University Campuses Explode, The Administrators' Pontifications Continue

Musings

The saga of the student body protests on various college and university campuses around the country continues. Over 50 are now under way. The reactions to it are almost universally misplaced and seemed to be guided by the egos of the administrations who do not like their authority challenged and who do not want to have to revisit their policies. They are particularly flummoxed as they took many wrong steps  initially responding to the protests and they act like Donald Trump, they can't admit they did anything wrong. Many people in positions of power seem to wind up with that mentality and it appears we have an excess of them in higher academia. We now have some admittance by some of the administrators that they reacted improperly in their initial steps and just made the protests more vehement and more difficult to address. The problem is now to swallow their egos, analyze the situation and try and find an avenue out of this quagmire.

Contemplations

The backdrop of all this is the horrendous assault by Hamas on some Israeli kibbitzes followed by the vengeance assault of Israel on Gaza, destroying almost all of the living space of  two and a half million people, which assault continues today, and the Israeli government keeps insisting that its invasions of Gaza shall continue. These actions by the Israeli military have created enumerable civilian deaths, injuries and destruction of the Gaza strip. The big picture perspective is approximately 1400 Israelis which were captured, killed or wounded and the response ordered by the Israeli government has now killed over 30,000 people in Gaza including over 16,000 children. These people are not Hamas fighters, but the Israeli government is focused on destruction.

Against that backdrop a strong protest movement has arisen, particularly on college campuses, that insists that the Israeli government drop its vengeance policy and start working on a way out of this slaughter and presumably find a way to live with the Palestinians, although the current Israeli government insists that it cannot do that. The horrendous nature of the results of the Israeli invasion have created a student protest that is not an extreme case of civil disobedience .  Inevitably some of the people at the protests start shouting out language  that is offensive. Naturally the people on the receiving end shout back and complain they are being threatened. The reported confrontations do not seem too troublesome.

Into all this we have the administrations that overreact, declare there's: " a clear and present danger", call in the civil police to drag students off the campus  to jail, cancel student access cards, and expel students and try and show their power to squash the protests. If there's anything we've learned from past decades and student demonstrations, if you want to confront the students directly just go ahead and show your ego and go on a power trip and watch them respond with their youthfull vehemence of, you can't do that to me I live in a country that allows free speech and assembly. I don't know where the administrators lost track of the historical lessons we presumably have learned and those parts of our constitution. But they have.

To look at just a couple of the universities I will start with Colombia University. That administration seems to be rethinking some of its initial response, but still defending its earlier missteps, even while admitting they were wrong. Figure that one out! They need to start working on ways to loosen up and interact and show the students that they know how to listen and, where appropriate, make changes.  The protest from Columbia has spread to a number of colleges and universities and the more a hard line has been applied to squash the views of the pro-Palestinian supporters, the more the protests have spread.

Interestingly at Columbia we also have a court  jester who has jumped in. It  is it  the speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson from Louisiana. He showed up at Columbia to issue his own royal edicts that the president of Colombia had to get control of her campus and if she didn't she had to resign. It is interesting that a member of the House of Representatives representing a district in Louisiana can decide that he should go uninvited to New York City and assert his great willpower to order people around when he has absolutely no jurisdiction and does not even  try to go in as a problem solver but just engages in his political posturing.  Maybe he was afraid that his voice wouldn't be heard if he just said it from Louisiana. No wonder the House of Representatives is having so much trouble governing itself. Hopefully the Columbia University president and Senate will ignore him and he'll take the hint and go home.  But we must remember that politicians love to be in a position where they can get TV, radio and cable coverage to promote themselves and their party.  We also saw the governor of Texas decide that he should stick his nose into the protest at the University of Texas in the same manner, although he was still at home in Austin, but nobody needed his bombast added. He is just an arch conservative and he doesn't like liberal demonstrations so he had to jump in the pot.

University of Southern California (USC) has simply continued its absurd policies on graduation and is terminating its graduation ceremony. The valedictorian for the class that was to make a speech at this graduation was a Muslim woman who was a biomedical engineering graduate and emerged at the top of her class. This woman must be extremely powerful because the administration has been quaking in its shoes of what to do especially when it got a report that she had posted a link to a Southeast Asian pro-Palestinian group. I had trouble even conceptualizing that this is an issue for a university  administration to spend its time analyzing.  USC is either that boring or that lost in the world to explode that information into canceling graduation. USC cancelled the valedictorian speech and, surprise, the student body started to protest in earnest. The administration then cancels the graduation ceremony and all the speeches but announces it will take care of people in small little graduations hidden away in different buildings and the 65,000 people who were to attend the graduation, well they'll just have to stay home because it might be too much trouble to have them on campus. That is an interesting problem for the university since it plays some football games in front of 100,000, it hosts United States presidents to its campus for speeches, it has royalty  and other renown's visit  its campus and make speeches, but one Muslim woman who has posted a link  can shut the whole place down and she wasn't even trying. The administrators saw their power was being challenged, couldn't handle that predicament and decided the way to stop the challenge to their authority was just close things. What innovative leadership! You have to ask yourself if this is what academia is becoming.  People in power positions have a way of losing sight of things except their own image in the mirror.

One other aspect of these protest debacles has appeared that the administrations seemed to think complicates their world, but it doesn't really, they just haven't opened their eyes. The protesters are saying that the schools need to divest themselves from any investment in companies that are supplying material to Israel used to fight the Gaza war. It's a pretty simple concept. All these investment companies that work for the universities have way too many people running around analyzing such companies, the list would not be hard to come up with even though many people will pretend that it is. Yes, John Deere tractor probably makes something that the Israelis use that's part of their assault but John Deere probably knows how to clean that up too or it'll lose some investments. This is a fair request by the protesters. Given the harshness of the Israeli attack, and the Biden administrations failure to  step in and stop Israel from going forward since we're giving Israel billions of dollars in aid that it uses in its invasion of Gaza. The protesters are saying  for moral reasons the university's investments have to withdraw from being part of the support of the invasion.

The response to this has been totally negative from the universities. To pick on one of them, as I understand it, is such a demand from protesters at the University of Michigan. It was met by the investment committee who insisted that their investments were not subject to  " political pressure" and they weren't going to entertain that discussion. I found it mind boggling that a protest to withdraw support from companies supporting a totally unjust attack on people that are dying by the 10s of thousands is just political pressure. Further all these investment groups at the different universities make those kinds of moral decisions all the time. I feel quite sure that you won't find them investing in, I hope, blood diamonds, Iranian oil companies, any company of the Myanmar government, Russian uranium mines, or North Korean armaments. Yes, these are extreme examples but you need to have a level of  morality  in your efforts not just greed to make money. This is part of what the students are protesting. In  our capitalist society, in many respects, it has become so capitalist we've lost track of our moral beliefs. It's fine to keep investing money to make more money that's what the endowment groups are supposed to do for  the schools, but as my examples above, which are a little extreme, suggest that isn't an open-ended policy to be as greedy as you can be. It would be a very simple act for these administrations to say they will make a list, analyze it, show the changes to the companies in question, and then if the companies don't adjust appropriately, divest, and the endowment  value change will probably not even be noticed.

Musings

The administrations are the leaders here. It is up to them to act, not for them to pound the students and tell them to behave Tthe administration leaders are behaving the way they should. They need to go sort out what the students want, treat the students with respect and work on what things are appropriate to do. Drop all of the criminal complaints, let the students back in the dorms hold the graduations, swallow the administration egos and start  divestment programs so their college campuses can return to being college campuses and not battlegrounds, nor political backgrounds for politicians that want to go around the country making speeches.

Silence Dogood

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