A Plea to College Presidents: Exercise Your Moral Leadership

[Are_grits_groceries]

<snip>
How could this be happening at Davis—and at other campuses too? Why are students who are peaceably protesting being treated like criminals? At the University of California at Berkeley, the former poet laureate of the United States Robert Hass was clubbed by police in anti-terrorist SWAT gear when he went to see for himself if there really was brutality against students occupying the area in front of Sproul Hall, once the home of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s.

What is this madness? The justification for calling in the police is typically to "maintain order" or to preserve "safety" or "security" or "health." But surely violence is a distorted response to the desire for "order," "health," and "safety." And it is certainly incommensurate when dealing with such minor crimes as camping overnight on university property.

Is this really what university leaders want for our campuses? Where are today's leaders who will take the moral high ground and side sympathetically with the rising tide of students who are Occupying Higher Ed and protesting what all of us—and university presidents more than anyone else—agree is a national crisis in higher education?
<snip>
What will we do next? We are at a turning point, a Gettysburg Address moment, where moral leadership is required, where moral authority and moral force need to be eloquently articulated before this historical moment devolves into violence and polarization. Linda Katehi, Davis's chancellor, has suspended two officers with pay and, amid calls for her resignation, begun an investigation. Mark G. Yudof, president of the University of California system, has called for all the chancellors to meet to re-evaluate the proper law-enforcement response to student protest.

Well and good. But we need more. We need prominent, articulate leadership that concedes that students putting their bodies literally on the line are also raising profound issues about the future of education, which is to say the future of our nation. We don't just need better "procedures" or "task forces." We need Lincolnesque moral fervor that honors the courage of young students who have put themselves in peril, to date with remarkable self-control and self-organization. And with the awareness that the education they support is rapidly becoming something only the elite—1 percent—will be able to afford.

Our students are not wrong in the content of their protests on behalf of education. Calling the police does not solve their problems; as we have seen too often, it can foster violence—with an ever-more-imminent potential for tragedy.
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http://chronicle.com/article/A-Plea-to-College-Presidents-/129863/?sid=pm

The entire message is good. The leaders of the universities need to get out of their offices and see what is happening. If they are depending on the police, or any one source for that matter, they will get a skewed view.

[CreekDog]

1. Or you're going to get fired and likely shamed

hey, take a look at the news over the past few weeks.

do it out of the goodness of your hearts or out of self preservation, they will both lead you to the same place.

[Are_grits_groceries]

2. That is probably the only message that will work.

Appeal to their bank accounts and lifestyle because they have jobs. $$$$$ talks. Ethics and morality? Whazzat?

[CreekDog]

3. when things are going to hell, there's a great opportunity to be a hero

for doing the right thing.

[woo me with science]

4. Beautiful post. Thank you. nt