I really liked and admired Agnes Callard’s essay, “Beyond Neutrality: The university’s responsibility to lead” in The Point (September 29, 2024) [HT Dailynous]. My post is, despite some quibbles, primarily about amplifying a point Callard (Chicago) makes. I do so not just because there is considerable overlap between our positions (recall here and here), but also because she advances the discussion on the nature of campus speech.
Before I get to our agreement, I accentuate one difference first. Callard presupposes as a normative or practical ideal that universities are sites of leisure: “A university is a place devoted to the problem of how to make serious use of free time.” On Callard’s view this is only possible once “a world of justice, peace and plenty” has been achieved. And because we are not there yet universities engage in a bunch of non-intrinsic activities: “Forced to find a place for itself in a world unfriendly to sheltered gardens, the university employs police, hedge-fund managers, construction companies, a fundraising office and PR teams.”
Now, I have remarked before (in responding to Jennifer Frey here) that the serious cultivation of leisure is very far removed from the public ethos I inhabit (in a relatively underfunded public university). Students and faculty (as well as the PR teams) are like hamsters kept on a treadmill of busy-ness often without obvious relation to any intrinsic nature of the university. I am increasingly convinced that this contributes to the existential and medicalized psychological crises among our students. So, Callard’s comments resonate.
However, while I respect the idea that a university might be “a place devoted to the problem of how to make serious use of free time,” I don’t endorse the idea that this is the only worthy conception of the university one might have. I advocate that understood as self-governing corporate (and eternal) entities (in the old-fashioned medieval sense of ‘corporate’), universities ought to figure out, each and every one of them, what their particular mission is. I am myself committed to the idea that a university is supposed to advance knowledge discovery, knowledge transmission, and preservation of knowledge alongside whatever else it deems valuable. As Callard herself notes, universities pay increasingly hollow lip service to the notion of an intellectual mission worth taking seriously alongside other self-proclaimed missions.
One way this turns out to be hollow is that the performance of university leadership itself is often utterly removed from the intrinsic nature of universities. That is, university leadership often fails to lead by intellectual example (as Callard diagnoses aptly). And the renewed drift toward ‘neutrality’ in the art of leading universities is not just impossible to achieve as Shannon Dea has argued (and I agree), and so not obligatory, but also has the wrong picture of what university leadership is about. Commitment to neutrality pretends that university ‘governance’ is only about creating the pre-conditions of other people’s active contributions to the university mission — and then ‘get out of the way’ — and not itself partially constitutive of it.
This is also how I understand Callard’s main point:
Inquisitive leadership is the kind of leadership a teacher practices in a classroom, and also the kind of leadership a student practices, in the same classroom, when she raises her voice to ask or answer a question. In that context, you might argue for a side, but you don’t “take a side,” in the sense of “standing up for” your “principles” or avowing any “commitments” or “fighting” any “forces.” All of these modes of speech proclaim some matter settled when there are people out there who disagree. Inquisitive people are alert to the danger of overclaiming knowledge, and inquisitive contexts are precisely those in which there is no need to do so—neither for the teacher, nor for the student. Declaring yourself ready to fight on a given side is how you project leadership outside the classroom, but inside the classroom leadership works differently: we don’t need to fight, because all of us are ready both to teach and learn.
There is much to admire about this. Too rarely does academic leadership project that it is ready to teach and learn; both teaching and learning require inquisitive leadership. I wish (recall) I had used these phrases alongside my appeal to renew the ‘spiritual authority’ of university leadership when I lamented that universities failed to appreciate that protests could be moments of mutual learning (as sites of teach-ins and genuine public debate). The world would be a better please if university leadership exhibited a disposition to and aptitude for teaching and learning in office.
