Students Clash at UC Davis Gaza Protest

November 20, 2012 in Campus Protests, Student vs. Student | by | 1 comment

Several dozen students briefly occupied Dutton Hall, an administration building on the University of California Davis campus, yesterday afternoon in protest against Israeli attacks on Gaza. The protest came one day after the first anniversary of last year’s notorious pepper-spraying of UC Davis activists by campus police.

According to the California Aggie, the UC Davis student newspaper, tempers flared between protesters and pro-Israel students at the occupation in two separate incidents.

The paper says that when demonstrators saw one student recording the action on her camera phone they approached her and “two neighboring Israeli students, yelling ‘Death to Israel’ and ‘Fuck Israel’ until they left.” Later, the paper reported, a demonstrator “grabbed [another student] by the shirt collar and raised a fist” after he “vocalized disagreement with one of the signs in the room.”

It’s not clear whether Aggie reporters witnessed either of the two incidents. The paper’s tweets from the scene mentioned only “heated … talk,” not intimidation or physical confrontation.

Update | Aggie editor and article author Janelle Bitker says she and another Aggie staffer witnessed both incidents.

Massachusetts Grants In-State Tuition to Undocumented Students. Sort of.

November 19, 2012 in Access, Immigration, Politics, Tuition and Fees | by | 1 comment

There’s been a lot of cheering today for the news that Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick plans to direct public colleges in the state to allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition, but a peek at the fine print shows that the policy shift isn’t anywhere near what it could be.

The policy covers undocumented Massachusetts residents eligible for temporary immunity from deportation under the Obama administration’s new DREAM-Act-like policy, but there’s a catch. Actually two.

First, in order to qualify for in-state tuition, you have to have made your way through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) hoops and been granted the reprieve from deportation it provides. That means that if you’ve got qualms about coming forward, or you’re having trouble proving eligibility, or are stuck in the bureaucracy for some other reason, you’re out of luck.

Second, and more importantly, the program only covers DACA-eligible students. So if you’re over thirty, you don’t qualify — even if you’ve lived in Massachusetts for twenty years. If you came to the US after your 18th birthday, or you’ve got the wrong kind of criminal record, or you don’t have (or can’t prove) the uninterrupted presence in the country that DACA requires, you’ll continue be treated as an out-of-state student for tuition purposes.

And it’s important to note that there’s no reason for Massachusetts to be limiting in-state tuition this way. A number of other states have taken the more reasonable approach of applying residency rules to all students equally, no matter what their immigration status. Just this month, in fact, Maryland took that step by statewide referendum.

If you’ve been in state long enough to obtain residency, you’ve been a state resident long enough to get in-state tuition. That’s a simple, straightforward principle, and it should be the one that pertains in Massachusetts.

It’s a shame Deval Patrick doesn’t see it that way.

Did Obama Steal the Election? (No.)

November 18, 2012 in Media, Politics, Race | by | 1 comment

There’s a conspiracy theory going around the right-wing blogosphere that says that Obama “stole” votes in heavily Democratic precincts in heavily Democratic cities in heavily Democratic states. Why he’d do this isn’t clear — the electoral college chooses the president, so a few extra votes in states that are in the bag aren’t going to change the outcome — but the drum is being beaten louder and louder. It’s “evidence of massive voter fraud” that “could have impacted the election.” It’s “statistically impossible.” It’s proof that he stole the presidency.

And what’s this evidence? That in certain precincts in certain cities, Mitt Romney received no votes.

Now, let’s note at the outset that we’re talking about overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhoods populated overwhelmingly by people of color here. With Obama winning upwards of 95% of the black vote nationally, you’d expect his support in black areas of Democratic cities to be even higher. So the broad trends aren’t cause for alarm.

What’s curious, the conspiracists say, isn’t the landslide. It’s the unanimity — the fact that in 37 precincts in Chicago, 59 in Philadelphia, and about a hundred in Cleveland, Obama won every single vote cast. Here’s Mark Steyn of the National Review, quoting a commenter at a Chicago news station’s website:

Statistically, even if among 10′s of thousands of voters all wanted to vote for Obama, it would not be possible to receive 100% of the vote because at least a few would make a mistake and vote incorrectly for Romney.

