College Presidents Ought to Examine How Democracy Works
A philosophy division chair arrested at a campus protest gives college presidents a lesson in democracy
Law enforcement officials 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 Pictures
College presidents and directors can study so much from the scholar demonstrations that closed out this tutorial 12 months.
Some classes could possibly 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 house of two days get 22 million views and turn out to be a critical public relations headache.
One other pragmatic lesson is likely to be to clear encampments peacefully however rapidly, since tents critically 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 all the way down to retaining 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 today, whereas one way or the other sustaining their repute in opposition to prices of antisemitism or “complicity in genocide.”
As that arrested philosophy division chair, I’d wish to suggest a extra visionary lesson: If college presidents wish to be on the suitable facet of historical past, they need to research 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 turn out to be 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 acceptable, have interaction with the demonstrators. Deal with them like budding civic actors, not enemies. If protests are peaceable, allow them to proceed. Contemplate going to REI and getting a tent to camp out with the scholars. Hearken to these concerned. If the discourse and chants strike you and your board or alumni as offensive, usher in some consultants on constructive dialogue. Organize 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 exterior 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 wish to impart is that this previous season of protests is a component of a bigger political and democratic course of. Such a season isn’t aberrant. Protests have a protracted and honored historical past, and they’re central to a well-functioning democracy. My e book Worry of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis identifies protesting as one in every of a number of democratic practices central to even probably 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 establish urgent points and start to deliberate on attainable 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 help. 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 Information and Norms, established political methods not often discover new and urgent public issues. Extra typically it’s social actions activists, together with younger folks on campuses, who establish 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, typically utilizing language that older of us discover discomfiting. From the rowdy margins of the general public sphere, college students and others have known as on the bigger political sphere to handle huge issues, from the battle in Vietnam to apartheid in South Africa.
That is what college students at my college had been attempting 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. In contrast to a merely expedient college president, a visionary one would perceive and admire 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 school to assist create areas for such studying. A visionary president would assist nourish this type 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 typically oligarchic governing boards and donors, had been doing this on function. Maybe they’re truly 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 writer or authors should not essentially these of Scientific American.
