By John Riddell interviews Felipe Stuart Cournoyer | Axis of Logic

Arizona’s suppression of Mexican American studies fits a pattern of making history serve an exclusionary nationalist mythology | Gary Younge | The Guardian

“The Liberals’ decision to axe the $42 million came at the same time as the government introduced a 30 per cent tuition rebate initiative.”

Meanwhile … in Nova Scotia:

Government Ushers in New Year with Tuition Fee Increases and Funding Cuts | CFS

–A rather long article on copyright and the academy and how we need to keep fighting for fair implementations of copyright and the “copyleft” alternatives to allow sharing of data and analysis in an increasingly commercialised academy and monopoly publishing world.
Oh, and I wrote it.

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20111231/news/news2.html

–The Peoples’ National Party has beaten Labour in Jamaica. A move to the left, but the PNP better put education first and build ties with the ALBA nations if it is going to be able to implement its manifesto.

–A continuation of my comments on student debt and education funding in Canada.

–My comment on Citizens’ Press.

–French student militants are organised again.

–New Education is a Right campaign website from the Canadian Federation of Students was launched today. The Federation is calling for a national day of action on February 1, 2012.

–Occupy.

“Dear Professor Mankiw –
“Today, we are walking out of your class, Economics 10, in order to express our discontent with the bias inherent in this introductory economics course. We are deeply concerned about the way that this bias affects students, the University, and our greater society.”

It would be interesting to see how many of these Harvard students gain an interest in Marxist political economy. Mankiw, btw, is the author whose Econ textbooks are used in university classrooms all over North America.

by David Blacker | MR Zine | “Education is an irresistibly tempting victim, bleeding but still with enough blood for a few good meals. As during the Soviet economic collapse, where public assets were directed into private oligarchs’ hands, we are now witnessing in our schools what David Harvey describes as “accumulation by dispossession,” a neo-enclosure movement of neoliberal privatization, where previously public assets are transferred over into the private, death-dealing hands of the vampires.”

Two faculty members at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), a private university in San Francisco, are being edged out of their jobs largely because of their efforts to create a system for granting tenure at CIIS and their academic work on Kashmir.
The administration at CIIS are claiming their suspensions are the result of ‘poor teaching’, however, such claims contradict the recommendation of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) who, after examining the evidence presented by the administration, have urged their reinstatement.
Unfortunately for the faculty being targeted, CIIS remains a non-unionized workplace, where academic freedom can be usurped under the cover of any performance indicator the administration chooses to implement.
Students and alumni from CIIS have organized their own response to the suspension of their professors, this petition is just one. Please sign it.

–The “return on investment” argument misses the point. It is not whether there is a good return on investment for funding post-secondary education, it is a question of whether we want an educated and skilled population. It is about what kind of society we want. Personally, I think that a society of educated and skilled workers is better than the alternative. Those that choose to enrich our society by becoming skilled labourers should not be punished for making that choice by slapping them with a massive loan. Education is a right, we should make sure that it is accessible to everyone.

By Nick Falvo | Rabble.ca | On Wednesday, William Watson wrote a comment piece in the Financial Post in which he was critical of Armine Yalnizyan’s recent essay on inequality.

–The Canadian Federation of Students responds to the latest tuition fee data.

Students campaign against privatized educational system, demand education as a right | The Real News

The 2008 ‘financial crisis’ in the United States was a systemic fraud in which the wealthy finance capitalists stole trillions of public dollars. No one was jailed for this crime, the largest theft of public money in history. This documentary explains the nature of capitalist crisis, visits the protests against austerity measures, and recommends revolutionary paths for the future.

Demonstrators attack a police vehicle during riots after a student protest in Santiago, Chile. The demonstrations turned violent when masked protesters split off from the main march. | BBC

–Support the students.

“There should be an open system adapted to the needs and interests of the students.”

–The re-establishment of education as a privilege.