As an aside, let me illustrate this with a pet-peeve. After protests had escalated on our campus, we were suddenly overrun by administration sponsored events in which departments could ‘learn and reflect on the events.’ The university leadership never participates in these as students who might learn something despite a campus full of genuine expertise. In addition, even when these events were earnest and helped re-establish some lines of intra-departmental communication, their agendas were not conducive to real, enduring learning. I can’t tell you how often I was asked to come talk to a department for five-minute speaking slots to pontificate on academic freedom in a mosaic of speakers on a wide diversity of topics in rapid succession. (I always declined.) It is as if university administration has no idea what the conditions of teaching and learning are.
Be that as it may, — okay, so this is not just amplifying a signal, but also disagreement — universities are themselves not best or exclusively modelled on a classroom. Universities also involve labs with controlled experiments, libraries for quiet contemplation, and public spaces for different kinds of collaborative learning in addition to many other forms of social collaboration. Often these places are inhabited by experts with very different disciplinary norms and methods. Recognition of this epistemic, disciplinary, and methodological plurality shapes my view that academic freedom is never just one thing, but specific to particular research and learning contexts. But how to safeguard all of this and to make it flourish is not reducible to the nature of classroom leadership. It also requires the art of government in a wider sense, where there is a place for trade-offs and tactical sacrifices in the service of the university mission.
While Callard and I, thus, disagree over the art of university government, lurking here is a more fundamental disagreement with Callard. Callard sees university protesters fundamentally as exposing the hypocrisy of university mission statements. It’s hard to disagree with this. But she treats student protestors themselves as trying to use “force to get what” they want and “entitled, by the justice of their cause, to ignore and disrupt the university’s normal pursuit of its mission.”
As regular readers know I am not especially enamored of much of what passes for student protesting, and the glorification by some faculty cheerleaders of street riots as a fantasy-first step into the mass strike and political revolution or decolonization. This just invites the enemies of learning and those enamored by violence for its own sake onto campus. In Amsterdam, we have seen this up close.
But that particular student protests are disruptive does not entail that they are inevitably without intellectual or epistemic merit. That is, there are two things off in Callard’s position: first, as she herself implies, often student protestors may well be the ones trying to make universities live up to their stated mission statements that may have enticed them to campus (in defense of ‘citizenship,’ ‘democracy,’ or ‘moral leadership’). And so, student protests often exhibit a public conscience for intellectual and moral integrity.
Second, because Callard has a singular understanding what true education involves modelled on what we might call a ‘Socratic classroom,’ she refuses to engage with the possibility that student protests are themselves sites where teaching and learning takes place along many dimensions [including the art of citizenship, the art of collective mobilization, mutual education how different kinds of injustices intersect, etc.] and, as I have argued, that they may well be collective experiments in living that have non-trivial albeit imperfect epistemic significance to the students, campus life, and (without being too hopeful about this) wider society.
Now, this in turn, requires that student protests reconceive themselves as participating in the practice of learning and teaching or experiments in living with all the obligations and self-restraint and self-discipline those require. Unfortunately, academic leadership rarely enacts the disposition to teach any of this by example. And so we end up requiring our students to be wiser and more thoughtful than those that purport to be exemplary.
- An earlier, modestly corrected version of this piece appeared at Digressionsnimpressions.
{ 30 comments }
SusanC 10.15.24 at 11:25 am
One could also view student protests as a kind of learning experience.
At least at our higher regarded institutions ( :-) ) it is likely that at least some of our current students are going to end up running things in some capacity. (E.g. being in the government of assorted countries). From which point of view, having been in a protest may be a valuable experience, because they’re soon enough going to be on the other side of them. Maybe it doesn’t matter too much what the object-level issue of the student protest is, if the deal is to understand how protests do or don’t work.
SusanC 10.15.24 at 11:28 am
Also, possible contrary to Agnes Callard…
Another possible function of the university is to have a supply of people who Know Stuff when you need them. For this function to work, those people need to be granted a measure of freedom, for the hypothesis here is that you don’t always want someone who will confirm to you what you already believe, and sometimes need someone who can tell you what’s true. Not always, granted. But sometimes.
