The police showed up on my campus yesterday and used rubber bullets, tear gas, and tasers, assaulted and arrested two faculty members. The footage is viral. I have colleagues wringing their hands about graduation getting canceled after these Covid kids already missed their high school ceremony.
A student walked into my office in tears yesterday and said, We don’t need commencement—we need dialogue.
My heart is hurting. Every single word of your essay is true.
Sometimes for pure incisiveness you rise to level with the best work of Hunter Thompson. Not quite the tears-inducing humor that came roaring out of that drug barn but I value the fact that you value your liver more than he did.
Credentialism, gate keeping, and indoctrination. Shut up and find a spot to man in this horrible machine we've constructed; there are only so many seats at the table. You don’t want to be the meat being ground up by the machine, so find a spot turning the crank, kids. That is our college ethos.
"Take a public good (higher education), have Republicans choke its public financing, privatize it, make the ability of people to have a decent life dependent upon buying it, and then “run it like a business,” in the sense of creating lavish tiers for very rich customers and inflating prices to extortionate levels and attacking labor and climbing happily into bed with some of the most sociopathic billionaires the world has ever produced."
I dont think it helps to single out Republicans here. The "sociopathic billionaires" donate to both parties. The rot you describe is bipartisan.
The question you raise about "running things like a business" is important. We want education because it is of intrinsic value to leading a good life. Turning education into a business can destroy these intrinsic values. That does not only happen to education. It is a foundational problem of our current economic systems. But business can also promote intrinsic values. How can we structure incentives to get it right?
"Caroline Fohlin, the Emory professor of economics seen on video being thrown to the ground and handcuffed by an Emory police officer for expressing concern at the violent arrest of a protester on campus, was jailed for 11 hours and charged with... Battery Against Police Officer."
Out on the streets, we called the police PIGS in the 70s. We were correct. Power to the students! We may be able to debunk neo-liberalism, old-school entrenched dems, and conservatives if we follow the students' lead.
"After all, they are young and healthy and have their whole lives ahead of them and the rest of us have already chosen our dreary paths, which we regret."
Your first sentence is very true but not perhaps for the reason you have given. College has become a place for young people to go because they have no idea what they are going to do next after high school. I work helping young people get into manufacturing and it is very difficult. Their parents have a mindset that college is "needed". No, it's not. The Steel mills next door to Chicago, where I live and work, are paying $80,000 a year for HS grads to start and it is not difficult to earn six figures there. Try making that with a college degree in History or similar.. Colleges are broken but even if they were perfect they are not the answer for many, if not most, people.
As a veteran of college protests during the 1960s and ‘70s, a former college professor, and dean, I applaud your description of the current state of affairs. Keep it up. 👍
I feel absolulely crazy watching the cops bulldoze onto campuses to break up these exceptionally clear-cut, logical protests. I feel even crazier hear people I love describe the protests as "pro-Palestine riots by kids that want to kill Jews," or as poseur events b/c "WTF, this isn't Vietnam." (It is in SO MANY respects like Vietnam!) If I hadn't seen cops do the exact same thing to Black Lives Matter protestors for years I wouldn't even have context for what's going on.
Anyway, yes to this whole essay, but particularly the part that calls out how much we'd benefit by chucking "College Kids are Entitled" discourse-peddlers far into the sea.
Excellent summary, Hamilton. I can't think of anything else to add, except that it wasn't as if anything or anyone was threatening real "disruption" by students pitching tents on lawns, other than donors who threatened a disruption of their alma mater's endowment gravy trains, unless administrators agreed to sick the cops on them! So much for "academic freedom" under capitalism...
Brother, you've been spying on my brain! Spot on once again. Its such a racket isn't it. The liberal arts in college have been completely gutted because very few people can afford to pay the extortionate amount of money to follow their heart, follow their bliss. How can you afford to go tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt studying history or philosophy? College essentially is little more than a vocational school. Especially business school. Pffft. That's not a fucking education, that's job training gussied up to look important and intellectual. And as time goes on, going to college, that was once an almost certain guarantee of higher paying jobs, isn't even able to fulfill that tacit promise anymore. I mean, you have to have a college degree in order to teach elementary school, and you're going to pay back those loans? On an elementary school teacher salary? I am in favor of trade schools mostly replacing college. Unless you are studying the stem fields where you need the kind of facilities that only a university Can provide, What's the point of a university? And if they were free as they should be, it would all be a moot point.
