Cooper Union

February 20, 2013 in Students | by | 1 comment

Cooper Union students’ fight to preserve the college’s century-plus tradition of free tuition is kicking into gear again, as administrative dithering and blackmail has thrown the new entering class into disarray.

Two of the three schools that make up CU have submitted proposals for integrating tuition into their budgets going forward, but the third — the School of Art — has refused to do so, saying that they will not cooperate with “any solution to The Cooper Union’s current financial crisis that depends, even in part, on tuition compromises and irreversibly damages the ideals of art, education, freedom, and citizenship.”

In retaliation for this act of defiance, Cooper Union president Jamshed Bharucha announced last week that the college would not honor the School of Art’s decisions on its early admission applicants, and would instead inform those applicants that they would be considered as part of the general admissions process later in the spring.

The most immediate result of this retaliation against the School of Art is to weaken their applicant pool — and, by extension, the student body and reputation of Cooper Union itself. By announcing that the school to which they applied does not intend to honor their commitment to the early admissions process, and that it in fact has no “sustainable model” for operating in the future, Cooper Union will surely drive many of those applicants — the very students who were most committed to enrolling at CU — to other colleges.

As I wrote last fall, Cooper Union’s reputation rests more than usually on the quality of its students. To dilute the college’s applicant pool as part of an attempt to force recalcitrant faculty to accede to administration policies they abhor is an astoundingly short-sighted and pernicious act.

It is, as a group of activist students at Cooper Union have said, a betrayal:

These applicants have gone above and beyond their due diligence in holding up their end of the application process … applicants and their families were told on numerous occasions by administrators, the school’s official website, and admissions literature that the incoming class of 2017 would not be affected by the financial struggles plaguing the Cooper Union.

Cooper Union students, who last semester occupied a campus building for most of a week in opposition to the tuition plan, will be holding a rally in support of the deferred students at one o’clock this afternoon.

More to come.

Florida Atlantic University Sells Stadium Naming Rights to Notorious Prison Company

February 19, 2013 in Finances, Governance, Sexual Violence, The Corporate University, Violence | by | 1 comment

Here’s a mind-boggling one.

Florida Atlantic University, a 29,000-student public university in Boca Raton, will announce today that it has sold the naming rights to its football stadium to a private prison company that until recently ran a youthful offender facility in Mississippi whose “pervasive level of brazen staff sexual misconduct”  was called “among the worst in the nation” by a 2012 Department of Justice investigation.

The Justice Department report on the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility found not only that Walnut Grove management was “deliberately indifferent to staff sexual misconduct,” but also that the facility “often use[d] excessive force as a first response” to disciplinary issues, tolerated active gang membership by facility employees, failed to protect inmates against physical and sexual assault by peers, and was “deliberately indifferent to the suicide risks and serious mental health needs of its youth.”

Walnut Grove was operated at the time by GEO Group, a global private prison operator. Later that year, after a federal judge described Walnut Grove as “a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts,” GEO was removed as manager of the institution. The company would later claim that it had chosen not to renew the contract because Walnut Grove was “financially underperforming.”)

So why would FAU choose to associate itself with a company with such an appalling record? Two reasons.

First, the university has been searching for a corporate sponsor for the stadium without success since it opened two years ago. The $5 million reportedly offered by the GEO Group was apparently impossible to resist.

And second? Well, there’s GEO Group’s CEO, George Zoley. He’s a FAU alum and the former chair of the university’s board of trustees.

Update | It’s official. Thanks to a $6 million donation to the university, the stadium will now be named “GEO Group Stadium.” The university’s press release on the deal calls GEO Group a “fully integrated equity real estate investment trust specializing in the design, financing, development, and operation of correctional, detention, and community reentry facilities around the globe.”

Wednesday Update | The New York Times reports on the story, calling the deal a “a jarring case of the lengths colleges and teams will go to produce revenue, of the way that everything seems to be for sale now in sports — and to anyone with enough cash.” As well, it quotes local private-prison opponent Bob Libal as saying that the GEO Group has recently “poured enormous resources” into attempts “to take over a large portion of the Florida prison system,” characterizing yesterday’s agreement as an extension of that lobbying effort. GEO is, Libal says, “a company whose record is marred by human rights abuses, by lawsuits, by unnecessary deaths of people in their custody and a whole series of incidents that really draw into question their ability to successfully manage a prison facility.” As the Times itself notes, GEO “has been cited by state and federal regulators and lost a series of high-profile lawsuits.”

Asked by a Times reporter whether FAU had investigated such incidents before partnering with GEO, university president Saunders said, “we think it’s a wonderful company, and we’re very proud to partner with them.”

The Times also notes that two past FAU student government presidents have gone on to work for GEO Group.

