Funny, I was also thinking that William and Mary could become William and Hillary.
What about George Washington University? It will just be University!
I actually thought Eisgruber handled it well. He let the kids make their point. I think it is fair to say that most people not already far down the rabbit hole thought the subject of the protest rather silly, ill conceived and poorly reasoned. In case anybody missed that point, Eisgruber’s first statement basically said that in nicer language. Then he said he neither had the authority nor the desire to give in to their demands. He made sure there were photos and press coverage of him talking peacefully with the students. In other words, he controlled the narrative. At the end of the day, he signed a document that said nothing other than that the kids in his office would not be formally disciplined. While this was going on, the only disruption on campus of which I am aware was that a group of kids hung around Wilson College two nights ago chanting “no justice, no peace” all night. All in all, not a bad result from his perspective.
The students got an email saying the bomb threat isn’t credible but that they should be vigilant. I have a daughter there so it makes me nervous.
Suppose the White House was temporarily closed for renovations and there was no President or staff there at the time. Would we let protesters take over the White House even though there is no threat to anyone? The answer is absolutely not, because to cede control of an important symbol of authority shows weakness, even in a country where peaceful protest is an important right.
The protesters taking over the President’s office was a big middle finger to Princeton’s President and his authority. Since these are students, giving them time to leave and a place where they could go to continue their protest would have been appropriate. But given that he just let them hang around, what is to stop the next group with silly demands from doing the same thing?
I wonder if you could put some closure on this statement of yours. In subsequent posts it was shown that 63% of survey respondents did, in fact support AA in university admissions, and that even 31% (your data) supported it in some other, limited way, but you took issue with what qualified as “people” on that. So, could you clarify?
You said 200M and then 100M based upon the US having 300M+ people. But I believe polling usually refers to adults (i.e. we usually don’t ask 9 year olds about their thoughts on affirmative action), so it is about 3/4 of that. Now, 75M people that support affirmative action to the point of tilting the scales is still more than I expected. But that is what the data shows, and I thank you for pointing me to that.
When my sister was at Brown in the early 90s, she and others occupied the president’s office demanding need-blind admission. In other words, a change that wasn’t symbolic, but that directly affected who would have the opportunity to come to the university. To me, demanding a name change doesn’t have that sort of weight.
I think there is a difference between occupying the White House and hanging out at a conference table in Eisgruber’s office. In the images I saw, it seemed obvious that the school was still in control of the building. The students didn’t appear to be doing anything much other than sitting around with their laptops. I doubt seriously that the functioning of the administration was impeded at all by the protest.
And I think nothing will stop the next group of protesters from doing the same thing again, but that is part of the culture we as a society have created at universities and the subject of a whole different discussion. I would think the next great protest movement would pause and think about what they are doing though, because really these kids did not come across terribly well here.
Dartmouth was ahead of the curve.
Student protesters held demonstrations and sit-ins and produced a long list of demands (the “Freedom Budget”) at Dartmouth over 18 months ago.
In some schools, plenty of existing humanities and social studies courses could fulfill such requirements, which are often worded as something like “one of your H/SS courses should include content on cultural diversity” (i.e. not an extra course beyond the usual H/SS general education requirements).
Of course, sometimes the faculty can do something unexpected with such student demands. Decades ago, some students at Berkeley (many of these students were majoring in ethnic studies of their own ethnic groups) protested in favor of an ethnic studies requirement (that they themselves would automatically fulfill). The faculty then instituted the American cultures requirement, with a requirement that courses fulfilling it had to cover two or more of the ethnic groups in question (most ethnic studies courses did not meet that criterion). It was hard for the protesters to argue against such a multicultural requirement, but it was apparently not what they were really looking for.
@TomSrOfBoston wrote- Smith College protestors will only allow journalists to cover their protest if they pledge to write articles supporting them.
They claim they need a “safe Space”.That is ridiculous about Smith. Students cannot expect to assert their First Amendment rights and in the same breath seek to deny others the same privilege. Time to grow up.
Agree.
Speaking of Vanderbilt, no it’s not immune to the current scenario: my son was following this story…http://www.foxsports.com/college-football/outkick-the-coverage/vanderbilt-hate-crime-turns-out-to-be-blind-girl-s-dog-s-poop-111815
This is still something I would still have a beef with. The GenEd stuff can be extremely broad and covers a tremendous amount of subjects. It’s a waste to require one to be spent on a focused subject. It’s akin to making a math requirement being forced to include euclidian geometry or science to include modern physics.
Maybe they could include a cultural diversity component in their new student orientation, if they don’t have it already. Would that satisfy the protesters?
Yeah the Princeton idiots have won . Another application fee I don’t have to cough up !
http://dailycaller.com/2015/11/20/princeton-gives-in-will-consider-dropping-woodrow-wilson-video/ :))
Just read most of the Dartmouth Freedom Budget and it seems to suffer from the same problem I see in many of the demand letters, a desire/need/attempt to fully satisfy every constituency, resulting in a document that badly overreaches and may not serve the best interests of the petitioning students. (As an aside, the Amherst students seem to have recognized this issue with their first set of demands and have since revised then to create a somewhat more moderate list.)
For instance, the Freedom Budget demands Dartmouth “Increase enrollment of Black, Latin@, and Native students to at least 10 percent each.” This seems to me to be an attempt to treat each of these groups equally. The problem is that they do not have equal representation in the US population, with NA’s making up somewhere between one and two percent of Americans. The letter goes on to demand, “Admissions Office will increase transparency about data of applicant pool. For example, how many Black, Latin@, and Native students applied, their test scores, class, etc.”
If they acceded to these demands Dartmouth would be faced with two choices.
A. Admit qualified students with only a tangential claim to NA ancestry, i.e., students with no tribal affiliation or NA cultural heritage.
B. Admit a number of under-qualified NA students whose stats will then be available to every critic of affirmative action to be used as evidence that NA admittees as a whole are weaker students than their peers.
Neither of these options is in the best interest of qualified NA students.
From the dailycaller article cited above: “Most notably, they demanded the university create a new affinity housing option for black students, so that those interested in black culture could live segregated away from the rest of campus.”
What exactly is black culture and who decides its definition? As for voluntary segregation, that’s the very opposite of the direction our society is supposed to be moving, which I thought was inclusion and color blindness. And so much for the networking benefits to URM’s of attending an elite school; separate housing will hurt the connection-making possibilities for AA students who do not come from privileged backgrounds.
"From the dailycaller article cited above: “Most notably, they demanded the university create a new affinity housing option for black students, so that those interested in black culture could live segregated away from the rest of campus.”
That’s not a terrible idea all by itself. There’s lots of arrangements where kids get benefit from being supported in a place where the other kids are like me. Honor dorms, engineering dorms, foreign language dorms, foreign student dorms, fraternity houses. And of course HBCs. Diversity is good, but there’s advantages from non-diversity as well.