College students whining....

Rico's friend Kelley, no friend of whiners, forwards this by Becca Stanek from The Week:

Students at Oberlin College are asking the school to put academics on the back burner so they can better turn their attention to activism. More than thirteen hundred students at the Midwestern liberal arts college have now signed a petition asking that the college get rid of any grade below a C for the semester, and some students are requesting alternatives to the standard written midterm examination, such as a conversation with a professor in lieu of an essay.
The students say that, between their activism work and their heavy course load, finding success within the usual grading parameters is increasingly difficult. "A lot of us worked alongside community members in Cleveland, Ohio who were protesting," Megan Bautista, a co-liaison in Oberlin's student government said, referring to the protests surrounding the shooting death of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice by a police officer in 2014. "But we needed to organize on campus as well, as it wasn't sustainable to keep driving forty minutes away. A lot of us started suffering academically."
The student activists' request doesn't come without precedence: in the 1970s, Oberlin adjusted its grading to accommodate student activists protesting the Vietnam War and the Kent State shootings, according to The New Yorker. But current students contend that the same luxury was not granted to them, even though the recent Rice protests were over a police shooting that took place just thirty miles east of campus.
"You know, we're paying for a service. We're paying for our attendance here. We need to be able to get what we need in a way that we can actually consume it," student Zakiya Acey told The New Yorker. "Because I'm dealing with having been arrested on campus, or having to deal with the things that my family are going through because of larger systems, having to deal with all of that, I can't produce the work that they want me to do. But I understand the material, and I can give it to you in different ways."
Read the full story on the ongoing battle at Oberlin over at The New Yorker. 

Rico says college students haven't changed since he was at CMU in the 1970s; they always want it their way...