Student power and its origins
I thought I’d highlight this observation by commenter “Caedmon” in the “Free speech on campus” thread:
I wonder how much influence high tuition fees have on this?…
When the high costs of tuition fees in the US are discussed the college students are usually seen as unfortunate victims. Might it not also be the case that paying thousands of dollars to sit in a lecture hall gives one a sense of entitlement?
In such a situation I might well feel that it was up to me to decide whether Lena Dunham was better than Shakespeare.
This is not to dismiss the influence of political correctness etc. just to suggest that high fees change the relationship between student and professor. The kid who has spent all summer baling hay to go to college might look on his Latin professor with veneration. The kid who has borrowed against his future earnings as a top Hollywood script writer does not hold his film studies professor in such high esteem.
This might not be so much the revolution devouring its own as America’s professors slowly waking up to the fact that they are now the servants of the little monsters they have created.
My response is that it’s an interesting notion, and I think it enters into the mix, but I’m not at all sure how much. Things were already changing back in the 60s, when tuition was not that high—not just in absolute terms, but in relative ones. Yet, in the words of the brilliant Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind:
”¦[S]tudents discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.
Bloom’s book came out in 1989, but in that passage he was describing certain matters that took place at Cornell, where he’d been a professor, in the year 1969. This was long before the marked tuition hikes we’ve seen in recent decades. I’ve written at length about what happened that year at Cornell and its significance, so I won’t recap it all in this post, but suffice to say that professors and administrators there proved that they were pushovers more interested in PC thought and placating student pressure (including, in the case of Cornell, the threat of violence by armed students) than in defending any principle they had supposedly held dear.
The issues were somewhat different back then. In Cornell it was race, and the establishment of a Black Studies department, as well as threatening a black student (Alan Keyes, as it turns out) who had disagreed with the protesters. In 1969 at Cornell the protagonists consisted primarily (although not solely) of young black men. Today they are more likely to be women, and many—although by no means all—are white women. What these groups of protestors have in common is that they are students who have realized they can all-too-often bully and threaten professors into doing pretty much whatever they say.
[NOTE: I’ve said I wouldn’t go into the whole Cornell 1969 story here, but I keep learning new and fascinating things about it. For example, in doing research for this post I found this article—generally quite sympathetic to the protestors—from which I learned the following:
Only days before the Straight takeover, on April 10, 1969, the Cornell administration had approved $240,000 to create an Afro-American Studies Center and a director, James Turner, had been identified months earlier. “The students wanted an autonomous program; they wanted the center to have control of its own destiny,” said Eric Acree, librarian at the Africana Studies and Research Center.
So Cornell was already slated to get an Afro-American Studies Center, but that wasn’t good enough for the demonstrators, who said they wanted it to be autonomous.
I had always figured that the black students at Cornell in 1969 had come there as part of some sort of affirmative action or outreach program to get more black students at Cornell in an era when they were ordinarily few and far between. Sure enough, that turns out to have been true, and President Perkins of Cornell was a pioneer in that respect:
In 1963, his first year in office, Cornell President James Perkins had launched the Committee on Special Educational Projects (COSEP) to increase enrollment of African-American students at Cornell and provide them with support services — the first program of its kind at a major American university.
Perkins, who had chaired the board of trustees of the United Negro College Fund, said Cornell wanted to “make a larger contribution to the education of qualified students who have been disadvantaged by their cultural, economic and educational environments.”
Perkins resigned the semester after the student takeover, saying: “it seemed to me quite clear that one way ”” a strange way ”” to contribute to healing the community was to resign.” So the demonstrators managed to force him out, too, despite how far he had gone to further the presence of black students at Cornell.
One other thing I noticed when reading this piece:
Early in the morning of Parents’ Weekend, 40 years ago this Saturday, 11 fire alarms rang out across the Cornell campus. At 3 a.m., a burning cross was discovered outside Wari House, a cooperative for black women students. The following morning, members of the Afro-American Society (AAS) occupied Willard Straight Hall to protest Cornell’s perceived racism, its judicial system and its slow progress in establishing a black studies program.
I would now bet a fair amount of money that the protestors who ended up occupying Willard Straight Hall were the same people who had set fire to the cross. Their motive would have been to establish a pretext for the entire episode, and to pretend it was white racists on campus who did it. I doubt we’ll ever know whether that’s the case or not. But that would be my guess, although it’s something I would not have thought of until recent years in which we’ve learned of the recent spate of fake racist and/or hate crimes on campus and elsewhere (see this).]
The PC faculty and administration people are pushovers. Remember “Mau-Mauing The Flak-Catchers”?
Just a quick glance at the entry on the 1960s at Wikipedia reminds us of what an incredibly tumultuous time that was. So, while I wish those college administrators and professors had not lost heart and caved so easily or become “dancing bears”, I can understand on a human level that they must have felt utterly overwhelmed by the ferocity and pace of the challenges being thrown at them.
