Chloe Lew: Student protests necessary to bring issues to light on campus

There’s a tendency to measure student protests by their sheer size and volume. The more noise the students make, the more successful a demonstration appears.

But our college campuses may now be taking the more peaceful route. In a Chronicle of Higher Education article, professors and administrators in higher education suggest there has been a nationwide shift in the way college administrations respond to student protests: Rather than confronting and punishing students, administrators are now more likely to try collaborating with them to find solutions.

Administrative cooperation with the students protesting can go a long way toward finding solutions to student problems. But some administrative cooperation goes so far as to jump over the protest itself, brushing off the inherent value of a communicative and motivational public demonstration by insisting issues can be solved solely through administrative meetings and resources.

The willingness of an administration to meet with students and discuss solutions does not replace the need for a protest itself, which serves to publicize an issue and rally a campus around it, a separate mission from merely solving the issue behind closed doors. If all campus issues were solved by a limited group of student activists and administrators, the rest of the student body would be left in the dark about issues relevant to them, such as the tuition hike plan that students are currently protesting.

This is a distinction that administrators must recognize when they attempt to cooperate with protesting students: administration is an avenue toward solutions, and protests are a method of garnering awareness.

Both parts of the equation are necessary in addressing campus issues, and this applies to the ones at the University of California as well. In November 2011, university police officers used batons and pepper spray on students at Occupy protests at UC Berkeley and UC Davis.

In the aftermath of what struck the general public as excessive police force, then-UC President Mark G. Yudof called upon Vice President and General Counsel Charles Robinson and former dean of UC Berkeley School of Law Christopher Edley Jr. to review and make recommendations to the UC system about how campuses could respond to future protests and civil disobedience.

Neatly organized in the Robinson-Edley report, many of these recommendations that seek to ensure a balance of both student safety and freedom of speech are currently being implemented across UC campuses.

At UCLA, the implemented recommendations for protest management focus on employing administrators in the Student Affairs office to reach out to student groups and supply them with information about First Amendment rights and civil disobedience. Student Affairs also offers to staff student demonstrations and provide security through University of California Police Department officers, who are specially trained in crowd management and mediation.

In this way, Student Affairs acts as a middle ground between students and administrators, but the office must be careful that in helping to build the relationship between students and administrators, it does not obstruct the relationship between student protesters and the rest of the campus by removing the step of public demonstration.

For instance, one paragraph of the Robinson-Edley implementation report lists ways that UCLA’s Student Affairs works to make student demonstrations safe. In that same paragraph on safety, the report details how Student Affairs advises demonstration organizers to find alternate methods of accomplishing their goals, other than through protests.

In other words, a method of ensuring safety at student protests is to not have a protest at all.

To understand why administrative cooperation does not mitigate the need for a protest, we must understand that there is a point to protests beyond the endgame of compromise with authority. Protests are held for issues to be heard by entire campuses, so that organizers can rally students, staff and faculty around a cause that might otherwise slip through the cracks. Over the decades, our campus has been able to mobilize students from various pockets of campus to Meyerhoff Park to unite against issues from divestment from companies doing business in South Africa in the 1980s to police brutality in the aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. just last month.

Private and intimate meetings with administrators don’t allow issues such as campus climate to receive the public attention needed to be understood as campus-wide problems.

Take, for example, the protests about the racist and sexist flyer sent to the Asian American Studies Center this past February. The rally and town hall meeting protesting the act of discrimination were attended by faculty and administration and led to multiple meetings between the student leaders and administration. But it was arguably the media outlets present at the town hall meeting, student protesters on campus and social media that gave the issue proper attention.

And often protests result after a culmination of incidents surrounding an ongoing issue. In these cases, it is vital to educate and rally students around the larger cause – in this instance, campus climate was the overarching issue, not a specific offensive flyer.

Campus administrators cannot treat protests as if they are in response to isolated incidents. Supporting students means supporting their protests, and trying to convince students that protests are a step that can be skipped does not count as support.

Email Lew at [email protected] or tweet her at @chloelew8. Send general comments to [email protected] or tweet us at @DBOpinion.