Yes this. Usually admins just wait the kids out patronizingly. They form committees to “look into” their concerns that make circular recommendations forever. All classic avoidance tactics of establishments that students hate but that, and this is the main part, don’t require the riot police.
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.
Totally what I was talking about the other day. We know authorities don’t hesitate to call the cops on young people *off* campus, but that hasn’t been the norm *on* campus for decades
One of the bananas things about all this is that most these campuses are very near the end of the semester and the most tried and true administrative tactic is to just wait student activists out until everyone graduates or goes home for the summer. Yet here we are.
Well the billionaire men of action on the Boards of Trustees have such inflated egos and want everything to happen instantly they precipitate police action which is stupid. Billionaires have no idea how to negotiate with large numbers of sensitive people and they don’t respect them anyway.
I wonder how much the severe over-reaction we're seeing now is driven by Admin being terrified of right-wing legislators/trustees coming after them for being "too tolerant" of the "woke mob"
While that makes sense, I believe it's attributing a little too much strategy to these execs.
In my 15 yrs+ under them I've found that they're simply cut from the same cloth as the Howard Schultz's/Boeing execs/whatever. They've gotten where they are largely because they're vapid, weak, spineless
I think Shafik thought she was going to avoid getting caught in the rw trap that caught Magill and Gay, but she failed to consider that none of those people actually give a shit about antisemitism
the knee jerk need to send armed troops into colleges right now from way more quarters than I'd expect is filling me with utter dread as to what a Stephen Miller DoJ would be doing this time next year
At this point surely most administrators know they're acting stupidly in not using this playbook, so I really hope someone has the sources to uncover what's happening behind the scenes that the self-destructive repression keeps coming out.
Simplest answer would be acting on the whims of high-power donors who are basically paying to call the shots. Most obviously “detrimental to the university’s long-term health” decisions by admin can be traced back to it being a single or small group of powerful donors making a specific request.
So I'm sure this is right generally, but the details matter. Not every donor has this kind of power, and they often can't invoke it at will. I'm hoping someone can dig into this and explain how and why it's working on this issue.
Absolutely. It’s so difficult because these things can be hard to trace - much like shadow money in politics. Honestly that’s the journalistic model to follow, as it works in a similar vein just through universities rather than politicians/parties.
lol this is alternate history — see fat cop pepperspraying students meme — university administrators are very intolerant to their debt generating program — students who graduate? Yes, they are on their own saddled with debt. This is true and the admins still collecting fat checks year after year.
They don’t even have to wait until graduation; they could just wait until finals week and everything changes tone and intensity and volume on its own. This is a known fact. And that admins have ignored this gives away the game. They want to be seen overreacting.
“Forming a committee” and putting at least one of the dissenters on it usually does so well that they have a whole committee called “student government.” It’s so easy to just be passively resistant that being actively engaged shows how wrong things at the top of admin are.
But it is also an indication of the political moment we’re in. Uni admins were not scared of student activism or the national gov’t or their donors circa 2000. They felt they had autonomy to handle things in the interest of an institution not under threat.
It certainly is “a choice” as the kids say.
When authorities have latitude to decide when and how to enforce rules… watching what they choose is always telling.
I wonder how much of this is Uni admin drawing more from traditional management (and business) talent pools without the institutional knowledge the prior gen had regarding protest management
i remember going to a sit-in and the admin had promised us that our demands would be met, only for them to never meet these demands and/or completely reverse them. it really sucks when you feel like you did something important, only for admin to make you feel like sh*t because nothing changed
Yes!! I was like, why didn't they schedule a meeting right away next week, then agree to another meeting, but after finals for everyone's benefit, and then at that meeting, they say, "good points but it's now summer, so let's have a meeting in the fall when decison-makers are back on campus"...
I feel like realising that this approach is not going to stop dissent and criticism is one of the reasons why the dynamic has shifted to more open repression of it.
