University Administrators: Protect Your Students!
As a professor and a librarian at a college in the United States, it pains me greatly to see and to read news reports that it is university administrators that have been calling in the police to brutalize their own students. These events really pain me because it comes across that university administrators don’t seem to genuinely care about students in their care. Additionally it comes across that university administrators either never studied political science and the mass movement of peoples in societies, or forgot what they may have studied.
Let’s unpack some of this mess. I interact with a lot of college students on my campus, and they fascinate me for several reasons. These reasons are why university administrators need to be on the side of students. The first is that they are still bright eyed and hopeful for their future and their country. They’re not yet full of the jaded qualities that come later in life. They still think they can make a positive difference in this world and have not been ground down to rubble by the realities of life.
The second observation is that these students are smart and savvy. Remember university administrators, YOU chose these students to come to your campus. You felt they were the most intelligent, most ready to study and grasp the complexities of this world. Particularly at these “top universities” like Columbia. You chose these students because you felt they were smart. You said, “these are the cream of the crop, and I’m going to teach them the best.”
For a lot of the “top universities”, if these students are not the smartest and brightest, why did you select them to come to your school? Connections? Wealthy donors? If they are really smart, why are you not protecting them? They are your students. You selected them for their smarts.
The third observation is more historical. This is what college students do. They always protest. If you ever studied any literature on mass movements of people, understanding sociological events, students protest. That’s what they do. Let them learn. (Let them learn to be jaded, eh?)
If you’re sending off cops to beat your students, that tells a lot about who you are. You’re the bully. You’re the bully in the playground picking on the harmless kid. It also reveals your actual priorities. You care more about money, power, and control rather than education and growth of students.
There’s a reason why Republicans are picking on college students as their next target (after transgenders, after librarians, and so on). Because college students are the little kid in the playground, and the bullies know they can pick on them. It’s your job, as university administrators to protect your students. You selected them to come to your university. They are paying you for education, and you let wolves come devour them up. That’s really shameful. Do better. Protect your students.
As an extra, it goes without saying that protesters need to protest against the correct things. For instance, in the current situation with Gaza and Israel, the protesting must not target Jews themselves or their religion. This is a political matter in which the state of Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank. Americans have a right to protest these actions in particular because Israel cannot act in Gaza or the West Bank without American firepower and financial support. What another country does with cash received from us and with guns received from us matters because it is done then in our name. Pro Israeli folks do not have the power to silence these protests, and if they use the state against these protests, they show who they really are, pathetic fascists.