Belonging on Campus
Like in 1968, college students are bringing discourses about social justice into confrontations with each other and faculty and administrators, though it'd be difficult to imagine Neil Young writing a song about it. It'd be difficult to imagine Beyoncé choosing a college setting to work with images of protest.
Nevertheless, I think student protests importantly reflect trends beyond campus, and they have inspired no shortage of comment. Mine will focus on what they reflect about academic discourses, university governance, and what they say about fundamental assumptions about the nature of personal experience and the need for inclusion.
Typically when journalists and commentators talk about student protests of the present moment, they want to talk both about gravely serious political issues and what they regard as the juvenile sensitivities of the especially privileged. That is to say, outsiders say current student movements both do and don't matter.
Teaching on two very different campuses this year, I haven't written or talked much about the topic as much as I've thought about it. Recently, however, a piece in The New Yorker came up on my newsfeed focused attention among friends as none of the other pieces before it. It deals only with liberal-arts campuses, but it engages much broader issues and frames.
The article gives space to people to share their own stories and views with refreshing freedom from the moralizing judgments like those of Jonathan Chait and Jonathan Haidt among others. That first one gave me an eye-rolling headache.
I also appreciated an article on FiveThirtyEight analyzing what student demand-lists actually are as data. This piece gives a needed contrast to the common alternative of an author taking a few comments and generalizing about generational consciousness. It turns out that students are much less often demanding trigger warnings and comfy identity-only spaces and more often demanding institutions honor their own commitments.
However, as important as it is to listen to people and try to understand them on their own terms, I want to try to describe the effects of its institutional situation and its larger political significance.
Following the term of Elizabeth Povinelli, we can think of college students as autological subjects. This term describes a mode of governance that makes people account themselves in different institutional settings and in different terms. American education, with its roots in revivalist Protestant religion, values expressive self-examination, and college-admissions essays demand this to a very high degree from very young people. What did you learn in your gap year in Zambia or Habitat for Humanity? How did you come to accept and complicate your identity as an American Indian or religious Muslim?
The questions take this form, explicitly or implicitly, because of how liberal institutions' governance models conceive of diversity. These impose a duty on included people, if they are other than cisgender, white, heterosexual young men, not only to be good studious college students but also to contribute to the campus community through their particular perspectives. They are rendering goods to cisgender, white, heterosexual old men in faculty and administration.
It isn't new to say "diversity", "inclusion", and "pluralism" validate dominance through the extension of an offer for recognition and a dictation of the terms of difference. The people in power tell the different how they are allowed to be different.
However, campus diversity-initiatives are more productive in certain ways, they are defining what work "others" need to do to justify their inclusion.
This regime of inclusion does not have a clear idea of what to do with the kinds of identification it demands. This holds for the liberal polis and the universities, in my view.
University curricula in the humanities and social sciences are still, by and large, oriented toward producing citizens with critical relationship to the Western tradition. Modes of autology promoted through student and faculty selection prize "difference", and academic discourse invests huge moral weight in minor differences of opinion. All these are related, and all are a part of how critique is demanded, routinized, and ignored in places like campuses.
Kids are... kids. They're not mature. They can be incredibly bright, and it's part of our job to help them focus. The world needs changing, and the list of iniquities is as long as the list of student groups organized to address them. Accounting for the chaotic and often dissolute energy of intermittent campus protests does have to do with students, but it also needs account in terms of how institutions shape speech and action.
Campus protests can look similar, and here I'm saying they result from similar structural pressures, but they take place in different situations. Public universities are being ground down by manufactured funding crises while the top tier of private schools are becoming walled gardens to grow the global elite. These divergences result from corporate and bureaucratic management modes that have very little concern for the best interests of education. They urgently need room for the voices of the students they are supposed to serve.