Dear University President, you could run out the clock; a plea for repressive tolerance--and renewal

Once upon a time, university presidents knew that by mid May campus would be emptied of most students, including the student activists and the student reporters of the campus daily zine, all of whom had impressive internships lined up with NGOs in DC or foreign countries. Some seniors would even be willing to forego the cause in order to party one last time with classmates in graduation week. That is to say, they knew they could manage the clock as they pleased while they organized some sanitary facilities for the ‘encampment’ and exhibit curiosity about the underlying issue by proudly attending the teach in. After all, the world’s experts on the topic are often on payroll. (A good thing that interdisciplinary program was not cut.)

One of the oddities of our age is that the professional managers that have taken over the running of universities show themselves so unimaginative and so insecure with their authority. They echo each others slogans, and they role-play leadership from behind a large desk. Even as risk and reputation managers they are a flop. This is not just an American thing (although the armed snipers on rooftops are). The first time I noticed this state of affairs was a few years ago when peaceful student campers/campaigners got kicked off my Amsterdam campus with non trivial police brutality because a dean didn’t want them present near graduation. I forget the activists’ cause, but not the triviality that moved the campus hierarchy into action.

When universities resort to force long before that’s necessary — and the present generation of student activists have been a most harmless bunch, so far [has anyone been physically hurt by any of them?] — they educate their students to distrust argument, they teach their students cynicism about persuasion, and they teach them contempt for the gift of civilization, which is all about the art of managing fierce disagreements with words. They teach our students that education is not about patience and the slow mastery of skill, but that it is all about who has the ear of the police commissioner. They deny their students the possibility to discover and thereby learn from their mistakes, but teach them that obedience pays.

I am no friend of the aesthetic frisson that some of my leftwing colleagues feel when they see a mass of mostly young human bodies gathered in protest facing off with men (well mostly men) in uniform; the breathless reports from the ‘streets,’ the talk of demos and democracy, the instinctive trust of the crowd by the lords of a dinner-party. I detest the unwillingness to make distinctions because solidarity demands it. I find it comic when full professors insist that social hierarchy must be abolished. But, at least, their passion pays respect to something other than force.

It’s been shocking how impoverished, craven, and imprudent the leadership of the Anglophone’s wealthiest and flagship universities have been this past year. Yes, they face organized hostility from many sides. But that is, alas, the human condition.

A bit over a year ago I tried to organize my thoughts on these matters and wrote a piece for my campus newspaper (here, although it was originally written in Dutch). I circulated a draft among some of my department colleagues. They all urged me to remove an inchoate idea that I expressed with the clumsy and archaic phrase, ‘spiritual authority.’ And I did. I should have asked for better suggestions.

I regret dropping the phrase ‘spiritual authority.’

Yes, repressive tolerance for its own sake is potentially a higher form of cynicism. But true authority is born from a self-confidence that doesn’t originate in a job-title or praise; it is rather nourished because one is secure in one’s identity in serving the university’s mission to elevate us, to discover new truths, and to expand our intellectual horizons, to organize curiosity. All discovery is a journey into the unknown, a voyage without a clear destination, and without knowing what will ‘work.’ And this is grounded in a kind of faith that I have called ‘spiritual.’

A certain self-described ‘realist’ thinks that an institution’s true nature is revealed when water-cannons, batons, and shields (or worse) are deployed against their own students. It’s true now. Some of our very best will walk away from us in disgust.

But universities haven’t lasted for centuries without turmoil, and bouts of renewal. Perhaps, on some campus (originating in the Latin for ‘field’), or encampment of tents, some of the more thoughtful young will have seen through the façade of the administrative building, and sketched a vision for a virtual (not in the new sense of ‘online’ but in the supposedly obsolete sense of ‘full of excellence’) university.