You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, or its title, but how about from an extended interview with the authors? On November 2, Inside Higher Ed carried such an interview with the three authors of a new book entitled Occupying the Academy. The authors, Christine Clark (a professor of multicultural education at UNLV), Kenneth […]
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By Charlotte Allen and George Leef This article was prepared by Minding the Campus and the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. A new movement is rising on American campuses, timed perfectly to feed the frenzy over the income gap that is Occupy Wall Street’s main complaint. But this movement […]
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The sharp political focus on inequality, driven into the public mind by the Occupy movement and endorsed by President Obama in his State of the Union message, was born, not on the street, but on the campus. It thrives there, mostly under the aegis of elite universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia and Johns […]
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Sometimes the left is onto something. Take, for example, the latest twist in the “Occupy” movement: Occupy Student Debt. The new activism front, which began in with a Nov. 21 rally at Occupy Ground Zero, New York’s Zuccotti Park, is trying to collect a million online signatures from debtors pledging to refuse to repay their […]
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Commendably, the trustees of the City University of New York refused to bow to intimidation, and put the best interests of the university first by approving, in a 15-1 vote, a new tuition structure. The new policy grants CUNY the authority to raise tuition by $300 annually for the next five years. The decision, of […]
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A few weeks ago, I attended a presentation on the state of the university by CUNY chancellor Matthew Goldstein. In the Q&A session, a student asked Goldstein for his opinion on sympathy-protests with Occupy Wall Street that had sprung up on various CUNY campuses. Goldstein gave what seemed to me a reasonable answer. He said […]
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The scenes that describe certain events or incidents in the course of human events sometimes distort the actuality of those events and incidents; and, thus, leave a flawed portrait as a historical record. For example, while the public saw the “brutality” of the Los Angeles Police Department in the Rodney King incident, they did not see […]
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College students have been protesting lately in many different settings, from Occupy Wall Street to classroom walkouts, to the riots at Penn State. Each incident recommends its own separate analysis and explanation, but it is important to recognize what they share in common as well. Philip C. Altbach and Patti Peterson reminded us that student protest […]
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The Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are no longer merely residents of Zuccotti Park, they have converted themselves into roving bands restricting traffic on Broadway and Church Street and occupying nearby buildings. Yet the city authorities avert their gaze and well known scholars who share a hard left ideology such as Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek and […]
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Students occupied a New School building early this morning and police have now entered, with the evident aim of removing the occupants, the New York Times reports. They seem to have followed the lead of February’s NYU protesters in advancing a list of highly disparate demands: The students adopted a list of eight demands including […]
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What kind of mark does NYU deserve for its handling of its student occupation? Let’s give the university a “B-plus” or even an “A” for a performance marred only by a poor end game—immediately reinstating the suspended perpetrators of the sandbox revolution, thus letting them claim that they had won. (“We did it”, said the […]
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Take a look at some hilarious footage of the end of the NYU building occupation, courtesy of Gawker. You won’t regret the nine minutes spent watching this. “I don’t think they want water bottles. They probably drink corporate water.” -Protester
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New York University students, or at least a few dozen of them, have just set several records for student occupations of a campus building: fewest occupiers, shortest occupation (3 days) , least support among the student body and longest list of demands. Surely the strange litany of demands had much to so with the adventure’s […]
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When an American university sponsors a conference on Israel and Palestine, most observers know what to expect: a prolonged rabble-rousing attack on Israel sponsored by the “anti-colonial” far left, with no one invited to defend Israel. Last Friday, the University of Hawaii at Manoa concluded an 18-day Israel-bashing festival, one of the longest such adventures […]
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