Unionized Resident Assistants Fighting for a Better Contract at U Mass Amherst

October 24, 2012 in Access, Dorms, Labor, Organizing, Student Power | by | Leave a comment

The Resident Assistants in the dorms at the University of Massachusetts Amherst are, they say, unique in the country — they’re the only RA’s in the country who are represented by a union.

The Resident Assisants union at U Mass Amherst dates back to 2002, when an RA was fired for missing a single staff meeting, but there have been bumps in the road since then. Most recently Residential Life, the administrative department that oversees the RAs, eliminated 19 Apartment Living Assistant positions and attempted to cut the jobs of another 54 peer mentors.

Right now the Amherst RAs are in the middle of contract negotiations with the university, seeking minimum wage pay and protection against termination without just cause. Those negotiations have been ongoing for more than a year, and last week week fifty Amherst students marched on the contract negotiations, lining the halls outside the meeting room for four hours in support of the RAs’ union representatives.

More on this story as it develops.

December 6 Update | I’ll have more details in a later post, but I’ve just learned that the RAs approved the new contract last night. It provides for a 30% pay increase, and was ratified in an overwhelming vote.

Sexual Assault Scandal Rocks Amherst College

October 24, 2012 in Access, Campus Communities, Feminism, Governance, Sexual Violence, Student Power | by | 1 comment

Last week a former Amherst College student’s harrowing account of being raped on campus — and of the administration’s subsequent appalling failure to support her or deal with the incident responsibly — was published in the college newspaper and almost immediately began to draw attention across the country.

Angie Epifano’s story of rape, involuntary institutionalization, and administrative failure brought other campus rape survivors forward, sparked vigils and other organizing, and prompted Amherst president Biddy Martin, until recently the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to announce an investigation of Epifano’s allegations and a series of possible revisions to campus policy.

In her statement, released six days ago, Martin declared Epifano’s experiences “horrifying,” and declared that the administration’s approach to rape complaints “must change.” As a result of an open meeting with students, she said, students would immediately be added to the campus Title IX and student life planning committees, campus penalties for sexual assault would be reviewed, and new regulation of off-campus fraternities would be considered.

On Friday a group of students secured a meeting with the Amherst board of trustees to discuss the crisis on campus, and the next day the board announced the establishment of a committee, to include student representation, which will conduct a review of campus policy in the area. The committee will make a public report in advance of the board’s next meeting in January, though it will have no formal institutional authority.

A crucial question going forward will be which students are brought into these processes, and how they are chosen. The president of the Amherst student government, not the administration, chose the delegation for the trustee meeting, but some students have been critical of the composition of that group, and are pressing for a less “manufactured” process for choosing representatives to the upcoming advisory committee.

Some activists also express concern that a narrow focus on written policies evades the core issues at stake. “The policy in place isn’t the heart of the problem,” senior Alexa Hettwer told the school paper. “Its enforcement by the administration has been shameful. This is more than just tinkering with policy; it raises serious questions about the direction and inclusiveness of the College in the future.”

Meanwhile, organizing continues. A new student website devoted to exposing sexual assault at Amherst appeared in the immediate aftermath of the publication of Epifano’s story, and yesterday they posted a photo essay of survivors (and allies) “featur[ing] eleven men and women who were sexually assaulted at Amherst College and the words that members of our community said to them following their assaults.” (The photos appeared on that site in slideshow form. They can be seen here in a single page format.)

And the impact of Epifano’s statement continues to be felt, most recently just this morning with the publication of another student’s account of how the Amherst administration mishandled her own rape complaint, leading to her transfer. (This student was enrolled at Mount Holyoke, a nearby college closely affiliated with Amherst, and was raped on the Amherst campus.)

Did Nixon Win the Popular Vote in 1960?

October 23, 2012 in History, Politics, Students | by | Leave a comment

In a blogpost yesterday on the Electoral College, NY Times columnist Ross Douthat reported that “if you believe Sean Trende’s fascinating analysis,” Richard Nixon won the popular vote in the 1960 presidential election. I hadn’t seen this claim before, and I’m a dork, so I popped over to take a look.

Trende’s piece, published over the weekend, notes that in 1960 Alabama voters didn’t vote for presidential candidates, but for individual electors, and that they we allowed to split tickets. There were eleven Democratic electors and eleven Republicans, and voters could choose anywhere from one to eleven candidates from the two columns.

Five of the Democratic electors were “loyal,” or pledged to Kennedy, while six were unpledged and eventually wound up voting for Senator Harry Byrd. Those eleven electors all won, and the Republican electors all lost.