A commenter at National Review picks up that ball and runs with it:

It’s not statistically probable that hundreds of thousands of voters in a single sample, would cast votes in such a homogeneous way, particularly when you account for the fact that voters aren’t infallible.

One of two things happened: Either there is some yet undiscovered process error that “accidentally” cast all votes for Obama, or there was intentional fraud or deceit Now, I know what direction I lean, but whatever the case is, there needs to be a robust and thorough investigation to determine if the failure was accidental or intentional.

But, to pretend there wasn’t some kind of failure, is anti-science.

So what’s the deal here? Was there a pool of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of urban voters in which not a single vote was cast for anyone but Obama?

Simply put, no.

Let’s take Chicago’s 6th Ward as an example.

Ward 6 went for Obama by an overwhelming margin this year. He received more than 99% of the votes cast, holding Romney to just 0.53% of the total. (Jill Stein and Gary Johnson did even worse.) But even in the 6th, Romney managed to get on the board in nearly every precinct.

There are 48 precincts in Ward 6, and Obama took the whole vote in just three of them. Romney managed to pull a single vote in another eight, and multiple votes in the remainder.

The thirty-seven Chicago precincts in which Obama won unanimous victories are scattered across thirteen wards, and the amount to less than 1.5% of the city’s more than 2,000 precincts. And if you have a guy regularly taking 99% of the vote in big swaths of a big city, there are going to be a few places where he hits 100%.

That’s it. That’s the whole story.

Sorry, guys.

International Students’ Day

November 17, 2012 in Students | by | 1 comment

On this day in 1939, the Nazis shut down Czechoslovakia’s colleges and universities, executing nine student and faculty leaders and sending another 1200 to concentration camps.

On this day in 1973, the Greek junta staged a tank attack on Athens Polytechnic university to put down a student uprising, killing least two dozen people.

It’s International Students’ Day. Follow along with what’s happening on the #N17 Twitter hashtag.

Federal Court Rules that Banning Affirmative Action Is Unconstitutional

November 16, 2012 in Access, Race | by | 1 comment

A few weeks back, the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the question of whether it’s constitutional to allow affirmative action in college admissions. That decision, in the case of Fisher v. Texas, will likely come down next spring.

Yesterday, however, a federal appeals court ruled on the related — but distinct — question of whether it’s constitutional to ban affirmative action in college admissions, and the differences between the two cases are fascinating … and revealing.

The issue of affirmative action’s constitutionality is usually framed as it is in Fisher v. Texas, as a matter of whether states can take race into account in admissions. In the past, the Supreme Court has ruled that they can, in limited circumstances, and the question at hand in Fisher is whether that will remain the law of the land. But in yesterday’s case out of Michigan, the court approached the issue from another perspective.

Michigan’s public higher education system employed affirmative action in admissions from the 1960s until 2006, when a state referendum banned the use of race as a factor in the selection of students. What the appeals court ruled yesterday is that this referendum, and the resulting constitutional amendment, uniquely harms students of color.

“No other admissions criterion,” the judges wrote, not “grades, athletic ability, geographic diversity, or family alumni connections,” is barred from consideration in the selection process. And “Proposal 2 entrenched this prohibition at the state constitutional level, thus preventing public colleges and universities or their boards from revisiting this issue — and only this issue” in the absence of a constitutional amendment.

The court’s ruling in this case recognizes that affirmative action is an uncontroversial reality in the United States for all sorts of students. If you’re from a poor and/or remote part of the state, you’re welcome to a leg up. If you’re a great point guard applying to a school with a lousy basketball team, that’s wonderful. If your grandfather was a dean or your mom donated a million dollars, the school is welcome to take that into consideration. But in a state like Michigan, the college can’t give you the same consideration because you’re a member of a racial or ethnic group with a history of discrimination and a resultant underrepresentation in the student body.

The “simple but central principle” at stake here, as the court recognized, “is that the Equal Protection Clause prohibits requiring racial minorities to surmount more formidable obstacles than those faced by other groups to achieve their political objectives.”

Kudos to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. They got this one exactly right.

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

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