Third Update | It has emerged that the GEO Group owns an immigrant detention center just ten miles from the Florida Atlantic campus that has been the target of criticism based on complaints of inadequate medical care and unjustified incarceration. The Miami Herald reported today that at least one current FAU student is a former detainee at the center.

UPDATED: Connecticut Students Plan Walkout if Regents Hike Tuition

February 19, 2013 in Campus Protests, Finances, Governance, Tuition and Fees | by | Leave a comment

The Board of Regents of Connecticut’s state university system is meeting today to consider a $778 fee increase, and a group of students and activists are promising a system-wide walkout it the hike goes through.

In the last two years, state funding to public higher education has been slashed by more than 15 percent. Today’s planned hikes would amount to an aggregate fee hike of 11.8 percent in the same period — bringing in-state costs to nearly $9,000 a year. As recently as 2004, tuition and fees at Connecticut’s four regional universities — Central, Eastern, Southern and Western — stood at just over $5,000.

But not all students will see tuition increases if today’s proposal is approved. Facing declines in lucrative out-of-state enrollments, the Regents plan to cut out-of-state tuition for the second year in a row.

Public universities nationwide have been raising out-of-state tuition and increasing out-of-state enrollment to close budget gaps — at the University of California, out-of-state students now pay more than they would at Harvard. But only four percent of students enrolled at Connecticut’s regional state universities are out-of-staters.

In advance of today’s vote, a group called Students of Connecticut Universities for Democracy called for a system-wide walkout in the event that the increases pass. The Regents are meeting now, and supporters of the walkout are livetweeting at the hashtag #hikemeanswalk.

Check it out.

Wednesday Update | The Board of Regents delayed the vote on the proposed tuition increase until their next meeting. Their current proposal calls for a 5.5% increase for in-state students, coupled with a 2.6% cut for out-of-staters. The regents’ finance committee will consider the plan at a March 5 meeting, with the full board scheduled to take up their proposal on March 21.

Happy Valentine’s Day to the Superheroes of Scarleteen

February 14, 2013 in Students | by | 3 comments

I’ve known about Scarleteen for a few years now, and I’m still bowled over by them. Scarleteen is a sexuality education and advice organization for young people, and it’s absolutely incredible. It’s a website with a huge library of great information. It’s a set of online forums where young folks can go to ask hard questions and get thoughtful answers. It’s a Twitter feed and Facebook page with tens of thousands of followers, and a database of right-on service providers. Above all it’s Heather Corinna, who’s an amazing resource for young people and people who care about them.

Scarleteen is a national treasure, seriously. All oriented toward one project — helping young people navigate issues of sexuality and sexual identity in a healthy, sustaining, affirming way.

And here’s the most astounding part: The organization reached five million people last year … and they did it with a total budget of less than $45,000.

It’s incredible. But unfortunately it’s not sustainable. In order to keep Scarleteen going and make it everything it can and should be, the organization needs more resources, which means it needs more money.

If you’re a regular reader of this site, you know that asking for money isn’t something I do. It’s not my thing. But for Scarleteen I’ll make an exception.

If you give Scarleteen a penny — a single penny — you give them the resources to reach one person. A dollar reaches more than a hundred. Ten bucks keeps them going for a whole hour.

An hour of Scarleteen, a thousand people helped, for ten bucks. Which means that if you give them twenty bucks a month for a year, then for one entire day all of Scarleteen, the whole thing, will happen because of you.

Maybe you won’t save someone’s life, but maybe you will. Maybe you won’t keep someone from getting pregnant, but maybe you will. Maybe you won’t help a fifteen-year-old get out of an abusive relationship, or help someone come out to their dad, or let someone know they can love their body, but maybe you will.

I don’t remember the last time I did a charitable solicitation on this blog — maybe never. But this is a big deal. I support Scarleteen, and I hope you will too.

Click here for more info on what Scarleteen does and how you can help. Click here to read what folks they’ve helped have to say about them. And then click here to throw them some money.

And if you do give them some money, any amount at all, let me know here or on Twitter, and I’ll give them another dollar myself.

In Defense of Student Government

February 11, 2013 in Campus Life, Student Government, Student Power, Students | by | 3 comments

A few weeks back I wrote up some thoughts on one of the classic essays in American student activist history — Ray Glass’s “Are Student Governments Obsolete?” In that piece I argued that there was a strange paradox lurking in Glass’s repudiation of the student government model in favor of voluntary student unions, since Glass himself had helped to found one of the most important and effective statewide student associations the nation has ever seen — an organization funded through mandatory dues with student governments as its membership base.

In the course of exploring this contradiction I took issue with some of Glass’s criticisms of mandatory dues structures in the labor movement, quoting one historian’s suggestion that if “the price of civilization is taxes, the price of unionism is solidarity. And, yes, that does involve coercing people to contribute to the union.”

