StudentNation | The Nation

This weekend, from February 22 to 24, nearly 200 students from dozens of colleges across the country will come together at Swarthmore College for Power Up! Divest Fossil Fuels, a student-organized convergence of youth activists working to divest their colleges’ endowments from fossil fuel companies.

With some notable exceptions, college administrations have largely been hostile towards divestment but student campaigns have been gaining attention and support  nationwide with petitions, referendums, public art displays and rallies, and students are ready to escalate their campaigns by putting more pressure on administrations through direct action. There are now more than 256 organized campaigns at schools coast to coast, and the number is growing daily. Three colleges, Unity, Hampshire, and Sterling, have committed to portfolios free of fossil fuel stock. Cities, pension funds, churches, and individuals have joined the movement to divest as well.

Wisconsin’s Teaching Assistants’ Association, the first grad student union in the country, spearheaded the fight against Scott Walker’s union-busting bill. (Reuters/Allen Fredrickson)

E-mail questions, tips or proposals to studentmovement@thenation.com. For more dispatches, check out earlier posts from January 18 and February 1.

One of Seattle’s top secondary institutions, Garfield High School—home to one of the country’s premier youth jazz bands, and the alma mater of Jimi Hendrix, Quincy Jones and activist rapperMacklemore—has a mutiny on its hands. Students are refusing to sit for exams, or else completing their tests in just nine seconds. But if you’re picturing unruly classrooms filled with delinquents, think again.

In fact, it’s the teachers who, in a unanimous vote in January, have rebelled against Measures of Academic Progress (MAP), the mandated standardized tests that, they argue, cut into classroom hours, negatively affect minority and low-income students with less access to technology at home, and ultimately provide poor measures of student performance. Despite threats of suspension without pay, the teachers have not backed down. 

Following their lead, the students have played a part in the effort, distributing flyers that announce the ability of parents and guardians to opt their kids out of MAP. On February 5, the first day of a three-week period designated for testing, less than a quarter of the 400 scheduled to take the exam did so. Of those who sat for the test, many sabotaged the process. The next day, the Seattle NAACP sponsored a rally in support of eliminating MAP. Superintendent José Banda blames the boycott for making people forget that “this really is about students.” But the students’ support for their teachers, in words and action, suggests otherwise. 

In this unsigned ediitorial in the February 16, 2013, issue of The New Hampshire, the venerable independent student newspaper at the University of New Hampshire, editors hailed the administration's decision to accede to student wishes and convene a forum on the issue of fossil fuel divestment.

In the letters to the editor section of this issue (page 17), University of New Hampshire President Mark Huddleston announced a University Dialogue on March 4 concerning the issue of divestment. The Student Environmental Action Coalition presented Huddleston with a 1,000-signature petition back in November urging the university to divest its endowment from fossil fuel companies. Huddleston’s announcement of a forum on the issue signals what we had been waiting for all along: a real, public discussion on the issue of divestment.

SEAC reported that they had met with members of the administration in a closed-door meeting at the end of September and were unsatisfied with their answers regarding divestment. In another closed-door meeting in January, SEAC reported in a letter to the editor that once again members of the administration and the UNH Foundation, which handles the university’s endowment, provided inadequate responses to their questions regarding UNH’s investments.