Deva Woodly: I hate to pull a back in my day as a xennial-but back in the early oughts we set up an encampment on the UVA lawn and the university admin was like - you can do what you want for now but the truth is you’re a transient population & we’ll still be here when the semester ends - so knock yourself out.

Here's the simple explanation as to why this will keep happening: most current university administrators don't actually *have* serious firsthand background in or commitment to education, teaching, civic literacy, or critical pedagogy. Instead, their values are organized around capital management.

University presidents have lost their f**king mind. They just wasted the biggest public teaching moment in decades because they are too lazy to actually do any educating and risk the loss of some dirty money from dirty (or cheesy) donors. Just insane.

I hate to pull a back in my day as a xennial-but back in the early oughts we set up an encampment on the UVA lawn and the university admin was like - you can do what you want for now but the truth is you’re a transient population & we’ll still be here when the semester ends - so knock yourself out.

This infuriated us. And it was an entirely sane adult response. The hard swing toward unthinking knee jerk authoritarianism is astonishing. Not only because it is immoral but also because it is deeply stupid.

That’s exactly it. Any old skool administrator would just wait until finals kicked in, the protestors graduated or went onto their summer jobs, quietly cleaned up, and kicked back with a well deserved beer.

Honestly i think the Wall Street protests hit home and the elites decided this patience shit was for people without political strings to pull

I think that was already so long ago to be irrelevant. As someone pointed out yesterday, this feels like a reaction to their "overly tolerant" response to the BLM and George Floyd protests in 2020.

Yes, it’s reactionary. It’s also not smart if what they want is a functioning campus. Of course, that might not be what they actually want. They may simply want to perform toughness for various audiences demanding a say in the running of institutions where they ought not have authority.

Their donors are a constituency with much different priorities than its students or alumns So much so they are willing to damage their reputation with the former to appease the Bill Ackermans of the world and hos plagiarizing trophy wife

You probably don’t remember how long they inhabited that park down there BLM protests didn’t operate same and were met with police violence such as the notorious pincer movement in NYC

The overton window moved so hard so fast and it's frustrating to witness because SO MANY PEOPLE were trying to prevent us getting here...but here we are. Ugly stuff.

When they assume that they are sane adults and that the students are not then all they can do is double down on the punishment.

They’re terrified of the right-wing, and trying to appease them before the threats come.

DEEPLY. cuz now they've kicked off a national movement.

International.

Deeply stupid seems to be the goto move for everyone in leadership these days

Yes! It could’ve been brief items in student publication websites and nobody in national media would’ve picked up any of it. It’s freaking finals week or close to it at every university. They could’ve ignored it and the kids would be moving out in a matter of days. So short-sighted on their part.

Likely explanation is many are being pressed to make a show of security theater from donors, boards, & because they didn’t nip it in the bud with a united front of f*ck off you have no authority here - Congress - people who have no business sticking their nose in uni administration.

Too true. Trying to establish their boba fides so the McCartheyites in Congress turn their attention elsewhere.

Which, of course, is not how McCarthyism works. It’s not how any of this works.

Yeah, exactly. The classic response is for the Dean to go "we hear your concerns and will look into it," and then wait for the students to go off to their summer jobs and internships. (After some scathing essays are printed in the college paper no one reads.)

This approach has been part of the problem too. The assumption that dissent cannot be valid and that it must be either ignored or silenced.

Oh yes. I hated it. But we weren’t ignored (or ignorable). We learned to persist across school breaks,too. We had a student magazine, organized coalitions that made demands - some of which were answered. And riot police were not involved. Nobody got expelled. And everyone’s rights were preserved.

Absolutely, and the proper response should be actually addressing issues and not calling in the national guard to deal with a sit in.

Hey, I read the college paper! As I was trying to find the crossword.

Stanford had a tent city in White Plaza protesting apartheid. It was mostly cardboard and annoying, but no one felt threatened. The university eventually divested, and the protest was memory holed. No one called for the national guard.

100%. I saw same thing happen at Wesleyan circa 2000.

They did forbid us from chalking in 2003, ostensibly because of the obscenity but that certainly would have precluded discussion/rapid protest about Iraq.

That was probably the "fault" of the (extremely excellent) queer activists from the 90s, QUICHE, who papered the campus with things like "I fuck boys. I fuck girls. Deal with it!" and "when I say tie me up and fist me, I expect you to do it" hours before parents' weekend.

That’s a shame. I graduated in 02 and always loved the chalking.

Right?!?! It is LATE APRIL. If university admin simply quietly do nothing, odds are the encampments will be gone in three weeks. Instead they're out here calling militarized cops, which, I mean, is certainly _educational_, but maybe not what they meant to teach...

Good point, but did you also disrupt/halt graduation ceremonies etc? My guess is, along w caving to political pressure, admins know the people who pay the bills would soon be on campus: parents. They don't usually have a vision of campus being hurly-burly & were sold something else on the brochure.

Same as a GenXer in the early 90s. bsky.app/profile/stin... The descendants of the occupiers ended up getting a seat at the table in hiring decisions.

In 1993 students OCCUPIED the administration building for a few days to protest racism in hiring faculty. The current higher ed wusses would be calling for the National Guard. www.pomona.edu/timeline/199...

Same as a straight up GenXer in the early 90s. bsky.app/profile/stin... This time around, they did more or less the same thing, until the occupation part. www.pomona.edu/campus-incid...

In 1993 students OCCUPIED the administration building for a few days to protest racism in hiring faculty. The current higher ed wusses would be calling for the National Guard. www.pomona.edu/timeline/199...

Masked Protesters & Escalating Incidents on Campus | Pomona College in Claremont, California - Pomona Collegewww.pomona.edu Pomona College is committed to upholding free speech and the right to protest within the lines of our Claremont Colleges demonstration policy. We always attempt to maintain flexibility in handling stu...

We had similar fights in the 90s. Waiting us out was a tactic that worked at USC since (at least) the 70s.

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