"Business as Usual"
Southern Californians recently witnessed
the spectacle of forty police officers, armed and dressed in full
riot gear, arresting and forcibly removing nine Claremont Colleges
students who had been blocking an administrative building. A few
of the students, who had chained themselves to cement-filled garbage
cans, were lifted up and carted away by a forklift, pressed into
police service. The students were part of a larger group demonstrating
for the environmental preservation of land owned by the Claremont
Colleges on which the construction of a new bio-tech institute
is slated. Although the students were protesting nonviolently
and damaged no college property, they were both arrested and summarily
suspended. While the students were shackled with their arms behind
their backs, a college official slipped a note into their bound
hands informing them that they could no longer attend classes.
What's particularly saddening about
this incident is that college administrators refused from the
outset to discuss any mediating measures with the students. Their
public steadfastness precluded any ameliorating attempts at de-escalation,
and so what began as a peaceful demonstration quickly spiraled
into a riot-gear versus T-shirt face-off. While some observers
might view student protests designed to disrupt business on college
campuses as a threat requiring such swift and punitive responses,
we believe this incident reflects a wider failure of administrators
and other campus decision-makers to engage in substantive dialogue
with students before making major policy decisions.
College students in both public and
private settings are the foundation of our higher education system.
They are the adults who pay tuition and later support their colleges
and universities as alumni. Without their productive and sustained
participation in both the day-to-day and long-term policy decisions
on all campuses, higher education in the United States cannot
hope to create a vibrant learning environment for the students
of today and prepare for the challenges and complexities of tomorrow.
Too, when they find themselves locked out of the decision-making
process, or patronized with empty gestures, responsible students
sometimes resort to extracurricular forms of dissent. Instead
of immediately assuming that student protesters are incorrigible
criminals, administrators should at least listen to them and perhaps
even take them seriously as fellow stakeholders in the mission
of education.
Both the decision the students were
protesting--the construction of the new Keck Graduate Institute
on the site of the environmentally sensitive Bernard Field Station--and
the "get tough on protesters" policy deployed in response
to the students' actions were made without any formal student
approval before they were implemented. Such corporate-style, top-down
decision making processes, an increasing trend in college and
university "management," have resulted in a growing
sense of powerlessness among students that fuels dramatic gestures
such as chaining yourself to cement-filled trash cans or taking
over Royce Hall at UCLA.
To change this rapidly poisoning atmosphere,
higher education administrators should consider opening up the
decision-making process on campus to significant participation
by students. Students should have due representation with faculty
and staff on many if not most committees, and trustees should
require campus administrators to involve student representatives
in designing and implementing protest-response strategies and
plans. Although these changes would surely not end all student
protests, they would likely result in a greater sense of engagement
in college and university governance among today's students and
tomorrow's alumni.
If we were trustees of the Claremont
Colleges, we would wonder why our campus leadership has become
so estranged from these talented students that administrators
could not creatively negotiate--or would not even attempt to negotiate--a
resolution as peaceful as the protest itself. If we were parents
of Claremont College students watching Tuesday's events on the
news, we would worry about how the colleges might treat our children
when they non-violently demonstrate for the ideals in which they
believe. If we were students at the Claremont Colleges, we would
wonder how the colleges will treat us when we peacefully dissent
from policies we were denied any voice in formulating.
Disenfranchisement poses the same dangers
in higher education that it poses in our broader society. On Tuesday
the Claremont Colleges demonstrated to the rest of the higher
education community what can occur when campus leadership makes
important decisions without the participation of students. It
is true that the students disrupted business-as-usual and therefore
may deserve some kind of punishment; but campus administrators,
in refusing to heed their pleas, have failed once again to recognize
why business-as-usual well deserved such disruption.
John Seery, Professor and Chair, Pomona
College Politics Department
Jim Sullivan, Director, Harvey Mudd College Upward Bound Programs
April 8, 2001