SusanC 10.15.24 at 11:40 am
Without wishing to point at someone specific (cough) your typical university chancellor got where they are by being chairman of a supermarket chain, or married to the Queen(*) or something, and are really not who you should be asking whether or not we ought to be doing research into String Theory, or whatever; for that, you want to ask the relevant faculty, not the admin.
(*) ok, maybe that’s a bit specific. Full kudos to that Chancellor for donating a signed copy of the book by C Northcott Parkinson in which Parkinson’s Law was described. I assume there was some satirical intention.
Greg Koos 10.15.24 at 12:10 pm
I recall that “teach-ins” were an important part of the early anti-Vietnam War movement. These attracted 75 to 100 students and faculty at my downstate Illinois university. Information media at this time was highly channeled in national broadcasting and national and regional press. The teach-ins served the purpose of providing information not found in those channels.
In our current highly fragmented media environment information is siloed, as are the consumers of that information. In the 1960s a shared set of facts was the base which alternate interpretation and lived experience challenged. The need to identify and agree upon facts is the critical role of public dialog. The universities should be masters of this, but are not, for they have stovepiped their functions. Thus the monkey see – monkey do wrong headed knee jerk reaction by stovepiped administrators to Palestinian protests. So instead of hard hats beating students in street protests, as in the 1960s, thugs, uniformed or not, get to beat students on campus.
Teach-ins were the first step towards action. The university community needs to be more broadly engaged in this kind of ground work. Most all of us have a capacity to teach and learn. From that can come leadership that resists violence, wherever it is experienced.
engels 10.15.24 at 12:27 pm
“Forced to find a place for itself in a world unfriendly to sheltered gardens, the university employs police, hedge-fund managers, construction companies, a fundraising office and PR teams.”
In American university, hedge fund employs YOU.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/business-plan-save-harvard-endowment/676061/
wetzel-rhymes-with 10.15.24 at 2:42 pm
One hundred years ago, in “Science and the Modern World”, Alfred North Whitehead announced how the scope of knowledge had gotten such that to be effective in a professional discipline, a person had to give up being expert in anything else. Whitehead claimed the “Renaissance Man” was now impossible, but also really any directive intellect behind society’s governance because, basically, nobody can know “what’s going on”. Nietzsche’s mad-man isn’t surprised to see an Atlanta policeman pushing the the Chairwoman of the Philosophy Dept., through the quad, her arm behind her back in a submission hold.
A university isn’t a moral agent. There is not the sense of a person looking towards their own death because a university is immortal. It’s not like a family, or even a city, which can be an “issues to itself” in the sense a family can see its end, or a city can express a “general will” through an election. A university is an “issue to itself”. It has a spirit like a city can be a shelter for its children, a university does shelter human progress in things like “the sciences” or “the arts”, but can’t teach undergraduates systems-levels unity in general science. Even with the molecular biology revolution having shifting the Kuhnian paradigm, Emory’s departments still couldn’t articulate to the Provost why physics should go first and unfold into chemistry and then organic and biochemistry even though half their students want to be doctors.
A modern university can’t evaluate itself. It’s a problem it can’t make undergraduate science education “interdisciplinary” for future doctors. If values are sociological rituals then nihilism is a natural consequence of Whitehead’s thesis, seeing the chairwoman in a submission hold for the cameras. Is nihilism the same thing as there being no “elite” in society, or was the Chairwoman’s stressed dignity on TV a kind of grace, being led forward across the Quad, her long grey hair, black Joyce Carol Oates dress and shoes, knowing the care for justified claims in careful discussion she represents is out of time and out of place. There’s a kind of nihilism for a university under capitalism because what’s right is always what wins. It’s like a city that isn’t a shelter for its families.
