Academia: On The Inside?

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

Many of us are looking on with sadness and shame as university administrations all over the country are falling into profoundly self-harming overreactions in coping with protests on their campuses.

For many faculty and students, many of these decisions—cancellations of graduation ceremonies, ordering students and faculty arrested for trespassing on the campuses that they study and work at, bizarrely one-sided readings of “safety” and so on—seem all the more incomprehensible in light of restrained and tolerant administrative reactions to protests from the mid-1970s into the pandemic.

In the mid-1980s at my alma mater, anti-apartheid activists were once arrested when we blocked access to the main administration building, but we expected to be arrested. It was standard civil disobedience, very politely done, and no one was charged. We also had an encampment called “Free University” that went on for a week where students taught mini-classes and it was all fine. In the years I’ve been a professor, I’ve seen many protests. Some of them were more disruptive in various ways than anything this year, in one case by a considerable margin. Administrators behind the scenes were very frustrated, but they reacted with great restraint and patience nevertheless. The basic wisdom has held for decades now: this is part of the learning experience, be patient, don’t incite by over-reacting. That has worked, by and large. I think in many cases protestors themselves have on later reflection recognized where they either didn’t know as much as they should have or where they made tactical mistakes. That kind of learning was only possible because nobody in authority over-reacted, because administrative leaders understood where their first and last responsibilities were vested.

So the question is what has changed? It’s nothing in the tactics of protesters, especially not the current round centered on encampments. It’s very obviously at least partly in the content of protests, in multiple ways, despite all the mealy-mouthed attempts to claim otherwise coming from various administrations.

But I’m trying to think about what it looks like inside the room where university presidents and their cabinets are sitting at the moment that they decide to bring the police into play or decide to suspend and expel students en masse or decide to cancel graduation ceremonies or decide to hold classes virtually rather than finish out the semester. I’m trying to understand why Minouche Shafik thinks she can do anything that will satisfy Elise Stefanik. Or why Shafik doesn’t understand that she is prolonging and intensifying the enormous and deliberate distraction this whole issue is providing the GOP, who have no genuine or deep-seated concern about anti-semitism or the security of elite universities but are straightforwardly chasing anything that will change the political momentum in their favor before November.

In the case of public universities, I don’t have any trouble imagining what’s going on in the room where it happens. The threat from red-state governments is immediate: administrators will be fired if they refuse. Sorry, UTAustin faculty and students: you’re in Texas, and Greg Abbott would be happy to put “I destroyed the flagship campus of my own state” on his list of professional accomplishments.

In the case of wealthy private universities, I have to work harder in guessing at the specifics of their decision-making process.

In doing so, I’m trying to be as sympathetic as I can manage in assessing what they’re coping with. Here’s what I come up with as I think it through.

1. This is the consequence of the institutionalization of ‘safety’ as a pre-eminent discourse about social justice on campuses. Here is the one place where some critics are right to say that this is the campus left being hoisted on its own petard. I have been worrying about this point myself for a long time—I particularly raised it during some protests here on my own campus in 2013, where students were demanding a much more aggressive, top-down response from the college administration to complaints about discrimination and micro-aggressions by privileging the language of safety. I understand the difference between then and now, between the cases, but it should just be understood that empowering an institutional apparatus to act assertively following an open-ended logic is always a dangerous move. But it’s not mostly a cynical move on the part of administrations, either—many are trying to do right by the concept of safety for everyone because they really have embraced that idea. And because administrations in higher education have learned to speak an almost-utopian language about such ideas—to promise something like safety for all with little care for the real-world trade-offs involved, or the competing values that weigh against it.

2. Close on the heels of this point is the soaring stock of risk management and protection against liability as a comprehensive ideological frame that has replaced older paradigms like “fiduciary responsibility”. Within the upper reaches of most administrations in higher education, protecting the endowment and the institution’s other assets against any perceived risk that might produce legal claims is now the single paramount value that precedes all others—and advice about what constitutes risk is now by its nature permanently shrouded from scrutiny or debate, since it mostly comes from counsel in forms that are protected and in some sense unspeakable. To even admit you are acting out of a perception of potential liability is thought in some circles to create a risk of liability. But this thinking in some cases creates enormous risk because the people who are articulating risk only think along one line of vulnerability, the one they understand—or because their logic is easily bent towards a pre-determined conclusion by ideologues prepared to manipulate it.

3. Some university leaders have long enough memories—or have listened to the testimony of a previous generation of leaders—to regret having not acted against past protests in a more forceful way. That tempts them into thinking that if they had acted differently, they wouldn’t be dealing with the issue of the moment. I think that’s a profoundly incorrect counterfactual proposition: a more harshly punitive response in the past would do nothing to prevent successor protests, not the least because student culture has a 4-year cycle that produces serial amnesia. But I also do understand why administrative leadership feels like their time gets taken up year after year by protests that they see as unstrategic, histrionic and focused on issues that they can’t do anything about anyway, protests which occasionally are also aimed at individual administrators in professionally threatening ways that seem unfair or disproportionate. There is some justice to those characterizations. If I could magically shift the ground in many of these current protests, I’d argue that they should see the university simply as a convenient venue for staging protests that are focused elsewhere, not as the target, and lodge their demands elsewhere. Though now, unfortunately, the issue has legitimately become the universities that have acted so harshly and foolishly against their own students and faculty.

