Last night, students at Wesleyan University in Connecticut celebrated the end of finals as students usually do --with a big party. But this time 10 or more police cars showed up to try to disperse the crowd.  The students didn't leave and what ensued involved pepper spray bullets, attack dogs, taser guns, and rubber bullets.  Five students were arrested. Some students had to be hospitalized.

The best coverage of this event is by Wesleying, a blog run by Wesleyan students.  It includes links to all the media coverage (both print and television), student testimonials, photo documentation of the events, and more.

Full disclosure, I graduated from Wesleyan last year and have first-hand experience with some of the tactics the police use to break-up parties.  There is certainly enough blame to go around. Students definitely become stubborn and don't want to give into authority.  Some are disrespectful (and outright dangerous) to law enforcement officers and have an unjust sense of entitlement. Others have been racially targeted by police officers and attacked unfairly by overzealous cops with pepper spray, dogs, and taser guns.  The police often seem intent on confrontation. I'm not sure why it was necessary to call in the police when the students were not bothering anyone prior to the arrival of the police officers. (The party in question was on a side street with houses only occupied by students).

Many questions come out of this incident that fit into a larger context:

It’s been less than 48 hours since the most elite colleges and universities in the country made their admissions decisions available to prospective applicants, and already stories are popping up about record low admission rates. As usual, the figures are minuscule: Harvard took just 7.1 percent of its applicants, Columbia 8.7 percent. By contrast, Dartmouth College, with a 13 percent acceptance rate, may as well have just thrown its doors wide open. 

It’s not surprising to see record-low acceptance rates given the surge of applications over the past year, but looking at overall figures fails to answer important questions such as how many of those seven accepted students out of every 100 applicants comes from a low-income family? (For that matter, how many of those rejected 93 do as well?)

These are important questions, especially given the highly trumpeted recent decisions by a number of colleges to eliminate all loans for students that meet certain income requirements. Some of these policies are sensible, such as Washington University in St. Louis’s elimination of loans for families making less than $60,000. Others, such as Harvard’s dramatically slashing costs for families making up to $180,000, are deeply flawed. 

Setting aside the issue of whether these policies will lead to an increase in the socioeconomic diversity of America’s elite campuses, it is worth considering some potentially negative ramifications that could arise if other, less wealthy schools start down the no-loans path.

The problem, as laid out in an excellent piece in Inside  Higher Ed concerns what would happen if schools that are need aware (meaning they factor the applicant’s income into at least some admissions decisions) start eliminating loans. Under this hypothetical situation, a school might offer spots to fewer low-income applicants because each one is more costly (a $40,000-plus scholarship versus maybe half that amount and loans). This would result in an outcome where moves designed to cut costs for poorer applicants led to fewer low-income students accepted. 

While the Inside Higher Ed example is crucial for considering how no-loans policies work within the larger sphere of postsecondary education, it is important to offer a few caveats and considerations. First, it is possible for a school to have generous aid, not be need-blind and still have good socioeconomic diversity. The perfect example of this is Smith College, an all women’s school in Northampton, Mass. Through both its Ada Comstock Scholars Program and a general institutional commitment, the school has succeeded in putting together a student body that has the best diversity among the richest colleges and universities — 33 percent of Smith’s students come from families with incomes below $60,000, 19 percentage points above Harvard’s mark.  

While Smith has not eliminated loans for its students, its experience does show that institutional generosity need not hamper socioeconomic diversity — provided a school is willing to make a strong and concerted effort to admitting low-income students. 

It’s also important to consider the combination of no loans and being need aware in the context of affirmative action. If more and more court cases and state laws continue to side against admissions decisions based on race, then it is likely that income status will become the next criteria for achieving diversity. In this case, colleges would consider income anyway and the issue would become if they guaranteed to meet 100 percent of demonstrated need.

Two Recommendations

From a mere equity standpoint it is important that all colleges, and especially those considering going no loans, commit to a need blind admissions policy. As the numbers at elite schools demonstrate, it is hard enough to get into college these days, the least universities can do is guarantee that the reason the student did not get in was completely unrelated to their ability to pay. 

Second, it is time for colleges to begin doing a better job reporting the socioeconomic diversity of their campuses. Schools are more than happy to trumpet statistics on racial diversity, but data on family income is practically non-existent. The Web site economicdiversity.org, one of the best sites for institutional data, is only able to extrapolate about the low-income makeup of colleges using the income of financial aid applicants and recipients of Pell Grants, which generally go to students from families making under $40,000 a year. Therefore, all schools should be required to report both the average income of their admitted students and the breakdown within income quintiles.

These two changes won’t fix all the problems of access and equity, but they will ensure that when those gaudy admission figures come out in the future we will know for sure that all students, regardless of income, got a fair shot, and we shall see just whether the wealthiest schools are elite, or just for elites.

A 15–year-old gay student, Lawrence King, was shot by a classmate in Oxnard, California on Tuesday morning (approximately 60 miles north of Los Angeles and 40 miles south of Santa Barbara).

If you’re looking for an excuse for why you failed your Calc final, you’re in luck. According to a study at Duke University, college students and monkeys are equally good at math. Well, mental addition, anyway. Jessica Cantlon, a cognitive neuroscience researcher at Duke, noted that nonverbal math skills are not unique to humans:

"[The study] shows when you take language away from a human, they end up looking just like monkeys in terms of their performance…I don't think language is the only thing that differentiates humans from non-human primates, but in terms of math tasks, it is probably the big one," she said.