LFC 10.15.24 at 3:59 pm
engels @5 mentions endowments etc. The best measure of the wealth of a particular university (at least in the U.S. context at any rate) is not the absolute size of the endowment, but the size of the endowment per student.
https://www.collegeraptor.com/college-rankings/details/EndowmentPerStudent/
Harry 10.15.24 at 4:07 pm
“The best measure of the wealth of a particular university (at least in the U.S. context at any rate) is not the absolute size of the endowment, but the size of the endowment per student.”
Indeed:
https://crookedtimber.org/2022/09/29/the-endowment-exercise/
Also: the wealthiest colleges attract more government funding/per student. I worked out once that the tax relief on endowment per student, plus tax credits, etc, per undergrad at Stanford was higher than the same plus State funding at my own public flagship. Also: more selective public universities (with more affluent students) get more state funding per student than less selective pubic universities (with less affluent students).
somebody who remembers the libraries at occupy wall street encampments 10.15.24 at 4:29 pm
Good analysis and good comment by Greg Koos @ #4. Teach-ins, readings of texts and appeals and distribution of both factual material as well as poems and fiction have always taken place at campus protests. the present protest movement is no exception. the most successful campus protests over the last few years have had these elements. and these elements are not covered by the mainstream press as they are more interested in debating whether the protesters are actual terrorists who should be tortured to death in guantanamo bay or simply supporters of terrorists who should be imprisoned and put to hard labor for the next forty years. in this respect callard is a bit out of date. the university is neither a place for developing knowledge or a place for developing workers, to many – it is simply a place to find targets for hatred.
Sashas 10.15.24 at 5:18 pm
@OP, I think you’re being entirely too kind to Callard. Her argument rests on completely rotted foundations, with most (all?) of her premises ringing false to me or at best requiring support that she doesn’t provide. Some examples:
“Last year, two university presidents lost their jobs because, when testifying before Congress, they failed to project authority and moral seriousness to the general public” I will give Callard the respect of assuming she believes this. Does anyone else? Claudine Gay (Harvard’s president) was ousted because of either the plagiarism allegations or (more plausibly IMO) the Harvard board of regents wanted someone to take the blame for the bad press. Liz Magill (Penn’s president) came under fire from elected officials on “both sides” in her state, and presumably resigned because to stay would have invited retaliation against the University. The closest I think we can reasonably get to Callard’s position is to note that there is a bipartisan consensus that antisemitism is Evil, and both presidents made the mistake of disagreeing with that consensus. Projecting authority and moral seriousness has little to do with it. (Sidenote: I’m well aware that “both sides” in the US do not actually practice the opposition to antisemitism that they preach. That’s not the point here.)
“When protesters bait the university into using violence against them, they are trying to expose it to the world as the opposite of the noble leader it purports to be: an ignorant, selfish brute.” This is certainly an interesting framing of civil disobedience. I think Callard’s decision to place the responsibility for University violence on the protestors is wrong and contemptible, but I she gives away the game entirely later in the essay where she explicitly describes the protestors’ actions as using force. “Each side uses force to get what it wants”
@SusanC gives us another great example–Callard makes a grand claim about the purpose of a University with no support and entirely neglects the (IMO obvious) alternative that SusanC points out.
MisterMr 10.15.24 at 5:25 pm
It seems to me university students are adults and so they have a right to demonstrate like all adult citizens, regardless of the purposes of a university, that come later.
engels 10.16.24 at 12:09 am
The best measure of the wealth of a particular university (at least in the U.S. context at any rate) is not the absolute size of the endowment, but the size of the endowment per student.
If you see the mega US unis as money managers who do a bit of academing for PR and tax reasons the number of students is incidental and can presumably be tweaked for higher growth.
Mike on the Internet 10.16.24 at 3:51 am
@MisterMr
Yes, but… University students often are not just demonstrating in the streets like any other person, but occupying buildings and grounds from which we might expect non-students to be removed by order of the administration. Universities are often weird hybrid spaces, both public and private, and people with a certain status (students, faculty, alumni) can claim special priviledges of access and occupation over and above the general complement of civil rights. (This weird hybridity also manifests when universities use internal investigations and proceedings to address criminal activity, e.g. harassment, within their institutions, and such pretence to parallel jurisdiction is ripe for deflation.)