Oh but they do get mad at prisoners for being in prison .. catch a drug case or 2 and they follow you & then it makes it way easier to fill hard labor jobs. After all you likely been working out
Yes. From the idiots of the"Supreme Court" who so want Trump to be crowned King that they shove their hate-filled heads farther and farther up their asses, to the moronic and cowardly cops throwing students to the ground because the students are against genocide, the scum who are behind this want ALL the money and control and the ability to crush education at the same time, because they fear intelligence and truth, and to hell with all those innocent children and adults who were killed and mutilated by another hate filled monster, that they no doubt support.
This is a really important analysis - I work in a leading-edge climate stabilization field (ha,ha, is there any chance that will work!) and I am constantly surprised by (even) my colleagues who understand that imperial modernity is the prime cause of the problem and yet still impoverish themselves and trap their kids in debt by sending their kids to college to learn how to become ecosocially destructive agents of said modernity.
Suppose we didn’t know why there are ructions at university campuses. Not suppose that they were having a food strike (which we did at school, and which I wrote about here: https://endlesschain.substack.com/p/striking-boys), but let’s suppose we just didn’t know what the trouble was. That we’d never heard of Israel, or Gaza, or sliced white bread. What, then, would you think about what’s happening at Yale, and Columbia and elsewhere at this time?
Go ahead: you are hereby freed from the constraints of having to judge the issue itself. You have no responsibility to judge the merits of the occupations and the encampment and the sit-ins. What is your judgment of how they are being dealt with?
Is it that protest is futile, so that to protest anything is wrong? What, then if you received £5 less in your change than you ought to? Is it worth protesting then? Or should you simply accept that short-changing is part of life and you must acquiesce in it? I was short-changed five cents this week; I protested, and got my five cents. It was very amicable and an apology was given. It was only five cents, but they were mine, not the shop’s. Sometimes justice is easy to discern. No police were called.
Is the decision to call the police dependent on the severity of the protest, or is it dependent on other factors, like the loudness of the chanting? The vehemence of the violence? The damage to tender young shoots of grass on lawns? The loss in stock market value of whatever loses stock market value when such protests take place?
What about the decision to arrest people who use nothing but their voice to protest (aside from the unfortunate damage to pristine lawns)? Is it justifiable to arrest people for voicing their protest, or for marching? Or for just being there? For voicing their protest in the form of silent placards? Maybe we should just protest and not say why we protest. That way, no one is embarrassed. But then people would ask, would they not, “What are you protesting about?” Then, if they were told what the people are protesting about, that should be the point at which a criminal offence is committed. Would that make more sense? In Russia, they hold up pieces of white paper with nothing on, and still get arrested.
A young Jew was arrested in the UK for displaying a placard that said Jews Against Genocide. When he was taken in by the police, he asked, “Would it have been more acceptable if the placard had read Jews In Favour Of Genocide?” to which the police officers had no answer but to treat him even more roughly.
If the students of America, and elsewhere, it must be added, are slowly, but surely, realising the inane conundrum they are living through (and growing into), the irony lies in the fact that they are being constrained in the expression of their dismay and disgust with powers that they cannot otherwise hope to influence, on a matter of conscience, by law enforcement agencies who themselves have no answer to the logic arraigned against them by those they arrest for offences that have, in many cases, not been committed or that do not even exist.
And, it is at that point that the debate between the educator and the educated ceases to be limited to the educational institution, for it is now a debate that implicates us all. Not all of us are protesters, but all of us do protest at some time or another, as my small change dispute demonstrates. And not all of us evoke protest, but the divide is opening up wide between those who aspire to a position whereby insouciance towards others is a core element of that position, and those who aspire to the position whereby protest against the insouciant is, for them, a core value. In the 1990s, clothing trends narrowed to the point where a success story arose in malls around the globe: The Gap. Sweatshirts aside, and 30 years on, a new Gap is establishing itself, and it will not be closed with just a drawstring.
It is the agencies called upon to restrain the protest that are failing to understand their complicity as tools of the authors of circumstances which youth has banded together to oppose. The agencies of law enforcement comply without question on an, at most, questionable legal basis to perform, not the will, but the whim of established authority. Some do so with a reticence that, at least, is creditable. Others do so with a venom that recalls the Nuremberg defence of I was only following orders. Aye, some may just follow orders, and others champ at the bit waiting for the orders, adherence to which they will later brush from themselves, as Pilate washed his hands after the flogging.
And that is why the cause of the protest is now no longer relevant. It is the reaction of the law enforcers that should concern not just the college young, but the broad gamut of our societies. Our right to remain silent is becoming an obligation.
