Campus Disruption and Violence are Outcomes of Excessive Politicization
5/3/24 – – It’s becoming clearer by the day that being a college president isn’t much fun.
Sure, the job usually comes with a heated skybox for football games, an oversized wood-paneled office, and the honor of being the center of attention, outfitted in resplendent attire, at graduation ceremonies.
But today, while the football seats may still be safe, chances are good that your office is occupied by militant students (and some shady characters never before seen on campus) refusing to leave if their demands are not met, and you’re thinking of canceling graduation. Festivities may have to be scrapped due to credible threats of violence and the presence on campus of a tent city that looks more like a refugee camp than a college quad.
Been There, Done That
But with all due respect and empathy for these beleaguered academic leaders, we’ve seen all this before. They should have seen it coming.
In the early 1970s, university communities were a major battleground in the anti-Vietnam War movement. In 1985, students at Columbia University took over the administration building for almost a month demanding the school divest all its investments in companies supporting South Africa. And on November 17, 2011, NPR reported: “The Occupy Wall Street movement is planning a series of strikes and protests on college campuses Thursday. The movement and its encampments are proving to be a challenge for administrators at some schools.”
If the political vitriol seems harsher this time, many college presidents have contributed to that as well.
Politics Clouds Leadership Judgment
In December of last year, we witnessed the implosion of three college presidents’ careers and the reputations of their schools in front of a Congressional panel discussing the disruption on campus following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Here’s Washington Post columnist and CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria’s insightful takeaway:
“What we saw in the House hearing this week was the inevitable result of decades of the politicization of universities. America’s top colleges are no longer seen as bastions of excellence, but partisan outfits, which means they will keep getting buffeted by these political storms as they emerge.”
Zakaria called for academic institutions to, “abandon this long misadventure into politics, retrain their gaze on their core strengths, and rebuild their reputations as centers of research and learning.”
Political allegiances put administrators in a box, clouding their judgment and decisiveness when challenges appear. Feeling that you have to defend one side or another of a deeply emotional, divisive political debate rather than making your highest priority maintaining a safe operating environment on campus will get you into trouble every time. These skewed priorities and lack of moral clarity often result in what I call the “now I’ve pissed everybody off” predicament.
President Biden finds himself there now. Desperately trying to appease and hang on to voters in all age groups on all sides of the Israel – Hamas conflict, he’s alienating everybody. He was silent for more than a week as unlawful disruption and hateful rhetoric spread across America’s cities and campuses.
College presidents find themselves in the same leaky boat. How can they protect their political flanks while calling in police dressed in riot gear to arrest their students (and some shady characters never before seen on campus), whose families are paying in some cases more than $80,000 per year in tuition and trust that their daughters and sons are safe in a stimulating, not dangerous environment?
New Study Suggests a Better Path
The answer to the question, “What can college presidents do now,” will be different for every administrator and institution. But looking to the future, we got some very good advice from a study released this week underwritten by the Edward E. Ford Foundation (no relation to the auto Ford family). While it’s important to note that E.E. Ford’s focus is on supporting independent secondary schools, not colleges and universities, the wisdom presented in “Thriving in World of Pluralistic Contention: A Framework for Schools,” is spot on and applicable to all academic institutions.
The “framework,” developed to “form students as ‘distinct thinking individuals,’ skilled in the habits of independent thought, conversant with the norms of disciplined inquiry, and empowered to discover, develop, and courageously express their own political and civic commitments,” has three pillars:
- A Commitment to Expressive Freedom
- A commitment to Disciplined Nonpartisanship
- A Commitment to Intellectual Diversity
Here’s a summary paragraph from the paper:
The framework rests on a simple assumption: that schools are, first and foremost, places of inquiry and exploration, preparing students for the freedom, rights, and responsibilities they will enjoy as adults. Teaching and learning are distinct from advocacy and activism, and nonpartisan teaching is vital to creating an intellectual climate within schools that promotes, sustains, and deepens courageous inquiry. Avoiding political entanglements that exceed a school’s reach and resources will help foster a climate of intellectual exploration free from political tilt or ideological bias, support student autonomy and self-formation, and provide educators with an invaluable design principle against which program, instruction, and curriculum can be assessed.
Again, Columbia, Harvard and UCLA are not prep schools, their students are already adults, and heightened levels of contentious discourse are expected on campus. But how much better off would embattled college presidents be if the E.E. Ford “framework” was their north star?
A task force of eight prep school heads helped conduct the study. Their work is well worth the read, even if you’re not an academic. Corporate CEOs might even find this helpful in formulating their leadership style.
And if you are a college president, I recommend you read it twice and distribute it to your leadership team. If you take the advice to heart, you’ll have a much better chance of wearing your resplendent attire at next year’s graduation.
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