SusanC 10.16.24 at 11:01 am
While (ahem) certain of our older UK universities have their own courts….
A) it is my understanding that per current policy, allegations at the level of seriousness of e.g. sexual assault would be referred to the police, not dealt with internally
B) it is also my understanding that you really, really don’t want to find yourself before their internal courts. You’ll probably get a really fancy defence lawyer provided for you by the law faculty, though
MisterMr 10.16.24 at 11:27 am
@Mike on the Internet
I understand this, but there is something strange in arguing about freedom of demonstration as a subvalue of “education” or “research”, and it seems to me that academics, who live most of their lives in a micrisociety where reasearch is the main accepted value, end up saying things that for people outside that microsociety is strange or dubious.
For example above someone mentions an aged philosophy chair who is subjected tosubmission hold by a police officier, presumably because she was resisting non violently.
It is arguable wheter and up to what point police offcier can use submission holds on non complying demonstrators, and wheter old people should be threated differently for health reasons, but the fact that one is a philosophy chairperson should not enter in the calculation: otherwise people who do not immedesimate with academics might read it as an idea that academics should be above the others.
Similarly universities have this weird half public, half private nature: this is an interesting idea, but then what if, say, administrative personnel wants to do a sit in for some reason? What of people from the outside who want to demonstrate against Israel, or maybe against abortions? (I’m using two examples, one of something most people here would agree and one most people would disagree, to show the other side of the coin).
Even if we agree that only students and (perhaps) faculty can treat universities as “public spaces”, there is no particular reason the administrator of the campus should have the choice and or responsibility on what demonstration is allowed or what not. If instead you treat this as a problem of “learning”, one might have the idea that a demonstration against Israel is not learning, but for some reason a demonstration pro-Israel is, which is quite the problem.
TM 10.16.24 at 1:15 pm
Seconding MisterMr 11.
Universities often have student newspapers, student organizations, and (depending on the legal framework) elected student councils that have some say in the governance of their institution. These entities can be seen as “learning experiences”, yes, but really everything can (and perhaps should) be seen as a learning experience. When I was a student, I didn’t see my political activity as a “tryout” for the real thing happening after graduation (which is in my experience how this is often framed at US universities, where the student Senate and President often in a comical way mimic the real Senate and President without having any meaningful power), I saw it as, well, political activism of a grownup citizen.
somebody who remembers that statistically nobody has ever attended yale or harvard 10.16.24 at 6:52 pm
MisterMr’s #11 is jaw dropping to me.
of course it is more than the students, faculty and administration that must treat the university as a public space; in most cases, in america, the university is a government-owned and publicly-operated entity with a – often constitutional! – requirement that they be operated for the benefit of the public. outside people come to the grounds of state universities to preach their beliefs about abortion literally every day, by the dozens, and its essentially unchallenged in most states that they must be allowed to do so!
dont let the fact that elite colleges claim to exist fool you. they, for most people, don’t.
Tm 10.16.24 at 8:00 pm
I still don’t quite understand this idea of campus protest. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to organize mass protests in Washington DC rather than getting bogged down in fights with local university administrations?
In my student days, I took part in student organized anti war protests (can you guess against which war?). It wouldn’t have occurred to us to demonstrate on campus – what’s the point? The university leadership had nothing to do with the war and couldn’t stop it. We also didn’t want to only agitate other students, we wanted to be seen and heard in the wider community. I understand that US colleges have a totally different culture but I still don’t get the point of fixating on campus as a protest venue when the issue at hand has nothing to do with the university as an institution.
