya, pictured at right, is the vice-chair of the Students’ Representative Assembly of the University of Zimbabwe. In the summer of 2007, Sitiya (some news sources spell his name “Caesar Sitiya”) was a leader in protests against conditions at the university. According to Amnesty International, Sitiya was pulled from classes on July 7 of that year, arrested, and held for more than two weeks. Amnesty reports that he was tortured, starved, and denied access to a lawyer during his time in custody.
Last week Sitiya was informed that he has been suspended from the university for a period of two years for his role in the protests. Even after he becomes eligibile for re-admission, he will be barred from participating in student union activities and from living in the university’s dorms.
Other Zimbabwean student leaders face similar punishment from the university’s disciplinary committee.
ZINASU, the Zimbabwean national student union, has a website here. Their report on the events of July 2007 can be found here.
Twenty-nine students at New Jersey’s Readington Middle School protested the reduction of lunch hour to thirty minutes by paying for their lunches with pennies. Their principal sentenced twenty-nine of them to detention, but relented under pressure a few days later.
(The pennies story comes courtesy of Rad Geek People’s Daily, which I’ve added to the blogroll.)
The progressive political magazine The Nation is running a student writing contest, and you still have a few days to enter.
They’re looking for essays of 800 words or less on the question “What have you learned from a personal experience that the next president should know before setting the agenda for the country?” Submissions “should be original, unpublished work that demonstrates fresh, clear thinking and superior quality of expression and craftsmanship,” and will be accepted through May 31 — that’s this Saturday.
The contest is open to all high school students and undergraduates. Winners — one high school student and one college student — will receive $1000 and a Nation subscription. Five runners-up in each category will receive $200 and a subscription.
(Thanks to Kevin Bondelli, a new addition to our blogroll, for the tip.)
Two stories: the New York Times reports on American students’ efforts to live according to principles of environmental sustainability in the dorms, and WireTap magazine reports on student organizing around sustainable food practices on campus.
studentactivism.net 
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