Patrick St. John at For Student Power has written a really worthwhile response to that, in which he pushes back — quite convincingly — against my assessment of the role of mandatory dues in the labor context. “When an organization’s bureaucracy has become calcified and disconnected from its members over the years, thanks to guaranteed revenue,” Patrick writes, the organization can “collapse under its own weight” at the first moment of challenge.

He continues:

“Like most unions, student governments are handed a large pot of money at the beginning of the year without necessarily having done anything to actually earn it — regardless of whether the last election had 90% turnout or 2% … understanding the conservative and bureaucratic tendencies that automatic dues can engender is crucial to avoiding the pitfalls that so many fighting organizations inadvertently run headlong into.”

This is important stuff, and well worth saying. Anyone who’s ever spent any time at all around student government is familiar with the phenomenon Patrick describes, and the insularity, disconnectedness, and lack of accountability that typifies student government is surely one of the American student movement’s greatest challenges. But even so, as Ray Glass himself demonstrated, such student governments can be mobilized to do great things, and I think it’s worth spending some time contemplating why that is — and under what circumstances it happens.

It makes sense to criticize student governments’ lack of accountability, as Glass and St. John do, but in some weird ways that lack of accountability may be worth standing up for. A student government isn’t just its elected leadership — not just the president and officers and assembly that get so much deserved and undeserved flak. It’s also the other projects that those folks facilitate — on my undergraduate campus, SUNY Binghamton, the student activity fee, administered by our student association, funded not only all our student clubs, but also the student newspaper, and the radio station, and a campus bus service, and all sorts of other stuff as well. (For a while we controlled the budget for campus athletics, too, but that’s a story for a different day.)

The mandatory activity fee is a large pot of money, but even in poorly-run student governments a tremendous amount of that money typically winds up going to vitally important student organizations that wouldn’t find much funding any other way. At Binghamton today (according to a 2010 budget I just Googled), the student-run bus system gets more than $400,000 a year, a student-run ambulance service gets $100,000, and programming gets nearly $200,000.

And that’s before you get to the three quarters of a million dollars a year that goes to Binghamton’s hundreds of student clubs. More than twenty thousand each to the Black Student Union, Asian Student Union, Latin American Student Union, and Jewish Student Union. Seventy-five hundred to the Rainbow Pride Union. Thousands apiece to Students for Students International and the Women’s Center and the Children’s Dance Theater and the Thurgood Marshall black pre-law organization. And a few hundred each to dozens more, from the Society of Women Engineers to the College Libertarians.

That’s a huge amount of under-the-radar grassroots student activity, and most of it would disappear if even half of Binghamton’s students declined to pay a voluntary student fee. (Student government election turnout at Binghamton today averages about 15%, which means that non-voters supply the student association with nearly $1.9 million of its annual $2.2 million budget.)

Yes, it would be possible to keep rates of participation in a voluntary fee up, and yes the organizing work required would likely bring a higher profile and greater engagement to the work of the student government. But it would also consume a tremendous amount of time and energy, time and energy that was devoted to restoring most of the funding that nearly every American student government — the finest and most engaged as well as the least competent — now wields as a matter of course.

When I served on Binghamton’s student association budget committee as a 20-year-old undergraduate, I was one of a dozen elected students who spent two weeks meeting with representatives of nearly two hundred clubs to recommend how to divide up more than a million dollars in student money. When we got done, we presented our proposal to the student assembly, who spent some ten hours hearing from dozens of those groups again, going over the budget line by line, hammering out a plan to provide students with the support they needed to do all of the hundreds of different things — from tutoring struggling undergrads to providing safe spaces for underrepresented student communities to playing intramural touch football — that they wanted to do in the coming year. (What they wanted to do. Not what some student affairs administrator wanted them to do, what they wanted to do, and what their fellow students wanted to support them in doing.)

That’s student community. That’s student engagement. That’s student organizing. That’s student power. And it’s made possible by student government, an institution that many activists — back then and today — spurn as pointless, ineffectual, and hollow.

Those criticisms aren’t completely misplaced, of course — much of the work that student governments do is pointless, ineffectual, and hollow. But if you believe, as I wrote in my Ray Glass essay,

that every American campus should have a student union “which so overwhelmingly speaks for students that it becomes recognized by the university as the exclusive collective bargaining agent for students on all matters affecting the students of that university as students,” then the events of the last four decades suggest that you have to entertain the idea that building a robust, democratic mechanism for implementing mandatory dues schemes is a valid, even essential, organizing goal. And if that’s your goal, you have to at least contemplate the possibility that student government organizing may be the path most likely to get you there.

In my next post I’ll talk a bit more about why I believe in that route, and what shape I picture such organizing taking.

About This Blog

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StudentActivism.net is the work of Angus Johnston, a historian and advocate of American student organizing.

To contact Angus, click here. For more about him, check out AngusJohnston.com.