The student movement of the 1960s often did protests on campus (as well as off campus) because they protested the inequities and anachronisms of the educational system and the authoritarian structure and organization of the traditional university. Similar protests would be well justified today, not least in the US, but they don’t seem to be happening. Unless I’m missing something…
Tm 10.16.24 at 8:16 pm
“outside people come to the grounds of state universities to preach their beliefs about abortion literally every day, by the dozens, and its essentially unchallenged in most states”
This is hard to believe for Europeans. At the Southern university I was affiliated with for a few years, an aggressive preacher regularly a showed up in front of the student union to insult and annoy students (especially female ones). He had the right to do this – within certain limits – because it is a public space. Others showed up with a cross and a banner but at least were quiet (on one side, the banner read that women should dress modestly or go to hell, the other was actually something against war. I believe they were Mennonites).
They do this because they think that academia is the realm of Satan. By their logic, the choice of protesting on campus makes sense.
SusanC 10.17.24 at 1:11 pm
“ In my student days, I took part in student organized anti war protests (can you guess against which war?). ”
Back where I used to live, there was a long-lived graffiti that originally said “US murderers out of Vietnam” that was updated to whatever the latest war was each time there was a new one,
MisterMr 10.17.24 at 2:12 pm
@somebody who remembers… 17
Ok, even more reason to not threat political activity as part of the “student experience” then.
someone who actually read the website the student protesters set up for their local protest 10.17.24 at 4:36 pm
Tm @ #18 – the protesters are very clear on this point. what they want is for their university’s financial arm to refrain from investing in israeli arms importers and united states arms exporters, and to turn down money that gives us stuff like “the raytheon white phosphorus chair of the humanities department”. the typical big state university (and even the elite colleges, may god keep them (far away from us!)) is somewhere between shallowly and heavily involved with the israeli war machine and the protesters want them to stop. in many cases they have been successful! but this answer the question as to why the protests are on campus. they want the university to do things (or more typically, to stop doing things.) their main obstacle is that in around 40 states it’s illegal for a state institution to divest from israeli investments.
John Q 10.17.24 at 11:10 pm
“I still don’t quite understand this idea of campus protest. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to organize mass protests in Washington DC rather than getting bogged down in fights with local university administrations?”
Presumably, at least some students would prefer to protest where they live and work, rather than pay for airfares and accommodation in DC.
John Q 10.19.24 at 12:12 am
“I think that Alex SL and I, if we thought it worth while, could come up with a long and tedious list of wars in which one non-US side did very definitely not lose.”
Show don’t tell. I’ll concede in advance that my claim only refers to wars between modern societies.
JoeinCO 10.19.24 at 5:19 am
@ Sashas I agree with you that the article is built on, shall we say, a singular reading of reality…. More to the point, Claudine Gay was ousted because her handling of pro-Palestinian/Anti-Israel student activism angered Bill Ackman and other conservative pro-Israel wealthy donors, who teamed up with right wing culture warrior, House member, and fellow Harvard alum Elise Stefanik, among others.
This is the University that recently re-named their Graduate School of Arts and Sciences after another pro-Israel hedge fund manager. Money talks, but hundreds of millions of donations in the balance will always win the argument. (Granted, Harvard was named after a donor as well, but at least he donated books and is no longer able to complain about Congressional testimony).
wetzel-rhymes-with 10.19.24 at 9:05 am
@MrMister
Yes, presumably the Chairwoman of the Emory Philosophy Department was resisting leaving her own quad fast enough for the surreal militarized phalanx of masked Atlanta police clearing the demonstrators. Email and evidence show donor meetings with rich billionaires led Eric Adams’ police in NY arresting demonstrators in Columbia in such a way as to produce a propaganda effect. The parade of the philosophy chair before the cameras was a fascist spectacle.