The question Trende asks is how we should count these votes. (Since far more votes were cast than there were voters, we can’t just tally up the scores for each slate and do it that way.) The traditional approach has been to credit Kennedy with the number equal to his highest scoring elector, and Nixon with the corresponding total for his, but as Trende notes, that results in Byrd getting no votes in a state where he obviously had substantial support.

Instead, Trende suggests, it makes more sense to give all the Democratic votes to Byrd instead of Kennedy, or split them on the basis of how many electoral votes each received. In either case, he notes, the result is a Nixon victory in the overall popular vote. Nixon won!

But no, he didn’t. Here’s why:

Nationally, according to the source Trende himself relied on, Nixon received 34,108,157 votes in 1960, and Kennedy received 34,220,984. If we set Alabama aside — take all their votes off the table, and tally up the rest of the country without them, here’s what we’re left with:

Kennedy: 33,902,681

Nixon: 33,870,176

That’s a Kennedy victory of more than 32,000 votes. So in order to claim that Nixon beat Kennedy nationally, we have to argue that Nixon beat Kennedy by nearly 32,000 votes in Alabama. And that’s not what happened — Kennedy’s poorest-performing elector in Alabama received 316,934 votes. Nixon’s best-performing elector received 237,981.

It’s not easy to say how the votes should be carved up, since Kennedy had fewer electors on the ballot than Nixon. But the evidence suggests that the vast majority of those who went to the polls voted for all the electors they could. In a senate race on the same ballot, the two candidates received a total of 554,064 votes. If you divide the total number of votes cast in the presidential race by 11 — the maximum number of electors a single voter could support — you get 555,592.3 people voting, almost exactly the same.

The vast majority of Alabama voters in 1960 voted for a full slate of electors, and the strong majority of those chose the Democratic slate. Perhaps ten thousand or so voted only for Harry Byrd’s electors, and not for Kennedy’s, but the overwhelming number took what they were given from the party they supported.

Still not convinced? Let’s look at it another way. Figure that 600,000 Alabama voters went to the polls in 1960. That’s almost certainly too high, but it’s within the realm of plausibility, and approximates the best-case scenario for the ticket-splitting hypothesis. In that scenario, John Kennedy’s worst-performing elector received the support of 53% of the state’s voters, and Nixon’s best-performing elector received the votes of 40% of them.

Kennedy beat Nixon in Alabama. Kennedy beat Nixon outside of Alabama. Kennedy beat Nixon.

There’s no other way to spin it. Sorry.

Pussy Riot Shirts On Sale at Hot Topic Are Real

October 22, 2012 in Students | by | 1 comment

Just a quick weird note.

Over the weekend I noticed that ersatz punk mall-store chain Hot Topic had a selection of Free Pussy Riot shirts for sale, and tweeted about it. A few folks tweeted back to wonder whether PR was seeing any of the proceeds, so I wrote to HT to ask. And this morning I got an email back:

“Yes, we purchased the shirts through the band management’s merchandising company.”

So there you go. The shirts are legit, and Pussy Riot is getting their cut. Good to know.

Concerns on Romney Policy Causing DREAMers to Hang Back

October 22, 2012 in Access, Immigration, Politics, Students | by | 1 comment

Many undocumented immigrants eligible for a reprieve from deportation under the Obama administration’s DREAM Act-inspired policy shift are choosing not to apply because of fears of their applications being used against them if Mitt Romney wins the presidency.

In June President Obama announced that he would be establishing a process by which those young people who would be eligible for permanent residency and eventual citizenship under the DREAM Act — those brought to the US by the age of 15 who completed two years of college or enlisted in the military — could apply for a pre-emptive deferral of deportation proceedings. The policy, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), took effect in August.

The administration’s shift followed directly on the mounting of a series of increasingly high profile occupations of Obama campaign offices by DREAM Act-eligible activists.

Romney has pledged to end the DACA policy, but says he will honor any reprieves from deportation already approved when he takes office. Given the program’s complex documentation requirements and high fees, however — and the glacial pace of government bureaucracy — many DACA-eligible young people are hanging back, afraid that an incomplete application could give the government ammunition to use against them in the future.

Only seven percent of the nation’s estimated 1.2 million eligible immigrants applied for DACA in its first month, and though that number has since doubled, only a tiny fraction of applications have so far been processed. Of 180,000 applications submitted so far, only 4,591 have reached final approval. That’s less than three percent of applications, and 0.4 percent of the total eligible pool.

Romney has sent mixed signals on policy for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. He opposes the DREAM Act but says he’d work to give them a chance at permanent residency as part of comprehensive immigration reform. What that policy would look like, however, and how it would be implemented, remain impossible to assess.

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

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