College Presidents Ought to Examine How Democracy Works
A philosophy division chair arrested at a campus protest presents college presidents a lesson in democracy
Cops arrest a protester at Emory College in Atlanta, Georgia throughout a scholar led Palestine solidarity demonstration on April 25, 2024.
Elijah Nouvelage/AFP through Getty Photographs
College presidents and directors can be taught so much from the scholar demonstrations that closed out this educational yr.
Some classes may very well be merely expedient. Most acutely: don’t get the chair of your philosophy division (on this case, me) arrested. That’s very true when a video of her, wanting like a mannequin of respectability whereas being hauled off, may within the area of two days get 22 million views and change into a severe public relations headache.
One other pragmatic lesson is likely to be to clear encampments peacefully however shortly, since tents significantly intrude with graduation. Extra ambitiously, a president may attempt to negotiate with the demonstrators whereas concurrently appeasing the governing board in order to not get fired.
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Such classes in expediency boil right down to preserving their job whereas dealing with wrath from all sides, together with Congress. To make issues worse, doing all this entails negotiating millennia of spiritual strife that overflows to at the present time, whereas someway sustaining their fame towards fees of antisemitism or “complicity in genocide.”
As that arrested philosophy division chair, I’d prefer to suggest a extra visionary lesson: If college presidents need to be on the proper facet of historical past, they need to examine how democracy works and the function that universities play in aiding democratic processes. They need to see their job as foremost to teach their college students to change into engaged members of society—with the facet good thing about furthering the democratic course of itself. They need to keep away from doing something that slows down or reverses democracy.
Different classes for aspiring visionary leaders: When applicable, interact with the demonstrators. Deal with them like budding civic actors, not enemies. If protests are peaceable, allow them to proceed. Take into account going to REI and getting a tent to camp out with the scholars. Take heed to these concerned. If the discourse and chants strike you and your board or alumni as offensive, usher in some specialists on constructive dialogue. Prepare for some deliberative boards.
However no matter you do, don’t do what my college did on the morning of April 25, 2024. Don’t usher in outdoors police forces armed with pepper spray, rubber bullets and Tasers to violently and brutally dismantle a peaceable protest, all in a matter of minutes. Don’t arrest bystanders like me and different professors and college students who had been calling for the police to cease and refusing to step away. Please don’t do any of that.
As a professor of political philosophy who has researched and written extensively on political deliberation and public life, the primary lesson I’d prefer to impart is that this previous season of protests is a component of a bigger political and democratic course of. Such a season just isn’t aberrant. Protests have a protracted and commemorated historical past, and they’re central to a well-functioning democracy. My e-book Worry of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis identifies protesting as considered one of a number of democratic practices central to even essentially the most minimally functioning democracy. Protesting is a technique of naming and framing points, setting the agenda for extra deliberative our bodies to take up.
All advised these practices assist a big and numerous public determine urgent points and start to deliberate on doable programs of motion amidst all of the complexities and trade-offs concerned. In such a course of folks start to return to a public judgment, because the opinion researcher Daniel Yankelovich put it, on what programs of motion and insurance policies they’re prepared to assist. Protest motion are a primary step in creating such public will for sustainable public coverage, motion and alter.
Because the sociologist Jürgen Habermas, notes in his 1996 e-book Between Details and Norms, established political methods hardly ever discover new and urgent public issues. Extra usually it’s social actions activists, together with younger folks on campuses, who determine these points and sound warning bells, demanding that uncared for points get placed on the general public agenda. As such, college students have lengthy been the conscience of our tradition, bringing consciousness to uncomfortable points, usually utilizing language that older of us discover discomfiting. From the rowdy margins of the general public sphere, college students and others have referred to as on the bigger political sphere to handle huge issues, from the struggle in Vietnam to apartheid in South Africa.
That is what college students at my college had been making an attempt to do on April 25 and within the days after. Whether or not or not we like or condone their chants, that is how democracy works. Not like a merely expedient college president, a visionary one would perceive and recognize the democratic function of scholars within the public sphere. College leaders who suppose college students want a extra capacious understanding of the politics of the scenario ought to work with the college to assist create areas for such studying. A visionary president would assist nourish this sort of inquiry.
College web sites and graduation addresses are stuffed with high-blown language about educating college students for political engagement and cultivating fearless inquiry. All that rings hole now when these similar college presidents condone the assault and arrest of their college students for doing these very issues. If one had been extra cynical, one may wonder if these college administrative leaders, egged on by their usually oligarchic governing boards and donors, had been doing this on function. Maybe they’re really against democracy and aiming to teach college students to be complacent within the face of injustice. I’m near being that cynical however not but that despondent.
Let’s see what occurs after this season of discontent. Possibly these classes in democratic management may maintain.
That is an opinion and evaluation article, and the views expressed by the creator or authors should not essentially these of Scientific American.
