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Showing posts with label freedom of speech. Show all posts
Showing posts with label freedom of speech. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 28, 2024

Campus Protests, Campus Safety, and the Student Imagination

According to the LA Times, students at Cal Berkeley, San Jose State, San Francisco State, and the University of San Francisco plan to hold coordinated protests on their campuses tomorrow. These actions are a continuation of this year's earlier protests against Israel's atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza--which have been backed by the United States, through arms deals and federal funding.

With the US-backed genocide expanding to the West Bank and Southern Lebanon, there will certainly be student resistance despite administrative and police efforts to make campus occupations and other forms of protest (even free speech and freedom of assembly) difficult.

The greatest threat so far from these protests has been to the reputations of elite universities and their endowments, rather than to campus safety. And the greatest perceived threat to administrators is that students and their allies have the imagination to resist in novel ways--without violence.   

Students have already gained partial victories with a handful of universities which have offered to review investment strategies complicit with genocide. These progressive schools include Brown University and San Francisco State. At the University of Michigan, pro-Palestinian students organized as the Shut it Down Party have won student elections.       

Coordinated and Secret Crackdowns

The crackdown measures that schools have already made to reduce free speech and other freedoms, and to stoke fear, are too numerous to list. Some of these measures, like increased surveillance are not even known by students, faculty, staff, and community folks. Just understanding that secret mass surveillance is possible helps administrators who want to quell good trouble. 

What are the real threats to campus safety? 

We hope these protests (and any other actions) will be nonviolent and have published a list of nonviolent methods for resistance as a starting point for discussion. Violence is not a good excuse even in crackdowns of this type, and it's a losing strategy for all sides--other than the right wing--who want chaos and hope to bait others. It takes great planning, discipline, and strategy not to take the bait. At the same time, we hope campus administrators will take the problems of sexual assault, hate crimes and other forms of violence, as well as the threats of mass shootings, more seriously than they have.

Related links: 

Democratic Protests on Campus: Modeling the Better World We Seek (Annelise Orleck)

Methods of Student Nonviolent Resistance

Wikipedia Community Documents Pro-Palestinian Protests on University and College Campuses

Dangerous Spaces: Sexual Assault and Other Forms of Violence On and Off Campus

One Fascism or Two?: The Reemergence of "Fascism(s)" in US Higher Education

A People's History of Higher Education in the US?

Letter to an incoming freshman

Thursday, August 8, 2024

Good ideas are stolen. Great ideas are buried. We uncover both. And we publish them.

Over the course of our tenure at the Higher Education Inquirer, we have discovered that the US political economy (including the higher education system that serves it) is in a state of dysfunction-that the situation is worsening--and that there is some resistance (and hope). 

This critical analysis is not merely a belief, but something that can be objectively measured, whether its child poverty, student loan debt, loss of good jobs and union busting, mental illness and suicide, social inequality, life expectancy, or global climate chaos. 

It can also be measured in protests, strikes, and progressive social change.  

It doesn't have to be this way, but lots of American time and energy is spent with greed and fear in mind, instead of improving quality of life and sustaining the planet. That's why the Higher Education Inquirer exists: not just to expose rampant corruption, but to provide viable, detailed, life-sustaining alternatives. 

We aim not just to educate, but to agitate and help organize. We are not ashamed to say that our list of guest authors and contributors reflects human diversity, equity, inclusion--and justice for students, workers, and activists--people who are often marginalized and silenced by the higher education establishment and the higher ed business.   

Unlike other sources, we believe in the power of the People.

If you have good ideas and great ideas for higher education, send them to us. If you have stories of challenges and resistance, send them. We'll publish them when others won't. If you fear retribution or ridicule, we'll publish those stories anonymously. And the good ideas (and great ideas) will get out.  

Related links:

Ahead of the Learned Herd: Why the Higher Education Inquirer Grows During the Endless College Meltdown

Higher Education, Technology, and A Growing Social Anxiety

A People's History of Higher Education in the US?

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

Ahead of the Learned Herd: Why the Higher Education Inquirer Grows During the Endless College Meltdown (Dahn Shaulis and Glen McGhee)

The Higher Education Inquirer (HEI) continues to grow without financial support and without paying for advertising or SEO help. The reason is that HEI continues to provide useful information for folks who follow US higher education. We do it in the spirit of Upton Sinclair and others pejoratively known as the muckrakers. And we gladly take the label. 


For years, the higher ed herd dismissed warnings of looming financial crises, but HEI accurately foresaw the revenue declines and unsustainable models forcing college closures, and the downside of the online pivot (including online program managers and robocolleges). We also saw a decade of enrollment declines with no end in sight

HEI has published a number of articles that provide value to higher ed workers (including adjuncts), future, present, and former students (including the tens of millions of student loan debtors), and other folks affiliated with the higher ed industry (including workers at edtech and financial companies). We called it the College Meltdown

 

We have examined a number of groupings in the industry (from community colleges and for-profit schools to elite universities and everything in between) and issues (to include student and worker protests, student loan debt, and violence on campus).  We highlight those who are trying to good, like David Halperin (Republic Report), Gary Stocker (College Viability), Mark Salisbury (TuitionFit), Helena Worthen (Power Despite Precarity), Theresa Sweet and Tarah Gramza (Sweet v Cardona), and Ann Bowers (Debt Collective)

HEI has also had the good fortune of getting outstanding contributions from Randall Collins, Bryan Alexander, Robert Kelchen, Phil HillGary Roth, Bill Harrington, and others. Bryan Alexander's contributions have been extremely important in highlighting the existential threat of global climate change and the civil strife that accompanies it.

While honest reporting is important to us, we do take sides, just as other outlets do (most others take the side of big business and government). We are for the People, and we hunt for corruption that undermines democracy. We have examined companies (like Guild, Maximus, and EducationDynamics) that few others will bother to examine. We continue to follow subprime for-profit colleges that have morphed into subprime state universities (like Purdue Global and University of Arizona Global) and other bad actors in higher ed (like 2U and the University of Phoenix). 

We value history, the real unvarnished history, not the tales, myths and lies that have been repeated to children for generations and used as indoctrination at all levels of society. And we value those who look honestly at the present and the future, those not trying to sell themselves or their hidden agendas. 

As Howard Zinn proclaimed, you can't be neutral on a moving train. And US higher education, we fear, is a train moving away from America's hopes and dreams of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, towards a less utopian, more dangerous, place.