I remember, years after we graduated university, a friend being as surprised as I had been when I told her a person can be an atheist and Jew simultaneously. This week a famous blogger, Penelope Trunk, has an atheist Jewish son involved in a protest on campus. I am one of 45 commenters. I have no essay this week—I was busy! So I present my comment.
As a senior citizen, I try to keep my ideals, but without illusions about students.
To use students as activists, I have decided, it is best to ignore their ability to document and footnote, do nuance and be future leaders. Better to treat them as an ancient Roman mob who could only do something very simple without nuance.
Hence if students are protesting higher tuition, then you won’t see them auditing the finances and making gigantic charts and graphs to explain things. Not even if the dean offers to help them by giving them access to the books.
Circa 1970 a college dean said he wouldn’t oppose a sit-in protest, wouldn’t give students such a “wall to bounce their ball against.” So I suspect a younger-than-me dean made a mistake when he ordered arrests of campers.
As for whether a significant percentage of today’s campus protestors are non students: Yes. At my campus student newspaper I once read that the last five bar assaults, including a guy going back to his trunk to pick up a pick ax handle, were by non students. Perhaps passing classes requires a certain level of functioning.
One may remember that classic picture from the Kent State riot, “Four dead in O-hi-o” of a distraught girl by a slain student. She was literally a “girl,” playing hooky, (skipping out) from her high school.
https://www.songfacts.com/lyrics/crosby-stills-nash-young/ohio
One thing Vietnam taught me was the practicality of narrowing a topic according to the word count, on the page or verbally, as in a class paper or an idealistic student-to-student conversation. Rather than announce a grand thesis for a conversation of only five minutes, I would rather ask, “What narrow part can we fruitfully discuss?” Of course, if a student is uninformed then we wouldn’t reach a “contract” for discussing, but still, it would be worth me asking because: I might meet a non mob student.
In my day we said, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” I find it sad when young 21st century students don’t trust each other.
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Sean Crawford
April
Calgary
2024
Datelined one hour ago: Here’s a dean that did NOT throw up a wall. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68909953
Footnote: Am I mistaken about students being so simple minded? I don’t think so. When the G-8 conference was in town (In the mountain foothills, actually) none of the “jobless-or-on-a-holiday” students, arriving from all over the continent to protest, wrote a letter or essay into our local newspaper to explain things to the rest of us.
When our city plaza sprouted round tents to Occupy Wall Street, right across from our big central library, nobody would walk over to document and footnote, compare and contrast, to explain Wall Street and capitalism to us. Nor could they explain anything, let alone coherently, to reporters gathered on the big day when the tent city disbanded. This when society’s taxes were supporting, at six dollars to one, the tuition of our future leaders in learning to research, reason and write.
And when I saw a movie during the the Wall Street melt down, Margin Call, at the arthouse theatre, sitting at the front, and I turned to see all of the faces… all the folks were establishment, older generation, well over thirty. And no, the show was not on a school night.
