[In my annual
end-of-year series, I’ll AmericanStudy some big stories from the year about
which I didn’t get to write in this space. I’d love to hear your thoughts on
these and any other 2015 stories!]
On two ways
AmericanStudies can help us support the current wave of college protests.
I get that the
protests which have swept across many of the nation’s college campuses in the
second half of 2015—and which are mostly, if unfortunately
not entirely, linked to the #BlackLivesMatter
movement—are complex, and as open to critique as any social movement
(especially one led by 18-22 year olds). Indeed, such critiques are vital if
the movement is to endure, grow, and fulfill its possibilities as a part of
American higher education and society. But at the same time, to my mind far too
many of the critiques have treated the student protesters as simply
out-of-touch, spoiled brats, looking to turn college into
a “day care” or the like. Such reductive responses not only elide many of
the serious issues and events on campuses to which the protesters are
responding (a list
that seems to grow longer every day), but fail to recognize the historical
parallels that can help us see this latest wave of protests for the significant
movement they are.
For one thing,
those reductive responses to these 21st century college protests
echo quite closely many of the official responses to 1960s college protesters. When
protests erupted at New York’s
Columbia University in the spring of 1968, for example, police were brought
in to violently remove the protesters and the remainder of the spring semester was
cancelled, an excessive administrative response that could logically follow
from the refusal to hear or negotiate with college protesters that the “This is
not a day care!” college president embodies. And while the
shootings of student protesters at Kent State two years later represented
of course another level of excessive response, I would argue that they were on
the same spectrum of official rigidity and overreaction as Columbia’s actions. In
each of these cases, as in too many of our current ones, dismissals of student
concerns and voices led directly to an overt desire only to silence and shut down
these protests, rather than to consider the sources of their grievances and how
they might be engaged. History has not looked favorably on the 1960s official
responses, a lesson that current administrations and officials would do well to
learn.
And then there
are those
football players at the University of Missouri. The team’s protest was
frequently compared to the most famous moment in which sports were linked to
social protest: the Black
Power salute of athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith at the 1968 Summer
Olympics in Mexico City. Yet the very comparison reveals how rarely American
athletes have been at the center of such protests—and since Carlos and Smith
were protesting as amateur individuals, rather than as a team connected to a
powerful and wealthy football program and its public university, I would argue
that the Missouri protest was in many ways even more striking and radical (not
least because it had the
support of the team’s head coach as well). While big-time
college football often seems to embody the worst of American higher education
in the 21st century, there’s no reason why it can’t also become part
of movements to improve that system and the society of which it’s a vital part—and
the Missouri protest represented an inspiring move in that direction.
Last 2015 story
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other 2015 stories you’d AmericanStudy?
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