https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/28/opinion/protests-college-free-speech.html
Wednesday, May 1, 2024
Tuesday, April 30, 2024
President Serene Jones of Union Theological Seminary (April 26, 2024)
In a community letter, I let our students, faculty and staff know that Union is an institution committed to being a safe haven for all – but especially our most vulnerable communities. And as an institution committed to academic freedom for deeply moral and spiritual reasons, we never silence voices of protest. We value these voices, even at times when that protest is against us.
Most importantly, I reminded our students that the aggressive police action being taken on other campuses across the country will not be taken here. As their president, I have their back.
[...]
Whatever our differences, I firmly believe campuses must be places for lively, rigorous debate, where we struggle collectively to find better ways to live together on this planet, and where students have the chance to find and strengthen their voices. Education is to experience the power of collective action, to become a passionate, engaged citizen. These precious values do not flourish when protests are squashed. Democracy itself cannot flourish.
With the events that unfolded at Columbia last Thursday, we are seeing encampments of peaceful student protestors rise up on campuses across the country. While university leaders are under tremendous pressure to respond with full force, I hope this tide of intolerance can be turned towards our highest values – including a commitment to freedom of speech. Campuses should be spaces where we learn to build a better world, not a more destructive one.
In these precarious times, it is all the more important that these values be upheld. Please join us in the struggle to manifest these values. That, at its core, is what it means to be true educators.
Serge Schmenann in NYT: "Student Protest Is an Essential Part of Education" (April 29, 2024)
The classic account of Columbia ’68, “The Strawberry Statement,” a wry, punchy diary by an undergraduate, James Simon Kunen, who participated in the protests, captures the confused welter of causes, ideals, frustrations and raw excitement of that spring. “Beyond defining what it wasn’t, it is very difficult to say with certainty what anything meant. But everything must have a meaning, and everyone is free to say what meanings are. At Columbia a lot of students simply did not like their school commandeering a park, and they rather disapproved of their school making war, and they told other students, who told others, and we saw that Columbia is our school and we will have something to say for what it does.”
That’s the similarity. Just as students then could no longer tolerate the horrific images of a distant war delivered, for the first time, in almost real time by television, so many of today’s students have found the images from Gaza, now transmitted instantly onto their phones, to demand action. And just as students in ’68 insisted that their school sever ties to a government institute doing research for the war, so today’s students demand that Columbia divest from companies profiting from Israel’s invasion of Gaza. And students then and now have found their college administrators deaf to their entreaties.
Certainly there’s a lot to debate here. Universities do have a serious obligation to protect Jewish students from antisemitism and to maintain order, but it is to their students and teachers that they must answer, not to Republicans eager to score points against woke “indoctrination” at elite colleges or to megadonors seeking to push their agendas onto institutions of higher learning.
Like Mr. Kunen, I’m not sure exactly how that spring of 1968 affected my life. I suspect it forced me to think in ways that have informed my reporting on the world. What I do know is that I’m heartened to see that college kids will still get angry over injustice and suffering and will try to do something about it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/29/opinion/student-protests-columbia-israel.html
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)