You reflected the university as a collection of microsocieties, each with it’s research. I think this was Alfred North Whitehead’s basic point in “Science and the Modern World”. There is an idea or a mission in a university. It gives all university professors the status of truth seekers. When a police action is a spectacle or fascist demonstration, the court can’t distinguish and neither can the cameras truth from fiction. There is a nihilistic premise behind the idea, just because the truth of research claims can only be evaluated within a discipline, that all claims a professor may make with authority are only ones their CV warrants. The frontespiece of Giambattista Vico’s “New Science” had the brooch of Philosophy reflecting a beam of light from the eye of Providence to nourish the development of human existence in institutions and knowledge. A Chairwoman of a Philosophy Department understands better than a faculty member in Engineering how to speak on matters of the law, truth or justice, She’s an expert!
somebody who knows the difference between 'public' and private Universities 10.19.24 at 11:16 am
@18
‘I still don’t quite understand this idea of campus protest. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to organize mass protests in Washington DC rather than getting bogged down in fights with local university administrations?’
@22 – Tm @ #18 – the protesters are very clear on this point. what they want is for their university’s financial arm to refrain from investing in israeli arms importers and united states arms exporters,
That’s why we
FIRST! –
have to turn ALL of US ‘Private Universities into ‘Public Universities’ which don’t have any ‘tuitions’) and which don’t have to be ‘financed’ by Finance –
and then –
we could really debate this… issue.
Peter Dorman 10.19.24 at 6:06 pm
Late to the party. I am weirded out by the Callard quote at the beginning, “A university is a place devoted to the problem of how to make serious use of free time.” Incredible. Where I taught, there was precious little free time for anyone. Students were falling asleep in the classroom because they had worked the night shift. Faculty were racing to class at the last minute (I was sometimes a little late myself) because they were trying to take care of urgent responsibilities asap. My gut reaction is to think, I don’t want to read another word of someone so wrapped up in her little world of privilege; it has nothing to do with mine.
What I said to students endlessly over the years is that college is a special place set aside by society where it’s OK to make mistakes. Bridges won’t collapse if you make a math error; people won’t starve if you propose a flawed social policy. And in a way, that is or should be the difference between academic and commercial research: academics can and should go out on a limb, confident that their mistakes will be picked up by other academics, and it’s OK. The costs of getting internal research wrong at institutions that actually do stuff are more consequential. (I realize this is a fuzzy distinction in practice, mainly because most people have a mistaken idea of how to read and evaluate academic research.)
If universities view unintended error as a normal part of learning, they should have an expanded idea of what students should be allowed to do on campus, provided the rights of others are not infringed. From this point of view, an encampment is OK, and I agree universities should use it as an opportunity to promote learning, while occupying and trashing the library isn’t. Sitting in at an administration building is also more or less OK insofar as students and faculty can continue to go about their business — but the workers in occupied buildings have to be treated with respect.
I was absolutely appalled by the performances of the university presidents before congressional committees. On the one hand, they didn’t defend a meaningful concept of freedom of speech. On the other, they didn’t advocate for the role of universities as sites of learning, where tolerance for error is part of the bargain. On the third, they didn’t foreground the expertise and research of their faculty on the middle east, war and peace, and related topics. They absolutely deserved to be sacked, although not for the reasons they were.
An underlying theme behind the way this business has unfolded is the demand for “safety”. From what I know, this began as a key demand of parts of the left about 10-15 years ago, and I remember thinking at the time this is going to be used against us some day. Well, that day is now. Yes, people need physical safety in order to pursue other goals. But genuine learning is always at least a little unsafe; you put yourself at risk of having to change your mind.
M Caswell 10.20.24 at 2:23 am
“Incredible. Where I taught, there was precious little free time for anyone. Students were falling asleep in the classroom because they had worked the night shift. Faculty were racing to class at the last minute (I was sometimes a little late myself) because they were trying to take care of urgent responsibilities asap.”
The idea is that time in class (and out of it, preparing for class) is free time– free from work, free from “urgent responsibilities.” For most students, this liesure, like liesure in general, costs a pretty penny.
M Caswell 10.20.24 at 2:25 am
“leisure,” of course!
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