It’s fair to say that most undergraduates see themselves as paying for their education no matter where the money comes from. Running up large debt to do so only adds to the perception that they are paying. One school I know has changed the name of an office from student services to customer relations.
Somewhat related to this issue is the emphasis by administrators on retention. They like to say that the easiest student to recruit is the one already on campus. Constant pressure to retain students means ever more grade inflation and pandering to students.
Ann:
Have you ever read Bloom’s book, particularly the section about Cornell? It makes excellent and informative reading.
Yes, they felt overwhelmed. But they had reached their positions in life because supposedly they had strength of mind and character, and were devoted to certain principles. In that climate (the 60s), it required courage, a courage they had criticized others for lacking but which it turned out they themselves did not possess.
In short, they were weak-minded cowards.
Part of the problem may be due to over-reliance on student evaluations of professors. Such evaluations aren’t inherently bad, but need to be used very carefully.
In running a business that includes a business-to-business sales force, I’m certainly interested in what the customers think of the sales reps—but if a customer likes John or Suzy because of attentive and intelligent understanding and help with their problems, that’s something entirely different from liking them because they give large, unjustified, and unnecessary price discounts!
David Foster, 4:53 pm — “Part of the problem may be due to over-reliance on student evaluations of professors.”
I’ve got something to say about that. (I was on a college/university faculty full time in the 1970s and then as adjunct in the 2000s.) Many student evaluations are worthwhile feedback; many are superfluous noise, neither worthwhile nor a waste; and then there are the others:
One evaluation response in particular stood out to me ‘way back when (1970s), and I fondly remember it to this day. One question on the evaluation form asked whether I (the professor) had distributed syllabi to the class on the first day of class. I had done so, and the overwhelming majority of evaluations checked off “yes” on that question. The one I fondly remember checked off “no”.
WTF?? [See, I’m an older dude but I’m up on the new lingo.] This minor but extreme example underscores the fact that there is a subset of evaluation results that are meaningless or worse — and if anyone’s doing statistics on the evaluations, there are going to be monkey wrenches in there that should call descriptive summary statistics on student evaluations into question.
I think there is also an element of academia that is afraid to stand up to the cultural “elite.” If you are working your tail off every day and concentrating on your own academic interests, you may be too willing to trust the Leonard Bernsteins, etc. on matters where you are not an expert. And if you think the NYT is a top source of info because that’s the only paper you have time to read, you will surely lean left, and maybe suffer a bit of white guilt.
I don’t know, Neo, but I think “weak-minded cowards” might be a tad harsh. If you read this piece at City Journal with a lot of detail about what happened at the time, you’ll see that faculty members who at first voted to take a strong stand against the protestors were threatened, and that they actually brought their families to motels and registered them under assumed names. Pretty hard to make a brave move when not just you, but your family, is involved.
Ann:
It’s easy to be brave when the situation doesn’t require actual bravery, but requires only fake bravery.
They were cowards. The least they could have done was quit their jobs in protest. I know, that would have taken courage too—economic courage.
By the way, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying courage is easy. Cowardice is—well—it’s the coward’s way out. Nor am I saying I know I would have been any more courageous than they. I don’t know what I would do, and I’m glad I wasn’t in their position.
But if I had done what they did, I would have known I did it through cowardice. Failing to call it that does no good at all.
By the way—somehow, others managed to stand up to them and were not harmed at all. Bloom quit over it. Of course, he didn’t have a family. Thomas Sowell had quit earlier over issues related to it.
Here’s some of what happened (the entire article is worth reading—and by the way, it also backs up my theory that the cross-burning was set by the protestors themselves):
More here. Why weren’t they immediately arrested? I’ve seen nothing that indicates anything was done to them. If you read on (I can’t cut and paste from there, or I would) you’ll see that apparently “Perkins was never the same” after that.
Read the rest of that link, too. What went on was violence and the threat of more violence, and although there were some voices for firmer action against it the administration ultimately caved.
These intellectuals were weak when the Greeks were combining philosopher Socrates with military life as a citizen soldier.
It’s not new. One good example is Charles Krathhammer when he talked about Republican options concerning Hussein care. Apparently Cruz’s shut down and rejection of Authority wasn’t a solution to Charles, but Charles had no better alternative even. That didn’t stop them from gumming up the works for fear that the system will collapse otherwise. The ability to Refuse to Obey Authority is not a quality people tend to have. That is why they belong better as serfs, not intellectual masters.
Courage is a habit, one that requires practice, not merely moderated intellectual awareness. A person that commands themselves, must be used to using his own Will to overpower things like hunger, fear, or physical discomfort. Mortification of the flesh. Slowly training up provides a habit of the soul controlling the mind and body, rather than the reverse.
Their motive would have been to establish a pretext for the entire episode, and to pretend it was white racists on campus who did it.
If it was white racists like the Democrat funded KKK with Robert Byrd as Kleagle, then the black thugs would have been hanging from those crosses, still screaming as they burned alive.
