Encampments are a poor way to protest at universities.
Letting vandals join your protest group is dangerous.
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| The Oregonian newspaper |
The Oregonian reported:
Police moved in early May 2 to clear the library. They arrested 31 people, including at least six students, during the sweep and throughout the day as people continued to demonstrate.
University officials found paint splattered on library floors, glass broken, spray-painted messages covering walls and furniture moved and overturned. Security cameras had been disabled. Fire extinguishers were missing and the fire alarm system was dismantled.
I am not organizing or participating in campus protests, but I have some words of caution and advice for protesters anyway. Don't let your message be hijacked by vandals, nihilists, or lawbreakers.
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| Portland State University library |
Universities are convenient places for protests. Universities' support for free thinking and free speech makes them a place where policy ideas are shared. Encampments at universities are body language expressing passion more persuasively than does writing letters or signing petitions. Encampments created a good visual backdrop for television and social media. Protests at universities are a natural.
The problem is that university encampments are disruptive, and not in a good way. They cross a line between free expression and compulsion. To be fully newsworthy, encampments need to block access to a useful facility, for example a library or an administration building. That means some element of compulsion. Encampments cross a line between good-speech and bad-speech, a line universities think and care about because so much of the work of a university is about the boundary lines of truth and error. Ideas are tested there, and how ideas are tested matters. Protesters are judged closely on how they protest.
Encampments are counter-productive. Students look like privileged dilettantes, with time to waste. Parents are more likely to see campus disruption as a potential danger than they are a real-life clinic on ethics for humanities majors, or power dynamics for social studies majors, or marketing for business majors. University presidents have learned that their careers are on the line if they disappoint politicians or their trustees. University presidents are on tenterhooks.
Encampments are risky for protest organizers. Small trespasses break a boundary of lawfulness. Once an individual or group decides it's OK to camp on a lawn, it is a small step to feeling entitled to enter and occupy a building. The building is your castle now, your blank slate.
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| Portland State University library |
Organizers cannot control the behavior of everyone who attaches themselves to the protest. Protesters get judged by the behavior of the worst people who act under the cover of the group, even if they are not in the group. Who knows which occupiers at Portland State did the damage? There is a life lesson people learn on college campuses in different ways: Toga parties with free-flowing beer get out of control. You cannot control who crashes the party and you cannot control what drunk people do. Same with protest encampments. You cannot control what people drunk with political passion do.
College classmate Sandford Borins, now an emeritus professor at the University of Toronto, joined a group of other professors in a group letter urging an end to encampments at universities. He published it in his own blog, https://sandfordborins.com. It begins:
We, the signatories of this letter, believe that Universities exist to educate students and host academic research. These activities require a calm and respectful environment that promotes civil discourse. In this spirit, we oppose the movement to create encampments on University grounds. Such actions sow division and create exclusionary spaces, undermining the purpose and functioning of a University.
He continues at his site. He writes from the perspective of protecting the university. I write here from the perspective of protecting the clarity of the message of the protesters. We each reach the same conclusion: Stop the encampments. There are better ways and better places to make your point.
15 comments:
It’s true that vandalism, like violence, is abhorrent. Unfortunately, protest organizers have no way to screen out the crazies from among all those who join in. As for encampments as a form of protest, unless they prevent others from going about their business, they don’t seem like much of a threat.
The "burn it all down" vandals do not "attach" themselves to the student protesters--they are an extension or permutation of a shared left-wing hyper-collectivist ethos. Western institutions, history, traditions and norms top to bottom are the fashionable target. It's revolution against a culture to be equated with--indeed, deemed founded upon--pathological exploitation and oppression. Banks, businesses, police buildings, museums and courthouses join universities as representative of what is supposedly toxic about America and Western Europe. The PSU library graffiti included Anarchist symbols and BLM/ACAB, justifying violence and looting, just as in the 2020 Floyd riots, and also redolent of the anti-capitalist WTO riots of 1999 centered in Seattle, and the 2011 Occupy movement from Wall Street to Portland. Today's radical "No Oil" environmental street protesters and art vandals also help comprise this coalition of aggrieved, self-anointed societal victims of Western civilization. The central ethic is that inequality of any sort is per se proof of sinister harm and wrongdoing.
Reasonable folks on both sides of the aisle understand "everything in moderation", and "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater". Reasonable progressives must own what's endemic and predictable from the radicalized portion of today's Left. The shocking excesses are not idle opportunism. And yes, of course, the right-wing has its own radicals to rebuke and contain. This ain't them.
This vandalism is no surprise given that this country has a major political party that wants to destroy the USA at the behest (and funding) of Russia.
But first it wants to create a system so women can register their uteruses.
To L. D.
Sometimes, to quote Freud, a cigar is just a cigar.
Attempting to conflate destructive elements at Portland State University Miller Library as poster children for Left Wing radicals and establishment progresssive liberals is sophistry. Simply put, the damage was most likely caused by outsiders. Of the 31 people arrested by the police, 22 were not students. Similar outside elements caused the vandalism and riots associated with the Black Lives Matter demonstration.
John F.--
Left-wing outsiders, perhaps?!
If January 6 is conflated with, or is the responsibility of, the establishment Right, then arguably so too the campus riots and the other events I mentioned above, with the establishment Left.
