Banning campouts in common areas is the kind of reasonable, content-neutral restriction on public protest that should be easy for universities to enforce. Their failure to do so has damaged their reputations, and now the discussion of “amnesty” for the student protesters discredits them further.
A recent AP article establishes the low-accountability mind-set among students, professors, and even the reporters who cover them:
The students’ plight has become a central part of protests, with students and a growing number of faculty demanding their amnesty. At issue is whether universities and law enforcement will clear the charges and withhold other consequences, or whether the suspensions and legal records will follow students into their adult lives. [Emphasis added.]
This quote seems practically designed to support the caricature of higher education as a halfway house for people battling Peter Pan syndrome. To state the obvious, the students are already adults! They are every bit as responsible for their actions as are adults who do not attend a university. That should mean accepting the consequences for breaking clearly established rules.
Few have. The AP article points to “hundreds” of students who have faced arrest or some sort of school discipline, but this is a total across several universities it surveyed, and it includes suspensions that were converted into mere probation. Columbia’s women’s college, Barnard, says it ended suspensions for “nearly all” students after exacting a promise that they would behave from now on. In my opinion, the appropriate punishment for willfully and persistently breaking university rules is expulsion, but the AP acknowledges it has been “rare.”
Even limited attempts at discipline have been met with outrage. A Columbia student calls her suspension “dystopian,” as she does not know when she will be allowed to finish her degree in comparative literature and society. The university is exhibiting “over-the-top callousness,” says a lawyer for a group of protesting students. Professors at Vanderbilt lodge the most head-scratching complaint when they condemn the punishments as “punitive.”
Perhaps the quote most damning of higher education comes at the end of the article:
Freshman Jack Petocz, one of those expelled, . . . said protesting in high school was what helped get him into Vanderbilt and secure a merit scholarship for activists and organizers. His college essay was about organizing walkouts in rural Florida to oppose Gov. Ron DeSantis’ anti-LGBTQ policies. “Vanderbilt seemed to love that,” Petocz said.
He makes a valid point. Universities cannot recruit lawbreaking protesters to campus and then expect them to refrain from lawbreaking protest. Universities also cannot negotiate with the lawbreakers and issue trifling discipline while expecting the lawbreaking to end. And, frankly, universities cannot offer effete majors like “comparative literature and society” while hoping their students’ commitment to rigorous scholarship will dissuade them from choosing a campout over a classroom. Punish the students, of course, but remember that the rot starts at the top.