Kay Steiger is an associate editor at Campus Progress and a former editorial assistant at The American Prospect. She also contributes to TAPPED and blogs on her own site, kaysteiger.blogspot.com.
Scott Jaschik has a long and thoughtful piece over at Inside Higher Ed in light of St. Louis' Washington University decision to award anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly with an honorary doctorate. What, Jaschik wonders, is the point of honorary degrees? In the case of Schlafly, the university is endorsing a free exchange of ideas, officials claimed. But, as Jaschik pointed out,
Most of those protesting the Schlafly degree say that they would not object to her giving a lecture on the campus. Some might picket outside, but they would never challenge the right of a controversial figure to express her ideas, they say. An honorary doctorate is different from a lecture, they argue, because it is an honor, because it takes place at graduation, and because a doctorate — as the highest degree a university can award — conveys a sense of institutional endorsement.
If WU is merely endorsing the Schlafly's right to express ideas rather than the ideas themselves then what's the point of the award. Universities already endorse the free exchange of ideas in the very tenants of the institution of education. By citing this as a reason, university officials are implying Schlafly is doing something brave and new by putting forth unpopular ideas -- but the ideas she purports are merely reinforcement of old stereotypes and a resistance to real science and education.
Furthermore, Jaschik notes that other universities have dealt better with this idea of doling out honorary degrees. The University of Chicago, for instance, only awards honorary degrees to scholars that are nominated by the school's professors. Cornell University avoids the subject altogether and just doesn't award honorary degrees. The question that Jaschik poses is a good one. With so many universities giving out honorary degrees, they can't all be to thoughtful scholars or those that make significant social change. In many cases, it seems that honorary degrees are nothing more than a publicity stunt or means of getting a famous person at a graduation ceremony. When so many people labor long and hard for years to earn real doctorates, the practice of awarding honorary ones seems silly and unfair. I'd be happy to see this convention junked altogether.
New America's Higher Ed Watch blog has a great post by Ben Miller on how colleges and credit cards are teaming up to ensnare students into loads of credit card debt. (The post also includes an interesting fact I didn't know, which is that over 70 percent of students keep their first credit card for years -- now that's brand loyalty that companies would kill for -- and student credit cards often include much higher interest rates and more penalties).
Bob Reich also has a great post from yesterday on how credit card companies are similar to the mortgage industry in that they're dangerously underregulated -- they can raise interest rates at will and hide important information like how they calculate an outstanding balance. It also seems that the lobby in favor of keeping credit card companies that way is way more powerful than any force to enact legislation, and it's not just Republicans that are in the pockets of credit card companies. As Reich says "only 11 of 36 Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee have backed" legislation that would impose tougher regulations on credit card companies.
Well, this is depressing. Via the Economic Policy Institute, women start out of college with a nearly $3.00 an hour wage difference. That amounts to roughly $6,000 a year, and we all know your starting base wage has a long-term impact on raises (which are usually figured on a percentage basis) over a lifetime. Furthermore, women's hourly wages in the few years after graduating college seem to have stayed roughly stagnant since 2003, while men's wages have averaged an increase during that time. Furthermore, a second graph indicates that a college degree is becoming less and less of a guarantee for pension coverage and health insurance for both men and women.
Mother Jones magazine is running a survey to figure out if young people like you think the future of activism lies in personal choices like buying environmentally friendly cleaning products or if activism is something else. Weigh in on their survey here.
Today Emily Bazelon looks at a story in the Chronicle of Higher Education that talks about how colleges and universities with the biggest endowments -- usually over $500 million -- are working at increasing class and race diversity, but somehow the number of students who receive Pell grants are falling. So if these schools were really successfully recruiting lower-class students, wouldn't the Pell grant numbers be going up? The answer is, they're not. The answer, then, isn't to increase recruitment in schools where they might find lower-class students, but instead Yale and Harvard are expanding to upper middle class families with incomes up to $200,000.
These premium colleges and universities seem to be so out-of-touch with the lower class students that they're not recruiting successfully. I grew up in a small town full of middle- and lower-class working folk, something those coastal elitists like to call "flyover country." Part of the problem is that education for a lot of people that might be in the classes that they'd want -- the kind that are in the Pell grant-receiving brackets -- view education as a much more practical venture. They want to earn a degree that will take them the furthest without breaking the bank.
The Columbia Spectator reports today that pressure from student activist groups resulted in the student health services center lowering the cost of birth control to make it more affordable. As Campus Progress has reported before, the cost of birth control has shot up in recent months due to the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act. Prescriptions that used to cost $10 now cost $50 or $60 to a lot of college students and recent graduates.
At Columbia, though, the fabulous NuvaRing (a vaginal ring that contains hormones released continuously throughout the month) will drop from $40 to $20 over the summer and regular oral hormonal contraception co-payments will drop from $10 to $5 a month. Thanks to the pressure of a coalition of student groups, birth control at Columbia is once again affordable to students.
