It is bewildering to see how universities are reacting to student protest. Students have always protested! This is not at all new! I’d love to know what college parents think about all this.
I'm a staff member on a college campus. There have been no disturbances on this campus as far as I know, but I'm I'm haunted and disgusted that colleges are calling the cops to beat their students for protesting. Who would send their kids to that school next year?
Likewise, I would be willing to bet that there are many students who were super amped about getting their acceptance letters before all this authoritarianism was put on display who now are considering a backup school, a transfer, or just deciding against going to college altogether.
I told my son to let me know in advance if he planned to protest so I could lawyer up. And also that I'd be happy to come and protest with him as a middle-aged meat shield.
I was too horrified to stay on my kid's college's Facebook page for parents (🚁), but I hear that there's a lot of demands for more control and punishment.
Repeat after me kids:
-Do you have a warrant?
LE “You are trespassing a warrant isn’t required”
-Am I being detained or arrested?
LE “You can disperse from trespassing/illegal assembly or you are under arrest”
-I’m not answering questions without a lawyer
Sound legal advice
Okay but that’s parents ON FACEBOOK and I think that is gonna be some self sorting - like you said, helicopter parents.
A lot of people have heard the antisemitic accusations and refuse to investigate any further. It’s being exploited to discredit the merit of these kid’s legitimate protestations
Yeah, tons of this about UT Austin protests at the other place. I’m sure all of these campus protests will be used to argue for defunding humanities/closing departments and banishing tenure (Bc of course the students have been brainwashed by their liberal tenured faculty).
I think they should leave the damned kids alone. It doesn’t become a problem until the admins call in the cops and escalate shit. My kid has been on the ground there and she said it was entirely peaceful until the cops showed up.
The Boomers grew up and became the authoritarians they purported to hate.
And since the 80s we've been subjected to incremental erosion of first amendment rights and incremental militarization of law enforcement.
Boomers as a group always hated hippies. Hippies were a tiny minority opposed by the majority of their peers. The Reagan revolution was that majority coming to power.
Damn straight! They would have had a hell of a time fielding enough people to make the Freedom Rides an effective organizing force in the Deep South if the baby boom generation - ie people born up to 1964 - hadn’t been enthusiastically involved.
How old are you? The boomers were a huge and diverse generation. Reagan was utter poison to me and mine, and I’ll never stop talking about the huge laundry list of things he messed up for future generations.
I had to step away from this convo bcs it irked me so much. Here’s an article from TIME magazine from 1967. It describes the hippie movement to the older generation. When do you think the under-30s of the 1960s were born? The boomers WERE THE HIPPIES!!!
https://time.com/4835155/1967-hippies/
I'm pretty horrified at how the racism directed against these students has been excused and ignored and enraged by the attacks against them.
I feel like I live in a country that truly hates its young people.
I protested to divest from South Africa with Obama at Occidental. (And many other various demonstrations through adulthood)
One kid at UCI which seems to be handling it calmly enough- a small encampment
I’m glad I’m not paying tuition to an institution to arrest protesters & would be PISSED
It’s disturbing. But it comes from the notion that everyone should feel safe & included on campus.
Of course there’s no reason people can’t criticize Israel. The problem is that Israel criticism attracts antisemitism like shit attracts flies. And handling that then becomes exceedingly challenging.
Yes that is indeed part of the problem. It’s terrible to use this as an opportunity to air bigotry rather than protest and keep the focus on a literal war.
And then, of course, in trying to stop antisemitism, the administrators end up silencing legitimate political dissent.
I can’t blame administrators for not having any answers, though, because I sure don’t have any.
Parent of HS junior and it's weird as hell to factor all this into college decisions. "Ok, they have your major, you liked the college tour, now how likely are they to call in the cops in riot gear on you?"
My kid is a graduating senior at one of the schools, and the fear among many parents is a canceled graduation. This is the high school class of 2020, and graduation PTSD is real for us. I don’t worry about what the protesters might do, only that they’ll be blamed for bad administration decisions.
I went to Columbia late 80s & when I toured the campus there were shanties here & there to protest apartheid. They were just part of the scenery.
Getting the NYPD this time seemed a complete overreaction.
Dissention is key to a healthy free society and I’m proud of these kids. It’s their right to take a swing at the the power structure… which seems not to work well for them, to be honest.
Right??
I can think of scores of historically important campus protests without half-trying...
No, it makes no sense.
But the First Amendment does constantly require defenders.
My kids graduated in the last few years. I protested in the early 80s when at university, nuclear disarmament, and Take Back the Night marches. I can't believe they seem so surprised.
