The Wishy Washy Centrist Post You’ve Been Waiting For!

Some barely collected thoughts on student activism, presented in bullet form. The italics represent sub-bullets, because apparently our bulleting doesn’t work as well as I’d hoped:

• 18-22 year olds are, as a rule, stupid; they do stupid things, both individually and collectively.  They have not been trained in the various ways that effective political actors develop, publicize, and enforce claims; they are exceedingly prone to over-reaction, in-group thinking, and a variety of other tactical and strategic errors
  • You’ll never find me saying that I “unconditionally” support a student activist movement.
• The particular movements that have arisen at Missouri, Yale, Amherst, et al display some distinctly anti-liberal tendencies that, while almost certainly positive for in-group cohesion and concerted political action, will make it difficult to formulate long-term goals and build long-term alliances with relevant stakeholders in the university reform process.
• It is quite likely that positive answers to student claims will come in the form of “administrative bloat,” the expansion of administrative authority over faculty and student life, and that this administrative bloat will have some negative effects on campus life. In particular, the establishment of broader support and monitoring networks within the university system will likely erode faculty authority and faculty governance.

But…

• Headlines notwithstanding, almost all of manifestations of this most recent wave of student activism arise from *some* foundation of genuine, reasonable grievances about how their institutions are operating, how these institutions relate to the past, and how these institutions are managing (or failing to manage) technological change. While some of the demands are expansive, others are specific and on point; the change of particular administrators or administrative policies, and the expansion of particular administrative support capacities.
  • Jeffrey Amherst and John C. Calhoun are not humans who should be memorialized on an American university campus.
  • The expansion of services and support designed to reduce attrition rates for minority students should be utterly uncontroversial.
• A liberal society can (and indeed, must) tolerate the existence of a wide variety of illiberal spaces. The internal functioning of organizations and communities within liberal society necessarily requires illiberal, hierarchical, and authoritarian measures. This is true whether we’re talking about a fraternity, a corporation, a political party, or a university.  This has always been the case, and is so obvious to me that it hardly seems worthy of bearing mention. Consequently, simply noting the illiberalism of activist demands in neither here nor there; the question is whether these particular illiberal manifestations are uniquely harmful to the organizational (university) mission, or the liberal project more broadly.
  • It seems abjectly silly for a blog that actively moderates its comment threads to claim that it is inherently wrong for universities, as well as specific groups within universities, to call for and establish both form and substance limitations on speech.
• Faculty governance ain’t all its cracked up to be. There are big downsides to administrative bloat, but the process has come about through a recognition that the 4-7 years of undergraduate education represent a personal transformation that involves something far more important that the collections of grades and classes that constitute a transcript.  As the American university system has expanded beyond its pre-war base of young, middle- and upper- class white men, it has become clear that the university community requires a degree of support, management, and administration that goes well beyond what was available fifty or sixty years ago. Much of this fight is about the precise contours and responsibilities of that administrative bureaucracy.
  • The faculty aren’t the only stakeholders in this process, and it’s not even obvious to me that they’re the most important stakeholders. 
    
  • It should be painfully obvious to anyone who has ever darkened the halls of an academic department that faculty are not selected for administrative talent or vision, and that a significant portion of faculty only grudgingly acquiesce to regular administrative responsibilities.

The biggest problem for the future of this particular wave of student activism isn’t Jonathan Chait; it’s the vengeful state legislatures that have been salivating about ways to break the public university system. Freddie is utterly correct about this, and I am far less hopeful than he that there’s any positive outcome to be found in that arena.