My son will be headed to college next year. While he is quite aware of the dynamics you write about, I am sure he will appreciate how cogently you express them. 🙏
The police showed up on my campus yesterday and used rubber bullets, tear gas, and tasers, assaulted and arrested two faculty members. The footage is viral. I have colleagues wringing their hands about graduation getting canceled after these Covid kids already missed their high school ceremony.
A student walked into my office in tears yesterday and said, We don’t need commencement—we need dialogue.
My heart is hurting. Every single word of your essay is true.
Sometimes for pure incisiveness you rise to level with the best work of Hunter Thompson. Not quite the tears-inducing humor that came roaring out of that drug barn but I value the fact that you value your liver more than he did.
Well done.
Wow. Fantastic article.
Credentialism, gate keeping, and indoctrination. Shut up and find a spot to man in this horrible machine we've constructed; there are only so many seats at the table. You don’t want to be the meat being ground up by the machine, so find a spot turning the crank, kids. That is our college ethos.
"Take a public good (higher education), have Republicans choke its public financing, privatize it, make the ability of people to have a decent life dependent upon buying it, and then “run it like a business,” in the sense of creating lavish tiers for very rich customers and inflating prices to extortionate levels and attacking labor and climbing happily into bed with some of the most sociopathic billionaires the world has ever produced."
I dont think it helps to single out Republicans here. The "sociopathic billionaires" donate to both parties. The rot you describe is bipartisan.
The question you raise about "running things like a business" is important. We want education because it is of intrinsic value to leading a good life. Turning education into a business can destroy these intrinsic values. That does not only happen to education. It is a foundational problem of our current economic systems. But business can also promote intrinsic values. How can we structure incentives to get it right?
"Caroline Fohlin, the Emory professor of economics seen on video being thrown to the ground and handcuffed by an Emory police officer for expressing concern at the violent arrest of a protester on campus, was jailed for 11 hours and charged with... Battery Against Police Officer."
Out on the streets, we called the police PIGS in the 70s. We were correct. Power to the students! We may be able to debunk neo-liberalism, old-school entrenched dems, and conservatives if we follow the students' lead.
"After all, they are young and healthy and have their whole lives ahead of them and the rest of us have already chosen our dreary paths, which we regret."
I feel seen, and also attacked.
Your first sentence is very true but not perhaps for the reason you have given. College has become a place for young people to go because they have no idea what they are going to do next after high school. I work helping young people get into manufacturing and it is very difficult. Their parents have a mindset that college is "needed". No, it's not. The Steel mills next door to Chicago, where I live and work, are paying $80,000 a year for HS grads to start and it is not difficult to earn six figures there. Try making that with a college degree in History or similar.. Colleges are broken but even if they were perfect they are not the answer for many, if not most, people.
As a veteran of college protests during the 1960s and ‘70s, a former college professor, and dean, I applaud your description of the current state of affairs. Keep it up. 👍
I feel absolulely crazy watching the cops bulldoze onto campuses to break up these exceptionally clear-cut, logical protests. I feel even crazier hear people I love describe the protests as "pro-Palestine riots by kids that want to kill Jews," or as poseur events b/c "WTF, this isn't Vietnam." (It is in SO MANY respects like Vietnam!) If I hadn't seen cops do the exact same thing to Black Lives Matter protestors for years I wouldn't even have context for what's going on.
Anyway, yes to this whole essay, but particularly the part that calls out how much we'd benefit by chucking "College Kids are Entitled" discourse-peddlers far into the sea.
Excellent summary, Hamilton. I can't think of anything else to add, except that it wasn't as if anything or anyone was threatening real "disruption" by students pitching tents on lawns, other than donors who threatened a disruption of their alma mater's endowment gravy trains, unless administrators agreed to sick the cops on them! So much for "academic freedom" under capitalism...
Brother, you've been spying on my brain! Spot on once again. Its such a racket isn't it. The liberal arts in college have been completely gutted because very few people can afford to pay the extortionate amount of money to follow their heart, follow their bliss. How can you afford to go tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt studying history or philosophy? College essentially is little more than a vocational school. Especially business school. Pffft. That's not a fucking education, that's job training gussied up to look important and intellectual. And as time goes on, going to college, that was once an almost certain guarantee of higher paying jobs, isn't even able to fulfill that tacit promise anymore. I mean, you have to have a college degree in order to teach elementary school, and you're going to pay back those loans? On an elementary school teacher salary? I am in favor of trade schools mostly replacing college. Unless you are studying the stem fields where you need the kind of facilities that only a university Can provide, What's the point of a university? And if they were free as they should be, it would all be a moot point.
