A commenter asked for my views on the latest campus protests and whatnot. My thoughts:
1. Probably over-played in the media.
2. The specific issues will turn out to be trivial. Like Hillary, I remember the 1960s. And in my high school the big victory for student activism was the agreement to designate a room where students could smoke. A smoking lounge!
3. The really radical students are a small minority. The most radical students are barely tolerated by the vast majority of students.
4. All a college administrator has to do to keep protests from getting out of hand is to communicate with reasonable students so that the radical students become isolated. I predict that where you find college administrators who “manage by walking around” and regularly talk to a lot of students, you will not find college protests that make the news.
5. The reason that campus protests do make the news is that college administrators tend to be both spineless and out of touch. They end up caving in to the radical minority, because they do not know how to obtain and use support from the reasonable majority.
5. I trace my own journey from left to right as beginning at Swarthmore College, where the radical students struck me as silly narcissists. I was not alone in having that reaction. I can think of quite a few alumni from my era who are outspoken conservatives or libertarians. The long-run impact of the protests may be to make more conservative converts than radical converts.
Good meta-analysis, as usual.
“Will turn out to be trivial,” is an interesting turn of phrase, susceptible to multiple interpretations.
I think ubiquitous video-recording devices and the ability to instantly share recordings globally for free on social media have created a new world and new media landscape, though one to which not everyone has yet adjusted and become well-adapted.
The trouble is that what I call “the market for confirmation bias” (which should totally be a Cowen-ism) will select only certain videos to go viral, and those are the ones that confirm suspicions instead of dispelling preconceptions. That’s a troubling leading indicator for more ideological bifurcation and epistemic segregation.
There is also a more troubling spin on, “the really radical students are a small minority,” and which wouldn’t be consistent with genuine but cowardly opposition among administrators. Many of these demonstrations and protests turned out to be fairly tiny in scale – a few hundred people is pretty minor – and also suspiciously introverted. For instance, if you wanted to take on bigotry in our society with a stunt, would your first choice of location be the Dartmouth library, that infamous hotbed of racism?
My point is that these protesters seem to be pushing on an open door. They are doing a very small amount of squeaky-wheeling to get an awful lot of oil from their institutions, awfully quickly.
Particularly interesting with respect to your first point is how within seconds of victory it seemed the winners abused their power by shutting out the formal media.
Two other points:
1) Modern social networking makes the radical voices a lot louder. The radicals are no worse than 25 years ago (and a lot less than 50 years ago) but with social media it is easier to get heard outside the campus. Most of the radical voices will regret their extreme views and some of them may hurt their careers over the next 10 years.
2) The big break with Missouri was the Football team strike threats. It shows the importance of the Football team to large universities and might be an ignition for college athletes to win monetary gains from the university. (Question if the football players were paid by the university, would have threatened a strike?)
3) For all the complaints about college radicals, they were right on Vietnam and tend to be more peaceful than the rest of the population.
Neither the protesters nor the administration can be reasonable, because their currency is tribal power, not reason.
To join a tribe you must do or undergo something unreasonable and public (take a beating / kill someone to join a gang, submit to hazing to join a frat, tattoo your back to join the yakuza). A reasonable action shows no commitment to the cause. Only an unreasonable action shows commitment to the group.
The protesters must demand something unreasonable, yet possible (usually a firing) because the goal of the protesters is to feel important. Only by causing a disproportionate response will they feel important, as is necessary to all 18 year olds.
The administration cannot do anything reasonable, because that would show a lack of loyalty to the narrative, and insensitivity and lack of empathy towards the protesters. Thus the administration must react immediately and emotionally.
The accused cannot do anything reasonable. Trying to reason with the protesters marks you as insensitive and lacking in empathy, and thus guilty. Only by immediately stepping down can you demonstrate your innocence. Only a witch can survive the trial, thus all survivors are witches that must be executed.
The media must cover it, because individual reporters are compelled by the status games of their own tribe to posture themselves as more left-wing than those who surround them, even if the resulting exposure causes left-wing politics as a whole to be tarnished in the eyes of the public.
And me? I must go and exercise, for schadenfreude that tastes this sweet will surely make me fat.
Yep. A lot of radicals gravitated toward student government. The vast majority, on the other hand, completely ignored student government except to bitch about the fee and would have gladly voted it out of existence if that was a viable option and they could get a refund.
“The reason that campus protests do make the news is that college administrators tend to be both spineless and out of touch. ”
Out of touch, sure. I’ve been surprised by the spineless part, though. Isn’t there some kind of competitive tournament process to reach the upper levels of institutional stewardship in higher education? I would have thought that this competitive process would select for people who could navigate institutional politics of this kind. I guess not, though.
It’s interesting, also, that administrators at each college where these flash mobs, er…I mean demonstrations have occurred have all reacted the same (spineless) way. A large state university has a state legislature to answer to and maybe small, pricy private colleges have to treat their students like valued customers these days, due to the high tuition and shrinking applications. You’d expect both to roll over pretty fast, I guess, as a result. But I would have thought the fun thing about running a Yale or Harvard, what with the institutional and financial capital they’ve accumulated, is that you can tell people to get lost when they start becoming an inconvenience.
It would be easy enough to call the students’ bluff — offer them a refund for the semester and say you’re sorry the product wasn’t what they expected. Good-bye and good luck.
Consider the Harvard Law School “Tape” crisis. A lot of what’s going on during the Black Autumn is conveniently interpretable through the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis lens that Orwell used in “1984.” If you have the conceptual category “hate hoax” already in your head, it’s easy to recognize that a large fraction of the purported agitating incidents never happened. But most people don’t have the Hate Hoax category because it’s not a respectable thing to know about, so they are constantly being surprised by new incidents. It’s all about who controls the past controls the present and the future.
Nice post Arnold. This might be the best analysis I have seen on this topic.