Low Dudgeon argues that vandal nihilists are an extension of left protests. I describe them as outsiders who attach.
I have some blame for BLM protesters in 2020 who allowed anarchists in black to hide out within them. They were so open minded that their brains fell out. They had an opportunity to aggressively police themselves and they failed to do it. They could have actively pointed out lawbreakers and they didn't do it, or at least they didn't do it effectively. It hijacked their protests, which got worse with right wing Proud Boy type thugs joined in looking for opportunities to fight the left oriented people. The left's anti-police orientation hurt them. They didn't see the police as competent to arrest the bad buys and not the peaceful guys.
But in my mind, they were outsiders who attached, and the failure was to not instantly define them as outsiders. They weren't insider-extention. The left's suspicion of figures of authority and order hurt them. I think this error is mostly among the most extreme, but, of course, the most extreme are the ones motivated to hold occupation-style protests.
Maybe left protesters have learned something. If they haven't they will be one more nail in the coffin of Biden's re-election. The stupidity of the left will elect Trump. That is one of Biden's weaknesses. The criminality and venality of Trump will allow Biden to get re-elected. That is one of Trump's weaknesses.
Alas, I think this is a contest between two candidates fighting to lose, each with profound weaknesses. Since this is a fight to do all the stupid things possible in order to lose, the more competent of the two, in their effort to lose by doing self-destructive things, will be the election loser. The less competent in the fight-to-lose by doing stupid things will become president. Biden is damaged by his friends who have taken over his policies, since he now governs by the staff people on the Bernie Sanders Elizabeth Warren teams. Trump is damaged by his character, enabled and cheered by his friends.
It's perfectly within the rights of the college to ban camping on campus.
Pitch your tent where it belongs, in your parent's backyard.
Protesting is a matter of free speech and that is a nuanced debate, but I think once you pick up a rock or spray can you've revoked your 1st Amendment protection.
Protest, if you must, Republican cynical opportunism undermining a united response to a dangerous international situation.
Back in the late 60's, we knew that some extreme protesters and creators of vandalism were agents provoctateurs. An agent provocateur is a person who is employed by the government or the police to encourage certain groups of people to break the law, so they can arrest them or make them lose public support.Especially infiltrated were groups like SDS. This time I am not sure, but think that this may be true again now. Other vandals are, of course, just extremists out of control.
I participated in exactly one BLM march after George Floyd, because I felt compelled to say something publicly. I was one of several thousand.
Any sense of satisfaction I might have gotten from “having my voice heard” was offset by the sense of vulnerability that there were some visibly bad actors among us. I also got the sense that the police in tactical gear along the parade route were likely to be indiscriminate in their response to any violent or destruction that might break out. Someone with a bull horn would say something provoke violence and some people would cheer. Others of us would look at each other with worry and say that’s not what we signed up for. But there we were part of a group that could easily turn into a mob.
MLK promoted non-violent civil disobedience to protest injustice because his Christian theological beliefs demanded that he do no harm; Indeed to love his opponents. Protests without a clear moral leader, and those kinds of idealogical guard rails are more likely to devolve and undermine the very thing the true protesters hope to achieve.
John F is right. I think LD has deluded himself into imagining that "burn it all down" radicals have the same grip on the Democratic Party as MAGA insurrectionists now have on the GOP. They don't.
One place to focus blame is on college administrators who fail to enforce the rules they already have and allow lawlessness to take over. What are rules for, if you are not going to enforce them?
The demonstrators at PSU should have been immediately removed from the encampment they set up, and immediately removed from the library as soon as they broke into it. Immediately removing them from the library would have prevented the damage inflicted on what was supposed to be a temple of higher learning. The same goes for the encampments at all the other colleges.
Lawlessness should be met with sufficient force to stop it immediately. Administrators who fail to do this should be fired.
I have the same criticism of the Capitol Police, who should have been present in sufficient numbers to prevent anyone from breaking into the Capitol on January 6. Any necessary force, up to and including deadly force, should have been employed to stop that invasion.
Just a reminder that not many demonstrations involved violence or vandalism on the part of the protesters, but police used force against them anyway.
Not to put to0 fine a point on it, but there's a big difference between a campus protest and an attempt to overthrow the government.
Malcolm X (before he moderated) was of the political Left as was MLK Jr. Malcolm like Stokely Carmichael rejected King’s trust in America and his pacifism, advocating instead a rather proactive and wide-ranging notion of identitarian self-preservation and self-defense. The latter resembles the “ANY means of resistance is justified” on the PSU library walls, and also the justification of looting and destruction during the Floyd riots by certain BLM leaders. These along with King’s legacy are fingers on a (left) hand. The right hand also has fingers, even if for now an extended middle finger, with Trump’s head tattooed on it, dominates the action.
Malcom X embraced Black Nationalism. Stokely Carmichael also became a Black Nationalist and separatist. As such, they had more in common with Republican White Nationalists, but Black instead of White.
The Democratic Party has remained fairly centrist, which makes them dirty commies in the eyes of the far-White radicals that have taken over the GOP. The Great Replacement conspiracy theory has become mainstream among Republicans, the leader of the Republican Party has dined with Nick Fuentes and White supremacists are his base. Not that it has anything to do with campus protests (kudos to the students who have enough of a conscience to care).
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