Today is also Equal Pay Day, a day that highlights the fact that equal pay still doesn't exist. Via Firedoglake, below is a video produced by Alliance for Justice that shows Lilly Ledbetter speaking out about pay discrimination in her own words (and narrated by Josh Lyman, er Bradly Whitford).
Campus Progress received an advance copy of an MTV/CBS poll this morning (which will be published on chooseorloose.com later today), which shows some significant things about a national sample of 18-29 year olds:
About two-thirds of young people believe they have as much or more influence on the presidential election as other generations. Of those, 31 percent believed they had more influence.
The economy now takes place as the number one issue young people are concerned about. The breakdown of issues is as follows: 22 percent said the economy was the number one issue, 13 percent said the Iraq War, 6 percent said education, 5 percent said the environment, and 5 percent said health care. About two-thirds of young people also think they have a fair or poor chance with job prospects.
Young people overwhelmingly (34 percent) listed economic problems as the number one problem that needs to be addressed in the next 20 years. The next biggest group (18 percent) listed the environment as the biggest problem to be addressed in the next 20 years. Interestingly enough, they can both be tackled by investing in green jobs.
Sixty-five percent of respondents said the coverage of the presidential race as focused too much on race and gender. Young people want to talk about issues.
Today is blog for Equal Pay Day. So named because despite all the articles declaring that feminism is over, that we live in a post-feminist society, women on average earn about 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. If you're a woman of color, that rate drops even lower.
The reason this is such a hot issue now is because the Supreme Court ruled against Lilly Ledbetter last year in a lawsuit against her employer Goodyear. They determined that her complaint had been filed after the appropriate time (in her state, 180 days) and the Supreme Court not only said she lost her right to sue after that period of time, but she also lost her award of back pay. The problem is, of course, that she didn't even realize that she was getting paid less than her male peers until after the time period had expired. Furthermore an initial pay discrimination decision can compound over time and cause an extreme disparity after years in the workforce.
Thankfully, there's legislation that that has been proposed in both the House and the Senate called the The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (the Senate is expected to vote on a version of the bill next week) that would, among other things would allow the time period to be counted from the last paycheck and not from the time the pay decision was made and take pension payments into account. Other versions of the bill attempt to increase pay transparency in ways that would still protect privacy.
My main fear with pay discrimination is that we've been locked in this kind of pay gap for decades. People are beginning to think that there's nothing that can be done, that that's just the way things are. The simple fact of the matter is that there are many reasons why women make less money than men, and it isn't as straightforward as the blatant sexism that Ledbetter experienced. (And when I saw her testify before George Miller's committee last year she told some stories that were truly terrifying.)
Women tend not to ask for more money or don't ask for as much as men. Generally, they're more cautious about negotiating their salaries.
Promotions tend to be more infrequent for women, sometimes due to taking time off for child bearing or child care.
Women who don't have higher education tend to fill lower paying jobs (hairdresser, administration) than men without higher education do (construction work, auto mechanic).
Women wait for evaluations with specific guidelines and expectations they might exceed before asking for a raise, while men tend to ask for more when they feel they "deserve" it.
The subtle sexism that men who network with each other in a personal way by talking about sports or dating. Women tend not to be part of those conversations as often.
There are more reasons I didn't list, but I think the tendency is to think that somehow we're "beyond" this kind of treatment. As if sexism and pay discrimination is a thing of the past. And such discrimination doesn't always come from men. Female bosses can apply some of the sexist stereotypes about women and pay just as easily as men can.
Young women in colleges especially don't tend to think of pay discrimination in such ways. College is an environment where the guidelines are pretty clear, and young women tend to make up the ranks of the highest-achieving students. Young women tend to assume, as I did, that their hard work would earn them the fair pay they deserved. It's more complicated than that.
UPDATE: Here's the piece I wrote for TAP last year about the Ledbetter case.
Via Cara at Feministe. (Her post is excellent so you should read the whole thing.) A Maryland court rule that it is indeed a rape when someone continue shaving sex with someone after they say "stop" or "no." The headline on this story? "Definition of rape widened."
That's the message of an NPR story this morning about college graduates on the job hunt. It's not available in print form yet, but you can listen to it here. Apparently if you're anything less than an A/B student, you should "take whatever job you can get." Many companies are putting hiring freezes on in light of the credit market crunch. Additionally, many graduates are competing with more "experienced" people who are on the job market because they've been laid off.
Great. As if college graduates don't panic enough during their job search.
In presidings over a copyright lawsuit yesterday, a fan creating a "Harry Potter Lexicon" -- an encyclopedia of sorts about the world of Harry Potter -- cried. J.K. Rowling, the author of the infamous books, called the encyclopedia "sloppy, lazy and ... wholesale theft" of her work.