Since that didn’t happen, that means the Democrats are funding another racist pogrom, this time of the black color hooded hoodies.
I was in the middle of all the protests in the late 60s and was, in fact, the object of many big protests. The issue initially was the Vietnam War. As a Navy recruiter at universities in northern California, my crew was the center of attention when we arrived on campus. I’ve detailed all the vandalism here before – burning literature, painting our vehicles, flattening our tires, surrounding us so no one could come talk to us, threats, epithets, spitting at us, and more. The cowardly administrations would do little to try to control them. I couldn’t understand why the Deans and administrators thought these young draft dodgers needed to be catered to. But they did and it was cowardice – also, I suppose, their passive aggressive way of protesting against the Vietnam War.
One of the big issues was so-called “academic freedom.” Just like today, the protestors didn’t want people they disagreed with to be heard. In many, many ways what we are seeing today reminds me very much of the 60s and 70s.
We found that the STEM students were our best bet for recruits and that they disagreed with and disliked the protestors as much as we did. I would wager the same is true today.
I entered college in 1967, stayed a couple of years, then left and enlisted in the military (I came back in 1973 with the GI Bill). In some ways the world today –including college campi– seems as tumultuous as the 60s, except I can’t escape the feeling that today’s commotion was astro-turfed by Obama, his minions, and other leftist activists. Occupy, Rape Culture, etc., it just all seems fake to me. In the 60s there really was an unpopular war going on where young men were being drafted to go and die, and there really was a Civil Rights movement going on that essentially ended 100 years of Jim Crow. What’s going on today, by comparison, that’s of such great import causing unrest? Just Marx’s Revolution of the Proletariat, rewritten and updated.
Eric Holder was one of those occupiers at Cornell. What a surprise.
ScotttheBadger:
Holder went to Columbia, not Cornell. From Wiki:
That’s quite a different situation, although related.
So the demonstrators managed to force him out, too, despite how far he had gone to further the presence of black students at Cornell.
Ingratitude, thy name is leftism.
His time as a tool was over. It was time for the New Left to take over.
I think Caedmon’s speculation missed the mark.
It’s activists who think in terms of paradigm shift deliberately applying a proven effective method.
I stand corrected. Still, he is sui generis with them.
The Battle is Lost but the War can be Won.
As a life-long conservative who has observed the great right/left Battle of Academia first as a teenager then as a college student then as a resident of the largest college town in the world, Cambridge/Boston I think I can say, with a sense of relief, that the battle has been lost and we can lay down our arms. Every decade, when the academic regime became intolerably oppressive the right on campus would find some outside allies and fight so as to gain some measure of breathing space; every decade this breathing space got eaten away. 30 years ago a small foundation started offering seed money to conservative students to start campus newspapers and journals. The amount of angst and hysteria that the Dartmouth review, The Harvard Salient, the Tufts Primary Source could stir up was quite impressive. Whole print runs would be trashed with the tacit approval of administrations. Many prominent conservative journalists and thinkers are alumni of these papers. Many a student found the campus conservative paper an oasis of sanity. Did they change the tenor of the college campus at all? I am fairly sure some the commentary and covers they printed back in the 90s would not be tolerated today. They (we) lost.
But how hollow is the victory for the Lefte? With the Long March Through the Institutions complete these institutions are disintegrating and are soon to become as valuable to the left as Moscow in the hands of Napoleon’s army. Conservative’s should do all that is possible to hasten the disintegration. There are a few schools that are in the hands conservatives (or at least serious educators) such as Hillsdale, St John’s, Aquinas, Grove City and others. Being somewhat detached form the Higher Ed ecosystem they will probably survive the deluge. Hell, quite a lot of them are already denied federal funds and have had make up the money privately. But for the most part the College campus should be closed and emptied of students who should be made to rely on the real world and private sources to train and/or educate themselves. Conservative should strive above all to keep these independent resources free from Federal and elite control for this will be the next project of the left–just at they are trying to put the Internet under the yoke of the U.N.
This liberating disintegration is occuring, as everybody knows, in any number of areas of human activity, such as journalism and entertainment. To give an example mentioned here: Yes the SFWoA and the Sci Fi publishing establishment in general is in the grip of political correctness but sales from self-publishing have equaled if not exceeded sales from traditional houses.
For a very long time we have been fighting a rearguard action. Time to change our tactics nay, our whole strategy. This blog, after all, is an example of that.
BTW, as well as the Bloom book, there are many great writings on this topic going back to Bill Buckley’s first book in 1951. I highly reccomend Tom Wolfe’s essay “The Intelligent Coed’s guide …” from the late 70s.
Edward Wagner
THERE SHOULD BE A LIST
Really, somebody should compile a list of all the conservative critiques of academic groupthink and intolerance. The genre goes back at least sixty years to Buckely in ’51 with God and Man at Yale.
I think I can easily come up with a dozen off the top of my head which would include these names: Buckley, Bloom, D’Souza, Hart, Silverglate, Kors, Luckianoff, Wolfe …