Protests & Universities

“A university is special to the extent that it is a place where teaching and learning replace fighting and grandstanding.” That’s Agnes Callard (Chicago), writing at The Point. Are protests a good way to manifest political concern on college campuses? Do the purposes universities serve—or are supposed to serve—in society give us a reason to think there’s something unfitting about them being sites for protests? Callard writes: The protesters believe that they are entitled, by the justice of their cause, to ignore and disrupt the university’s normal pursuit of its mission. The university believes it is entitled, by its own principles, to resist this disruption. Each side uses force to get what it wants, and the details of these disruptions—exactly how much force is permitted, by which party, and when—are hotly disputed by the media as well as on campus. And yet the real scandal lies in all the ways in which this disgracefully anti-intellectual debacle gets normalized and gilded. When we use force to manage our disagreements, we are admitting that this place is nowhere special, that the ethos of the classroom cannot be the ethos of the university as a whole. There is no deeper insult to an intellectual community than the suggestion that, when its conversations drift onto a topic that really matters—when, as the saying goes, “push comes to shove”—they have to stop talking and start pushing and shoving. Callard isn’t claiming that universities should be free of politics. What has no place on campus is political action that aims to change minds through coercion. This is not because the “institutional neutrality” of universities is inherently valuable; she criticizes university administrators who claim or pretend that it is (the president of her university justified shutting down protests by claiming, she says, “neutrality as the ‘foundational value’ of the university”). Hers is a not a political liberalism, but a perfectionist one, at least for universities, according to which the distinctive values universities realize are served neither by student protests or authoritarian administrations donning unconvincing costumes of neutrality. It’s just that the university is a place for education and inquiry, and “no one can be educated by coercion.” I imagine some people will respond to Callard with accusations of..
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/10/10/protests-universities/
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https://dailynous.com/2024/10/10/protests-universities/