Oh but they do get mad at prisoners for being in prison .. catch a drug case or 2 and they follow you & then it makes it way easier to fill hard labor jobs. After all you likely been working out
Yes. From the idiots of the"Supreme Court" who so want Trump to be crowned King that they shove their hate-filled heads farther and farther up their asses, to the moronic and cowardly cops throwing students to the ground because the students are against genocide, the scum who are behind this want ALL the money and control and the ability to crush education at the same time, because they fear intelligence and truth, and to hell with all those innocent children and adults who were killed and mutilated by another hate filled monster, that they no doubt support.
This is a really important analysis - I work in a leading-edge climate stabilization field (ha,ha, is there any chance that will work!) and I am constantly surprised by (even) my colleagues who understand that imperial modernity is the prime cause of the problem and yet still impoverish themselves and trap their kids in debt by sending their kids to college to learn how to become ecosocially destructive agents of said modernity.
Suppose we didn’t know why there are ructions at university campuses. Not suppose that they were having a food strike (which we did at school, and which I wrote about here: https://endlesschain.substack.com/p/striking-boys), but let’s suppose we just didn’t know what the trouble was. That we’d never heard of Israel, or Gaza, or sliced white bread. What, then, would you think about what’s happening at Yale, and Columbia and elsewhere at this time?
Go ahead: you are hereby freed from the constraints of having to judge the issue itself. You have no responsibility to judge the merits of the occupations and the encampment and the sit-ins. What is your judgment of how they are being dealt with?
Is it that protest is futile, so that to protest anything is wrong? What, then if you received £5 less in your change than you ought to? Is it worth protesting then? Or should you simply accept that short-changing is part of life and you must acquiesce in it? I was short-changed five cents this week; I protested, and got my five cents. It was very amicable and an apology was given. It was only five cents, but they were mine, not the shop’s. Sometimes justice is easy to discern. No police were called.
Is the decision to call the police dependent on the severity of the protest, or is it dependent on other factors, like the loudness of the chanting? The vehemence of the violence? The damage to tender young shoots of grass on lawns? The loss in stock market value of whatever loses stock market value when such protests take place?
What about the decision to arrest people who use nothing but their voice to protest (aside from the unfortunate damage to pristine lawns)? Is it justifiable to arrest people for voicing their protest, or for marching? Or for just being there? For voicing their protest in the form of silent placards? Maybe we should just protest and not say why we protest. That way, no one is embarrassed. But then people would ask, would they not, “What are you protesting about?” Then, if they were told what the people are protesting about, that should be the point at which a criminal offence is committed. Would that make more sense? In Russia, they hold up pieces of white paper with nothing on, and still get arrested.
A young Jew was arrested in the UK for displaying a placard that said Jews Against Genocide. When he was taken in by the police, he asked, “Would it have been more acceptable if the placard had read Jews In Favour Of Genocide?” to which the police officers had no answer but to treat him even more roughly.
If the students of America, and elsewhere, it must be added, are slowly, but surely, realising the inane conundrum they are living through (and growing into), the irony lies in the fact that they are being constrained in the expression of their dismay and disgust with powers that they cannot otherwise hope to influence, on a matter of conscience, by law enforcement agencies who themselves have no answer to the logic arraigned against them by those they arrest for offences that have, in many cases, not been committed or that do not even exist.
And, it is at that point that the debate between the educator and the educated ceases to be limited to the educational institution, for it is now a debate that implicates us all. Not all of us are protesters, but all of us do protest at some time or another, as my small change dispute demonstrates. And not all of us evoke protest, but the divide is opening up wide between those who aspire to a position whereby insouciance towards others is a core element of that position, and those who aspire to the position whereby protest against the insouciant is, for them, a core value. In the 1990s, clothing trends narrowed to the point where a success story arose in malls around the globe: The Gap. Sweatshirts aside, and 30 years on, a new Gap is establishing itself, and it will not be closed with just a drawstring.
It is the agencies called upon to restrain the protest that are failing to understand their complicity as tools of the authors of circumstances which youth has banded together to oppose. The agencies of law enforcement comply without question on an, at most, questionable legal basis to perform, not the will, but the whim of established authority. Some do so with a reticence that, at least, is creditable. Others do so with a venom that recalls the Nuremberg defence of I was only following orders. Aye, some may just follow orders, and others champ at the bit waiting for the orders, adherence to which they will later brush from themselves, as Pilate washed his hands after the flogging.
And that is why the cause of the protest is now no longer relevant. It is the reaction of the law enforcers that should concern not just the college young, but the broad gamut of our societies. Our right to remain silent is becoming an obligation.
My son will be headed to college next year. While he is quite aware of the dynamics you write about, I am sure he will appreciate how cogently you express them. 🙏