This has all the earmarks of a manufactured controversy—a publicity stunt by a politically motivated group of students, designed to embarrass the university administration and the Minnesota Student Association, the student government organization. This wasn’t a big issue on campus. As best I can tell, it wasn’t even reported in the Minnesota Daily, the student-edited campus newspaper. It was a conservative/libertarian blog calling itself the Minnesota Republic that made a big stink about it and called it to the attention of Eugene Volokh, a conservative/libertarian blogger who dutifully “reported” what the Minnesota Republic had told him in his blog, which the Washington Post website carries—without doing any independent investigation of his own, because, hey, he’s a blogger, he doesn’t need facts, he just needs controversy. The Minnesota Republic then used this mention in Volokh’s blog to breathlessly “report” that “the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities found itself under nationwide scrutiny this past week” over an obscure vote on one of dozens of non-binding resolutions that routinely come before the Minnesota Student Association.
The most credible account of what really happened comes from a statement issued by the Minnesota Student Association itself. The resolution failed by a vote of 23 in favor, 36 opposed, with 3 abstentions. According to the MSA, the resolution was discussed in committee earlier in the week and its author was asked whether a moment of silence in remembrance of 9/11 was observed on other large campuses, and how the University of Minnesota-Twin cities would go about implementing such an event across a sprawling campus of over 50,000 students and several thousand employees engaged in disparate classes, labs, extracurricular activities, worksites, job duties, etc. These are legitimate questions, IMO. I’ve taught at three large university campuses and none of them has ever observed a campus-wide moment of silence in remembrance of 9/11 or anything else, and as far as I know, it would be unprecedented at the University of Minnesota. It’s at least worth doing a little investigation and thinking through the details. Do you make it mandatory that everything just stop at the exact same moment–put down all your books and computers everywhere on campus, shut down your lab experiments, cease all active medical care in the medical center and the campus health center, all employees stop whatever they’re doing at that moment, no one answers the phones, etc? Do you exempt some “essential” functions, and if so, which ones? Do you confine it to classrooms? Do you require each professor to hold a moment of silence in each class that meets that day, so there’s not a single campus-wide moment, but students who happen to have four classes that day end up with four moments of silence? What are we even talking about here? The student proposing the resolution had no answers to these questions, so the committee asked him to do some research on what, if anything, was done elsewhere, and come up with some proposals on what the thing would look like, and an action plan as to how to carry it out. He did none of that; instead he brought it directly to the full legislative body. There he was again asked whether he had done any research on what was done elsewhere, as the committee had requested. He hadn’t. He was then asked whether he had any more specific proposals as to how it could be implemented. He had none. According to the MSA statement, concerns were expressed by some students about such an event stoking Islamophobia, but many of those who ended up voting “No” said they supported the concept in principle, but it was such a poorly researched and poorly thought-through proposal that they couldn’t support it in its present form. Some apparently offered to work with the proponent to try to develop a stronger and more specific proposal, with a realistic action plan attached.
Clearly intent on fanning the flames, the Minnesota Republic blog promptly labeled the MSA’s statement “flawed and factually inaccurate excuses.” How do we know the MSA’s account was “flawed and factually inaccurate”? Well, because the Minnesota Republic “received comments from” a grand total of 3 MSA student representatives and “not one mentioned that logistics played a role in the resolution’s failure.” But wait. There were 62 MSA representatives present and voting when the resolution came up. There’s no indication that the Minnesota Republic made any fair effort to canvass a larger and more representative sample of those voting. At least some of them must agree with the MSA’s official statement; that didn’t just drop out of the sky, presumably it came from MSA members who were present and voting, and most likely from the key MSA leaders. But the Minnesota Republic has no interest in doing actual reporting that might get to the bottom of what really happened because they have a ready-made answer that suits their political agenda: it was “the politically correct culture of MSA and the University” that "created an environment where passage of a resolution to remember the victims of 9./11 violated some student’s ‘safe spaces.’ "
I’m sorry, that’s not journalism, it’s just pure political spin.