But it turns out Rowling likes Vander Ark's website, something the middle school librarian created as a companion site over the years. It's just that Rowling is concerned that the Lexicon could compete with her own forthcoming Harry Potter encyclopedia.
At this point, Rowling's creation has become to big for her to control. Harry Potter has become part of global culture. Clearly she has chosen to pick and choose which "copyright violations" she will go after -- and this one was targeted because it directly competed with something she herself planned to sell.
Rinku Sen has a rather odd post on RaceWire. She* titles it "Dear Generation Disaffected:" which I guess includes me. She takes the anecdotal evidence of his intern, who said she couldn't find a place "to contribute." Sen then dives in to trying to figure out why this generation feels disaffected. But her post isn't very specific. Is she talking about all young people? Is she talking about young people of color? Or simply young men, like this intern? Is she talking about those seeking a career in nonprofits? It's unclear.
Thomas Friedman wrote the now-famous "Generation Q" column for the New York Times. Instead of trying to inspire a new generation to political action, he spent the entire column attacking us for lazing on the couch and plugging iPod buds into our ears. Baby Boomers and Gen Xers think because they don't see an exact replication of what they did when they were young, something must be drastically, desperately wrong. Read More »
If there's one thing this election season has highlighted, it's some deep divisions within the feminist movement. Today at Women's eNews, Amy Tiemann outlines how some older feminists claim solidarity with Hillary Clinton based on her vagina -- or as Tieman says "plenty of second-wavers have turned the campaigns into a test of feminist credentials." Many younger feminists, meanwhile, say it's not just about electing a woman. Tiemann says, "I am worried that modern feminism may go the way of 'The Greatest Generation,' something younger women honor as a historical legacy that does not directly involve us." It's a good summary of the debate among feminists.
Today over at RH Reality Check, Eleanor Bader has a piece about the "Choose Life" license plates I saw in Florida last week. They're supposed to be a fundraiser for women who choose adoption instead of abortion, but instead:
[M]oney collected by the DMV has been accumulating far faster than it is being spent. "In Marion County, we get $30,000 a year which is distributed to qualified agencies that promote, support or enhance adoption services," [Publicity Coordinator for Choose Life, Inc. Russ] Amerling continues. "There is no paperwork, no contract signing. The county auditor goes in every year and confirms that the money is being used in accordance with the statute. That's it. In other counties it's not like that. Many county commissioners don't distribute the money because there is so much red tape that agencies don't even apply for it. It's too burdensome. The funds are not being spent because barriers are being erected that keep it from being spent."
This means that the money raised by Florida's sale of Choose Life license plates isn't doing what its promoters say it is -- helping women place their babies with adoptive families. Instead, the funds -- approximately $200,000 according to news-press.com -- languish in state bank accounts.
Because the spending is so restrictive, by only spending on adoption rather than health care, diapers, or other necessities women who choose to have children and keep them may need, the funds aren't spent properly. Shocking that women who have children would need such things. If you ask me, this is one of those cases of waste, fraud, and abuse that the right is always lamenting.
An article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune last week looked at how students in Minnesota might be affected now that student loans are starting to dry up. The article reports that the average student that attends college in Minnesota college carries a debt load of $23,375 -- that's higher than the national average.
The article says not to worry, however:
"There may be fewer lenders, but I'm not in a panic," said Jane Williams, director of financial aid at Concordia. "We still think there are plenty of loans out there. I don't think it's necessary for families to be worried."
Oh good. There are still plenty of lenders out there.
Via C&L. Marc McDonald over at Beggars Can Be Choosers laments the lack of "protest music" in today's popular music landscape. I'm sure people who are far more into the music scene could bring up more specific examples than I could, but I'd have to say that McDonald presents an argument that's wrong for a couple of reasons. There argument McDonald makes is once centered on stereotypes about class and race. He compares Paris Hilton and the Dixie Chicks with Bob Dylan, these are both imperfect comparisons. Read More »
Last night I went to a Winter Soldier panel Campus Progress co-hosted down here in Gainesville, FL. It was a smaller scale than the one Spencer reported on in DC, consisting of six Iraq veterans, four of whom are with Iraq Veterans Against the War and two who just came forward to talk about their experiences unaffiliated. The event was extremely intense, gripping the audience during each soldier's story and lasting nearly four hours. The stories ranging from witnessing deaths of Iraqis, suicide bombers, self-medicating drug use, lack of veterans benefits, and sexual assault of both American female soldiers and Iraqi women.
Clifton Hicks, who was once suspected of being the author of TNR's disputed "Shock Troops" article, said, "None of us are here to make American soldiers look bad, because anyone in this room is capable of the same thing." Hicks blames the evil of war and not the individual troops. Many soldiers said they were still "pro-military" but opposed the Iraq war in particular. The opinions on pullout varied from immediately and as quickly as possible to a strategic and slow withdrawl. Unsurprisingly, the veterans aren't a monolithic group and don't have one opinion about the war.
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