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A community college dean who blogs anonymously at Inside Higher Ed has weighed in on the faculty suspensions at California’s Southwestern College, and his piece is definitely required reading.
“Dean Dad,” as he styles himself, is not a fan of campus protesters. “People who don’t deal with budgets for a living often don’t understand the constraints within them,” he writes, and too frequently “leap to the moral high ground and start passing judgments, loudly and publicly, based on misinformation.”
That said, he notes that when you’re a college administrator, dealing with such criticism — fair or unfair — is part of your job. And there are a bunch of ways you can do it:
You can work together with your critics to lobby for more government aid. You can bring those critics to the table and ask them for concrete recommendations. You can divide them. You can co-opt them. You can ignore them. You can conduct a PR blitz. (He takes a couple of sentences to describe each of these options, and as I said above it’s all well worth reading.)
Finally, he says, you can adopt the strategy that SWC president Raj Chopra has apparently chosen. You can “do your best imitation of Dr. Evil, go out on limbs that will be sawed off quickly in court, and make yourself look like an idiot in public.”
Again, DD is no friend of Chopra’s critics. He’s writing from the premise that Chopra’s position on the budget is reasonable, and that his student and faculty antagonists are unreasonable and ill-informed. And he still thinks Chopra is acting like a grade-A clod.
The title of DD’s piece is “Power 101.” He’s not concerned with whether Chopra had a technical legal right to authorize the suspensions, or what specifically happened on campus last Thursday. He doesn’t care, because those questions aren’t questions Chopra should have been asking.
A college like Southwestern is an institution, embedded in a network of other institutions — state government, unions, student groups, advocacy groups, non-profits, businesses, media. If you’re looking to transform an institution like that, or you’re hoping to thwart someone else’s attempts to transform it, you need to understand power. You need to understand the response that your actions will provoke, and the effect of that response on your position.
A leader of the ANC in South Africa once chastised a reporter who was trying to understand the long-term strategy of the apartheid government with regard to Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment. “You’re thinking like a chess player,” he said. “They play checkers.”
Most college and university administrators in the 21st century are adept chess players.
Raj Chopra plays checkers.
The student senate of the University of North Texas last week rejected a bylaw amendment that would have allowed same-sex couples to run for king and queen of homecoming.
Student government regulations at UNT do not bar LGBT students from running for homecoming king and queen, but they do provide that the court be elected as a male-female couple. The proposed bylaw amendment would have eliminated that restriction.
The bill, which had been introduced a week earlier, generated a strong negative response from UNT parents and alumni.
Debate on the proposal lasted for an hour, and at times grew heated. The final vote was five in favor of the change, ten opposed, and eight abstentions.
One student who voted against the bill said that he had been swayed by threats from alumni to end charitable donations to UNT, and from parents of students who had gone so far as to threaten to force their children to withdraw from the university.
Student government interns conducted an informal poll of two hundred students before the vote, and the UNT student newspaper, the NT Daily, said the results were “generally negative.” Comments on the Daily‘s coverage of the vote have, however, been mostly supportive of the defeated amendment.
(Thanks to @ericstoller on Twitter for the heads-up on this story.)
Evening update: Pitt’s chapter of the ACLU is co-sponsoring an Oakland Unites for First Amendment Rights rally on campus tomorrow at 5:30 pm. A four-point petition will be circulating at the rally — we’ll post the text as soon as we get it.
Last week’s G-20 meeting of the leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies drew massive protests in and around the University of Pittsburgh, and now police and campus administrators are facing heavy criticism for their handling of the incidents.
Over the course of the two-day meeting, police used sonic cannons, tear gas, pepper spray, bean-bag projectiles, smoke canisters, stun grenades, and rubber bullets on demonstrators, making hundreds of arrests. Innocent students, including some student journalists, were caught up in police sweeps on the Pitt campus.
Police arrested nearly two hundred people during the course of the G-20 demonstrations, including more than fifty students. The Allegheny County district attorney has already announced that charges against four students will be dropped, and more dismissals are expected.
Update: In a reversal of a policy announced yesterday, Pitt will allow students seeking dismissal of charges to bring attorneys to their meetings with campus police officials. The university has also confirmed that no campus judicial proceedings will be brought against students whose criminal charges are dismissed.
Dozens of videos from the protests have surfaced online, ranging from the hilarious (three burly cops in face masks attempt to pass as protesters, and failing spectacularly) to the chilling (students trapped on a stairway between two sets of cops, each trying to force them to go the other way).
Two student journalists for the Pitt News were arrested while covering the Friday night protests, and eight more were tear gassed, pepper sprayed, or maced. Stories have also emerged of students being locked out of their dorms, then arrested for failing to return to their rooms.
One student has posted a lengthy account online of how she was arrested for “failing to disperse” while helping students to disperse by holding open the locked doors of one dorm building. She describes students being arrested as they entered the dorms, and other reports suggest that students were arrested while waiting in line at local restaurants, or studying in the campus library.
Violations of students’ rights on campus were not limited to arrests. One video posted online shows police lobbing a tear gas canister onto the balcony of a dorm from which a group of students were quietly watching the protest in the street below. (The canister is thrown just after the two-minute mark in the video.)
The question of what limits should have been set on the actions of municipal police on the Pitt campus is being raised over and over again in the aftermath of the G-20, and evidence is emerging that it was a subject of dispute among police at the time. Police scanner recordings obtained by the Pitt News show that a high-ranking Pitt university police officer intervened personally on Friday night to prevent a non-university police “attack team” from storming the Towers, a campus dorm.
Adding to the confusion, and contributing to the police overreaction, is the fact that Pitt’s campus is an urban one, with no clear boundaries, and and the fact that thepolice were brought in for the G-20 protests from as far away as Tucson, Arizona. Many of the cops present were unfamiliar with the location.
Pitt’s university police have also been criticized, however. The university’s text message based Emergency Notification System was not used at all on Thursday, and only two messages were sent out on Friday — one encouraging them to “be careful” and “exercise good judgment,” and the other advising them to “remain near their residences.” As noted above, a number of students were ultimately arrested at or near their dorms that night.
Pressure on the police and the Pitt administration has been building since the meeting ended, with many claiming that, as one online petition puts it, “the right of citizens — students, professors, families, community members, and media — to assemble and gather peacefully in public was not only denied and violated but suppressed with unnecessary and excessive force.”
Note: Check out What Happened At Pitt?!?! for a huge collection of links and resources.
The Providence, Rhode Island mayor’s proposal to slap a “student municipal impact fee” on the city’s college students is being introduced as legislation in the RI state legislature.
The student tax, which I discussed here last month, would be an assessment of $150 per semester for all undergraduate and graduate students at the city’s four private universities. It’s intended to help close a multi million dollar municipal budget deficit.
Mayor Cicilline also put forward an alternate funding mechanism — a bill that would allow the city to collect fees directly from its largest tax-exempt institutions (the four universities plus five private hospitals). That bill would permit the assessment of such fees up to twenty-five percent of the taxes that the institutions would pay if they were not exempt.
The National Youth Rights Association of Southeast Florida, who staged a protest on May 1 against West Palm Beach’s weird youth curfew ordinance, have given the city one week to address their complaints before they formally file suit.
In a letter to the city’s attorney, civil rights lawyer Barry Silver, representing NYRASEFL, wrote yesterday that the curfew law is “unconstitutional, and thus unenforceable.” He urged them to rewrite the law or “better yet to scrap the idea altogether,” and said that if NYRASEFL does not hear from the city by Tuesday, May 26, they will initiate legal proceedings.
studentactivism.net 
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