Hunt: Police in riot gear at colleges don't solve anything
America’s colleges and universities are under attack from those who believe they have been infected by antisemitism (and “wokeism”). University presidents have been called before Congress. Police have gone onto campuses dressed in riot gear to arrest students.
This has happened before. It happened when students protested the war in Vietnam. It happened after police killed George Floyd. Students also protested apartheid in South Africa when both the Reagan and Thatcher governments were reluctant to condemn it because they were afraid it would interfere with the financial interests of wealthy people.
In fact there is rarely a time when students are not calling out some injustice they have identified, whether civil rights, the wages of food service workers at their own schools, the invasion of Iraq, or international problems far from home.
They do not always have effective solutions to the problems. Movements are sure to attract some who have more passion than wisdom and can be obnoxious. Sometimes they break the law, but that is time-honored in a country where an illustration of the Boston Tea Party is in every school child's history book. The American Revolution was a protest.
History usually determines that the students were rightly concerned about the issues they tackled, but people rarely welcome being upbraided by the young.
Gaza is a terrible place to be, and students are right to be concerned. Antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism, sexism are all wrong, misguided, and sometimes even evil. Most colleges and universities have statements to that effect.
But this is what is disturbing me: America’s college students live daily in more diverse communities than most other people on this planet. Just show up in their food service areas and look around. What do you see? A big cross section of humanity. Only in a hospital cafeteria or the waiting room at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) will you see a more diverse group. The military is diverse, but our nearly 4,000 colleges and universities, for many of us, are the places where people have come together voluntarily across boundaries of religion, race, ethnicity, class, gender, and age to study, work, play, and live in some kind of rough acceptance and good will.
So I get a little put out with those who attack colleges and universities because I know very well that most of them are not even attempting to accomplish what these schools do every day: create a community among a diverse group of people.
Some universities have handled the protests about the situation in Gaza better than others. Usually it is because the administrations and faculties of those schools have listened to their students, have been in dialogue with them.
I have little use for politicians trolling for headlines and votes by exploiting the concerns of students about Israel and Palestinians for their own interests. That also goes for billionaire trustees and donors who think their outsized donations give them the right to call the shots and dictate to the presidents and faculty how student concerns should be handled. This is not as much of a problem at smaller schools than at the most prestigious and wealthy schools.
People wondered why the presidents of Columbia, Harvard, and Penn seemed to handle poorly the grilling by members of Congress. I can think of two reasons among many. First of all, universities have decided that the main job of a president is to raise money. A lot of university presidents spend much more time with big donors than with students or faculty. The other reason is that while you and I wonder why they chose to say what they did on camera in front of members of Congress, their audience was not you or me or even the people asking them questions. It was the members of the boards of trustees (or board of visitors or whatever they might be called) and major donors. Some donors are better at expressing their opinions than listening to students and members of the faculty.
“America’s church,” the United Methodists, just decided to split up because they can’t live together. The universities they established are doing a better job than the denomination that established them. Could that be part of the reason some don’t like them?
So before you decide about American higher education, read the student newspapers, visit colleges, talk to students, teachers and staff, and don’t rely on hungry politicians or people lusting after headlines.
Ed Wilson, who was an alumnus, legendary English professor, dean and provost at Wake Forest University, died in March at 101. When asked what he hoped for Wake Forest, he said, “a place which men and women of good will everywhere might, if they knew it, be happy to call home.”
Our colleges and universities, for all their problems, are creating places where people of good will from everywhere can call home. They need our support. They have my admiration.
This article originally appeared on Staunton News Leader: Police in riot gear are last people you should send in to college protests: columnist