Awesome.

Yeah, yesterday wasn't a normal day at Columbia. It's not every day that you can only enter campus in two places, or that you have to show your ID at those gates, or that, if you are lucky to be onthe West side of campus, you get to run the gauntlet of hostile protestors calling for your university to be shut down. Also, you couldn't walk through campus without tripping over a reporter, and at one point I must admit that, for fun, I walked in a large circle and got five microphones/notepads shoved in my face before I could complete it. If I liked hearing the sound of my own voice, yesterday would have been a perfect day (wait a moment, I blog; of course I like to hear myself...)

There's plenty of other posts already about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, including here, here, here, and here (the latter ones are from my fellow Columbia students). I wanted to wait a day, to better, well, react to the reactions of the media. There's been some serious misunderstanding, and some downright lies, and a disturbing lack of support from the left-wing blogosphere. It may be longish, but stick with me here.

As usual, Faux, er, Fox News took the lead on disinformation. We all know Fox loves to hate Columbia (I think this is because we're the closest Ivy League school to their studios, and they're too lazy to send people elsewhere). They claimed that students applauded Ahmadinejad's comments, and that there were bitter clashes between groups on campus. The truth is, students did neither. Yes, if you watch the speech, there are students applauding, but there are two caveats to this: first, Bollinger got much more applause, and, second, that was the crowd inside. There were about 600 people inside, many of whom were graduate students from the School of International and Public Affairs. It's an open secret at Columbia that SIPA is particularly sympathetic to people with views close to Ahmadinejad's. One professor, Joseph Massad, has actually written a paper (now developed into a book) stating that homosexuality is a Western concept being forced upon the Middle East. Hardly surprising then that there was applause from some parts of the audience. But had Faux wanted to be fair and balanced, they would've gone outside, where Bollinger's remarks got a standing ovation from a huge crowd of students on the South Lawn, while Ahmadinejad got scattered applause and mostly silence. The biggest reaction to his speech? Like in the auditorium, his claim that there are no homosexuals in Iran was met with derisive laughter. Oh and those clashes? Almost entirely off-campus (i.e. not students), and the only one I saw had a grad student and an administrator or teacher, neither of whom were younger than 35. So much for students clashing. The truth is that the many diverse student groups got together in four days, and created a speaking schedule that allowed all points of view to be heard. Nobody was booed, nobody was shouted down. It was a proud day for Columbia.

More still in extended. 

"The white people have theirs, and the black people have theirs. It's nothing racial at all."

Mindy Bryan; Ashburn, Georgia 

Segregation is often seen as a default, a natural order, the way things just sort of fall into place when people with differences exist near to one another.  Ms Bryan’s sentiments are often echoed in defenses of segregation—it doesn’t come from racism or any maliciousness, but it’s just sort of the way things are, because they’re the way things have been for so long.  But this ignores inequity and inequality, the main reason that “separate but equal” was found to be a myth in Brown v. Board of Education. 

Turner County High School, in southern Georgia, just held its first-ever school-sponsored integrated prom.  For decades, parents had been organizing their own proms for the kids, one which Black students attended, and one which white students attended.  From the article, it seems that the impetus behind the integrated prom came from the student government, which is encouraging—the change came from the students themselves, rather than being thrust upon the student body by adults. The prom was generally regarded as a positive step, but there were some who were skeptical or downright hostile to the idea.  A parent, Valerie McKellar, said "'That's just like you're cooking a half-baked cake, putting the icing on it, and when you cut the cake, the cake ain't no good. That's how this prom is.'”  Additionally, one student said that some of her friends’ parents “didn’t agree with” the idea of an integrated prom.

You cheered with them when they took on Taco Bell and Yum Brands.  Now, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has done it again!  For the past 2 years, the CIW has run a campaign to expose the dismal conditions and treatment farmworkers who supply McDonald's receive.  Today, McD's and suppliers have agreed to the following as a result of the campaign:

1. A penny more per pound to workers harvesting tomatoes for McDonald's;
2. A stronger code of conduct based on the principle of worker participation;
3. And a collaborative effort to develop a third party mechanism for monitoring conditions in the fields and investigating workers' complaints of abuse.

Yay CIW!  And we can't forget the important role students played in supporting the campaign, through the spearheading organization Student/Farmworker Alliance, that works in solidarity with the CIW.

The Truth Tour is still on though!  This weekend, organizers, students, workers, and even some celebs will gather in Chicago to demand the dignity and just treatment of farmworkers.

Right now, University of Michigan students are staging a sit-in to end the use of sweatshop labor for university licensed apparel.  The students are demanding that the administration accept a Designated Suppliers Program and Code of Conduct for its licensees, that will actually reward factories for adopting fair and humane labor standards for its workers—thus reversing the “race to the bottom” trend, into a “race to the top.”  The best part of this plan, developed largely by United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), is that the Workers’ Rights Consortium, in cooperation with the local union or union-like entity, monitors and evaluates their places of employment for compliance with the Code of Conduct.  Workers can request that the factory be taken off the list of Code-compliant factories if violations occur.

Call, e-mail or fax the University of Michigan president, Mary Sue Coleman, now!  Tell her that you support the students sitting in and want the University of Michigan to be an example to other schools committed to the dignity of workers everywhere.  College apparel is a multi-billion dollar industry, and this plan has the potential to make real change.