Reaching for Change

Tuesday, April 16, 1996

Students should not expect immediate curricula evolutionBy Avi
Green

April has finally come with spring warmth, the occasional flower
and, for thousands of high school seniors across the country,
letters from university admissions departments bearing acceptances
or rejections.

Students arriving soon for tours of Columbia University are in
for a surprise. Hamilton Hall, the main academic undergraduate
building, has been occupied for three days now by student
protesters. Another building was stormed by students earlier in the
week, and rallies and protests are ongoing.

About 200 students took Hamilton Hall on Thursday evening as
part of an effort to convince administrators to create a department
of ethnic studies. Among the protesters are three hunger strikers
who have not eaten since April 1. The students think the
administrators are blindly loyal to a racist, sexist past and are
persecuting the protesters unfairly.

If only the truth were so simple. Although university President
George Rupp seems to have surprisingly little hold on the
situation, it is equally obvious that the president, along with his
key staff, is neither racist nor blindly loyal to institutional
precedent.

The problem the Columbia administration does have is the
inability to communicate well and consistently with the students.
For example, although top administrators call disciplinary action
against the protesters negotiable, some university staff served
warnings of pending disciplinary action in a letter ­ a letter
not sent via e-mail or placed in their mailboxes, but rather
brought into their rooms and placed upon their beds. The university
used its master keys to intrude in an obvious and reprehensible way
on the students’ privacy.

As a result, the protests continue to escalate. The numbers of
student protesters grow, and many among them have become embittered
and hostile. But the university can defuse the ethnic studies
situation before it grows worse through a combination of good faith
negotiation and intelligent public relations.

It would behoove the administration to follow such a course. In
1968, when the administration attempted to avoid negotiation with
students protesting the planned construction of a gym in
Morningside Park, students seized six buildings and held them until
the police retook them by force. The negative publicity and rancor
which ensued undermined Columbia’s academic mission both internally
and externally. The wounds to the community have only fully healed
in the last 10 years. The university administration needs to
explain its own position.

In this day of $20,000 tuitions, students naturally believe that
as consumers they are entitled to a university which hears and
responds to their complaints swiftly.

But the metaphor is always expressed incorrectly, as if the
students were food shoppers in New York buying bagels, with many
choices and the ability to change stores at will. A better model is
buying an expensive car, as parents immediately realize, but
students almost never do.

The similarities are not limited to price. Universities, like
cars, are not changed and modified very easily. A Taurus cannot be
converted to look like a Toyota very quickly if one has a change of
heart after purchase. It would be easier just to sell the old car
and buy a new one of the desired type; it would be even easier to
simply buy the Toyota in the first place or else accept the
Taurus.

In a like manner, academically conservative, socially liberal
Columbia can not easily come or quickly come to model a more
radical school like UC Berkeley. Columbia students of diverse
backgrounds want their school to develop scholarly resources to
help them claim their ethnic identities, help them overcome the
continuing effects of historical injustices against minorities.
They want an ethnic studies department to lead the charge, and they
want the department now.

The protesters have underestimated the pressures keeping
Columbia as it is, and these do not stem merely from the
administrators or the Greek-inspired architecture. Ethnic studies
advocates at Columbia wonder why, knowing how much their families
have to pay.

The faculty of the university, all fiercely partisan to their
own schools and departments, and generally much more conservative
than the students, have no desire for a new, expensive department.
Funds are no longer as loose as they once were, thanks to the
shrinking contribution of the federal and state governments to
higher education.

The alumni, whose annual giving almost matches the received
revenue from tuition, wish to preserve their alma mater’s strengths
and not dilute them in new studies devised somewhere left and west
of their own hearts. They have also been alienated by the
protesters’ chants against Columbia’s required courses in Western
civilization, such as "Hey hey, ho, ho, this racist core has got to
go."

To get out of its current dilemma, the university will have to
agree to some of the students’ demands, probably by agreeing to
hire some new faculty to teach Asian American and Latina/o studies,
and by giving general amnesty to the students involved in the
protests. In return, the students will have to temporarily postpone
their wishes for a department, agree to end the seizure of Hamilton
and the hunger strikes and promise to arrange future rallies for
the spring in a way that will not impede classes, research or any
other business of the university.

The compromise will leave no one happy, but it is far better
than the alternative ­ continued strife and the certain
hospitalization of the hunger strikers, along with the negative
publicity all that entails.

In order to pressure the protesters to accept compromise, the
administration should make its offers public. If good-faith and
significant offers are rejected by the heads of the ethnic studies
protest, support for the protests among the student body will
erode.

Perhaps the only lesson out of all of this is for the nation’s
high school seniors ­ many of whom will choose their colleges
this month. Universities and colleges differ not just in size and
location, but also in curricula, not just in flavor but in
substance.

If a college lacks a desired program now, don’t expect it to
build one in the next four years. Requirements, for better or
worse, will largely remain the same, also. Colleges, seniors should
note, live longer than humans and change much more slowly. The
growing pains, too, are as bad as those of any teenager.

Green is a senior at Columbia University.