Tag Archives: responsibilities

Adult-Run Universities

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Ben Sasse, President of the University of Florida, had an opinion piece in Friday’s Wall Street Journal that is, in the main, spot on. The thrust of his article was that, with adults in charge of our colleges and universities, and with those adults holding misbehaving students responsible for their behavior, actual idea-centric debate and education can occur.

The thrust of Sasse’s complete remarks are spot on, but I do have a couple of disagreements.

Pro-Hamas agitators have fought police, barricaded themselves in university buildings, shut down classes, forced commencement cancellations, and physically impeded Jewish students from attending lectures.

Pro-Hamas terrorist-supporting agitators have…. The seeming redundancy is necessary to clarify who and what these…persons…are.

Second, these terrorist supporters and the student populations who have consciously decided to go along with the agitation have not shut down any classes or forced any commencement cancelations. The cowardice of college and university management teams and of far too many “professors” has done that with their craven decisions.

It’s also the cowardice of those teams and “professors” that has facilitated those terrorist-supporting agitators’ and their student accomplices’ clashes with police, building occupations, and obstruction of Jewish and all other students’ attempts to attend the classes and lectures for which they’re paying more than a few pretty pennies.

A Coward’s Copout

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In a Wall Street Journal article centered on the Los Angeles police response to the disruptions and outright riot on the UCLA campus, there was this bit of attempted deflection:

Some universities and officials have blamed outsiders for coming to schools to escalate the protests.

This is a coward’s copout. It’s true enough that some outsiders are involved and fomenting some of the agitation. However, the students are voluntarily choosing to be agitated and choosing, on their own initiative, to participate in the pro-terrorist support, the antisemitic bigotry, the vandalism, the explicit threats of violence that are at the core of the disruptions.

The presence of outsiders in no way absolves these students of their participation in these…disruptions…and in no way mitigates their responsibility for their choices and actions.

A Statement of Responsibility…and of Consequences

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‘Way back in 1969, the University of Notre Dame’s then-President Father Ted Hesburgh had this to say about the consequences of student disruptions [emphasis in the original]:

Now comes my duty of stating, clearly and unequivocally, what happens if…. Anyone or any group that substitutes force for rational persuasion, be it violent or non-violent, will be given fifteen minutes of meditation to cease and desist…. If they do not within that time period cease and desist, they will be asked for their identity cards. Those who produce these will be suspended from this community as not understanding what this community is. Those who do not have or will not produce identity cards will be assumed not to be members of the community and will be charged with trespassing and disturbing the peace on private property and treated accordingly by the law.
After notification of suspension, or trespass in the case of non-community members, if there is not within five minutes a movement to cease and desist, students will be notified of expulsion from this community and the law will deal with them as non-students.
There seems to be a current myth that university members are not responsible to the law, and that somehow the law is the enemy, particularly those whom society has constituted to uphold and enforce the law. I would like to insist here that all of us are responsible to the duly constituted laws of this University community and to all of the laws of the land. There is no other guarantee of civilization versus the jungle or mob rule, here or elsewhere.

It must be noted that Hesburgh’s consequences are just as applicable to today’s crop of school professors who participate in such disruptions.

It’s too bad that today’s school administrators lack Father Hesburgh’s clarity and moral courage in executing the duties attached to school administration.

Shared Responsibility

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A wide range of colleges and universities are suffering millions of dollars in damages done their facilities by pro-Hamas, pro-terrorist gangs masquerading themselves as pro-Palestinians in their destructive and antisemitic disruptions [link in the original].

California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, closed down its campus on Saturday “due to ongoing occupation of Siemens Hall and Nelson Hall, as well as continued challenges with individuals breaking laws in the area surrounding the buildings and the quad,” the northern California public university said. Classes were moved online and students who live on campus are allowed to remain in their residence halls and in dining facilities, but they are not allowed on any other parts of campus.
Students at Cal Poly Humboldt appear to have renamed one of the occupied buildings “Intifada Hall.” That building is littered with trash and debris, while the walls are covered with graffiti in support of Palestinians in Gaza, video shows.

And

“Free Palestine” and “Palestine” were graffitied on two buildings at the University of Portland, a private Catholic school in Oregon that is not facing a student occupation. Campus Safety and Emergency Management Director Michael McNerney told The Beacon, a student newspaper, that the clean-up cost is estimated to be in the thousands.

And

Protest encampments have sprung up at more than three dozen private and public schools across the United States since Columbia University students in New York City began a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” earlier this month.

It’s true enough that the schools’ pupils and no small number of interlopers are the ones proximately doing the vandalism.

However, the schools’ management teams bear at least equal responsibility for these costs—which will, most assuredly, be passed along to students, future students, and their families in increased tuition and fees charged. Those management teams, through their tacit condoning of these disruptions and attendant vandalism, through their outright cowardice in not confronting these disrupters and vandals, or both, allow and encourage the damages being done.

Those same teams could have prevented the vast bulk of these damages and costs had they confronted the disrupters at the start, permanently expelling the pupils involved and having arrested the pupils and interlopers doing the vandalism and bringing them to trial. Those teams—or better, their replacements—could prevent further damage by immediately permanently expelling the pupils involved and having arrested the pupils and interlopers doing the vandalism and bringing them to trial.

Responsibilities

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The subheadline illustrates the misunderstanding of where responsibility lies.

School officials reap what their politically monoculture faculties have sown.

The WSJ‘s editors then went on about how those thinking antisemitic bigotry are exaggerating are mistaken, pointing out in their examples the rampant antisemitic bigotry on college campuses.

Antisemitism has too often been tolerated within Near Eastern Studies departments. On October 8, 2023, Columbia professor Joseph Massad praised the “awesome” scenes of the October 7 massacre “witnessed by millions of jubilant Arabs.” In 2018 Columbia professor Hamid Dabashi posted on Twitter (now X) that “Every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world” could soon be traced to “the ugly name of Israel.”

Then they wrote,

The liberal elites who run these institutions seem to lack the moral self-confidence to stand up to these student bullies. College presidents have to take charge, restore order and protect Jewish students, or the trustees should fire them and find someone who will.

But that’s closing the chicken coop after the weasels have moved in and taken over. Monocultural faculties have not created the schools’ problems, including the schools’ systemic (to coin a word) antisemitic bigotry. Schools’ management teams have created their environment of bigotry by allowing—perhaps even encouraging—from the start the creation of their faculties as monocultural, and bigoted.

It’s long past time those management teams were fired for cause, and the bigots on those faculties also fired for cause. Bigotry should not be allowed to survive contracts or tenure.