Student activists call it making themselves heard. Opponents call it a tantric silencing of moderate views. But what President Rebecca Chopp calls “the spring of our discontent” is primarily a series of ad hoc attempts at activism by various small groups of students, each seeking institutional change with the best intention: making students feel safe, welcome, and respected at Swarthmore College.
In the past few weeks, Swarthmore has seen a student council referendum to ban Greek life, complete with sidewalk chalkings anonymously accusing the brothers of harboring rapists; a corresponding federal complaint alleging that the administration has mishandled cases of sexual misconduct in violation of federal law; a factually misinformed protest leading to the withdrawal of alumnus and former World Bank president Robert Zoellick from accepting an honorary degree at commencement; and a takeover of a rare, open board of managers meeting meant to discuss fossil fuel divestment by students claiming to feel marginalized and silenced by an administration unwilling to help them feel safe at their school (video of the takeover here).
Surprisingly few of these protests were coordinated with one another. While many students participated in some way in all or most of these events, my understanding is that they were the brainchildren of different people making independent decisions to act. As a result, attributing a single motivation or goal is impossible, and different supporters will have radically different takes on the purposes, justifications, and intended consequences of any particular act. Certainly, attributing it to an institutionalized liberal conspiracy smells more of demagoguery than of hard-nosed reporting. Indeed, President Chopp and the administration probably guessed (rightly) that the activism would fizzle out as classes ended and finals began, which it duly did, only a few days after its climax at the board meeting.
Robert B. Zoellick ’75, former President of the World Bank Group (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Some students will say that none of these actions are about issues beyond themselves – not societal change, not institutional change, not social change – but rather about marginalized voices finally being heard. But any attempt to depoliticize the protests cuts against reality. Each event has been accompanied by express political demands, be they to withdraw an honorary degree offer, to change sexual assault policy, or to create an ethnic studies distribution requirement. So even if some students relate to events through an entirely personal lens, a vocal subset, at least, pursues loftier goals. But to those students who seek no change, I would remind you that nobody has a right simply to be heard. When you enter a public forum, especially to disrupt it, you are taking on the burden of persuasion because you are asserting that what you have to say is something so important that you can interject yourself into public discourse to make me hear it. But the extent to which I am obligated to listen is just the extent to which you are providing recognizable reasons for me to change my attitudes or behaviors, that is, making salient points. Speech as such is not a right because your thoughts and feelings are not necessarily important to me. Mutual respect as rational individuals is. Protests are inherently political because they must establish public reasons for a relevant change in policy or in individual action or attitudes, and they must be justified and evaluated in that light.
History also has a role. The board meeting takeover and the teach-ins organized by students were defended largely on the grounds that disruptive behavior is the only way to get meaningful change, and that similar tactics successfully won support for creating the Black Cultural Center and the Intercultural Center on campus.
I believe that some campus protests this spring were careful and justified responses to alleged wrongdoing. Others were counterproductive and childish. Considering the political and historical underpinnings of discourse, I think that there are six questions we need to ask in evaluating any particular act.
1. Have the means used been successful at creating social or institutional change in the past?
2. Were the changes brought about by those means, on balance, desirable?
3. Will the intended change be a net good for the community or communities affected?
4. If the form of protest has been successful before, do the same conditions prevail to make these means effective in the present, as they were in the past? If not, is the protest otherwise likely to bring about its intended change?
5. Will the goodness of the intended change outweigh the unintended consequences of the of protest?
6. Are the means of protest necessary to achieve the intended change? Do other possible means have fewer negative consequences?
Obviously, questions 1 and 2 apply only to cases where past success is used to justify present action, for example, in the case of sit-ins or meeting takeovers. The latter four, however, should disqualify any act from being a valid form of protest if any of them are answered in the negative. In descending order of importance and ascending order of difficulty for organizers to achieve: we obviously should not condone a protest, the goals of which are actually bad for those involved. But even if they are good, we should not condone a protest if it certainly won’t achieve any of them. If it does achieve them, it deserves contempt if it is so disruptive that its unintended consequences, e.g., the board of managers never again hosting an open, transparent meeting, are worse than the problem it successfully alleviates. But given that protest will by nature create some disruptive harm, if there are better ways to bring about intended change, then we should pursue those instead.
I believe that this heuristic has both prescriptive power for people planning activism and descriptive power for people evaluating it after it happens.
Angry Philosophy 