4. There’s a kind of herd logic to many decisions in higher education. When enough institutions do a thing, refusing to do that thing makes you a prominent target in some fashion. If you decide to reject U.S. News rankings, then U.S. News goes out of their way to damage you in retaliation. You might not be that interested in admitting more low-income first-generation students when it’s just Amherst moving aggressively on that goal, but when the New York Times publishes a ranked list of institutions based on the number of Pell Grant recipients they matriculated, suddenly it becomes urgent to embrace that goal. The herd logic is in very strong play now and it will take a mighty degree of common sense to refuse to follow it.

5. I’ve found that over the last two decades, it’s become harder and harder for most administrators to see protest as a pedagogical occasion. Or in the case of certain students, professional development. When I first started as a professor that seemed like a much more common insight—as a very junior professor here, I once sat with a former president here and several colleagues in a big circle with students who were highly aggrieved about what they believed was a defacing of a space set aside for intercultural understanding, and we all treated the discussion like a classroom conversation, patiently untangling their demands and gently challenging their understanding of what had happened. The former president and several other administrators completely understood that the moment wasn’t something to manage or make policy about, but a teaching moment. For whatever reason, that frame has just become very hard to access inside decision-making conversations in these kinds of moments.

6. Equally, I’ve found that administrative leaders increasingly feel the need to defend the formal prerogatives of their leadership, both for themselves and as a way of establishing precedent. That becomes the principal value they are defending in certain kinds of confrontations: the right to be the person who decides what will happen. The oddity of this insistence in this particular moment is that leaders at Columbia, NYU, Vanderbilt, USC and elsewhere don’t look like they’re defending their autonomy as leaders, their prerogatives to make decisions: they look weak, they look mostly like they are appeasing hostile outsiders who have no intention of being appeased. Here the need to be “the decider” is really leading them astray, because they’re in effect doing the exact opposite.

7. But this is because it’s not just hostile outsiders. When I started my career, for the most part, trustee boards at most elite universities and colleges were composed of modestly wealthy executives, prominent professionals, and highly accomplished individuals in the arts, in civic leadership, and so on. For the most part, they stayed out of the everyday affairs of their institutions and deferred to the president and their cabinet. (Selection of board members was also often effectively controlled by administrations rather than boards themselves.) They were there as donors, as genial cheerleaders for the institution, and as a kind of “in case of emergency, break glass” authority of last resort, to be called on in the case of a major crisis. In the few cases where a forceful personality really insisted on getting their way, you’d either humor them if what they wanted was sequestered enough from the core of the institution (say, building a new stadium or hiring a new coach) or you’d do what they wanted and then regret it, as Yale did in accepting a big donation from Lee Bass back in the 1990s. Today many of those same boards are peppered with micromanaging interventionists, many of them part of an extraordinarily small hyper-wealthy elite that has arisen since the 1990s. They’re accustomed to getting their way, often see the president and administration as subservient to them, and more than a few have little respect for universities as such and even less for many of the underlying values that animate life on campuses. So if you’re inside that decision-making room, you can’t just blow off or ignore that small subset of trustees who not only expect to have your ear but increasingly demand your obedience, where once upon a time your development staff would have insulated you from that kind of pressure. You can’t ignore it because on paper, the board is in charge, and the students and faculty are not. But this is a situation where university presidents and their staffs got themselves into hot water by losing some of the insulating safeguards of the past through incautious pursuit of the biggest wallets. That’s what happened at Penn, for example, where Amy Gutmann ended up exposing her successor to strong personalities who wanted to be in charge first and foremost and are open about their disdain for the basic ethos of university life.

All of this amounts to the anatomy of an enormous mistake, however: these leaders at various institutions are pleasing no one and alienating everybody, and this is not going to be the kind of moment that people just forget. They aren’t calming things down, they’re escalating them. They aren’t protecting their values, they’re undercutting their brand. They are pursuing strength via an accelerating weakness.

It’s true that in American history, it’s often been politically profitable to take credit for actions taken against college protestors. A lot of people forget that the Kent State shootings were popular. Antiwar protests were disapproved of by a supermajority of Americans polled until the waning days of the war itself, and really only rose in common estimation much later on. (Sort of the same way that suddenly everybody claims to have been against the invasion of Iraq now that it’s obvious that it was one of the worst decisions in modern American history.) Older Americans being glad for an opportunity to hate young Americans, especially people in college, is kind of an evergreen part of post-1945 American life.

Two things to consider, though. First, it’s politicians who get a boost, not university leaders, whose professional viability is often at risk when they don’t protect and sustain their own institutions. (It is especially hard to forgive the invocation of ‘safety’ by universities who are exposing their students to serious danger.) And even that boost doesn’t last for long, especially as a counter-discourse rises and pushes back.

And second, if I were Joe Biden, I’d be really careful about trying to claim a share of the demagoguery coming from the GOP on this issue. Not just because that kind of triangulation has been a consistent loser for the post-New Deal Democrats, but because there’s a real and present electoral danger to him if the overreaction by campus leaders coalesces a single-issue protest movement into a full-blown generational grievance. And an electoral danger to Joe Biden is, unfortunately at this point, not just his risk alone to manage.

Image credit: SWinxy, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2024_Columbia_pro-Palestine_protest_16.jpg