LETTER: Communication problems alienate Rupp from protests
To the editor:
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. With the spring have come some major headaches for ex-Rice President George Rupp.
Students arriving soon for tours of Columbia University are in for a surprise. Hamilton Hall, the main undergraduate academic building, has been occupied for 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 has seems to have surprisingly little hold on the situation, it is equally obvious that the president, along with his key staff, are 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 to 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 and hostility continue to escalate.
But the university can diffuse 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.
And 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. A better model is buying an expensive car.
The similarities are not limited to price. Columbia students of diverse backgrounds want their school to develop scholarly resources to help them claim their ethnic identities, to help them overcome the continuing effects of historical injustices against minorities.
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.
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 chants against the required courses in Western civilization such as, "Hey hey, ho ho, this racist core has got to go."
To get out 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 Latino 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 of the other business of the university.
The compromise will leave no one happy, but it is far better than the alternative. In order to pressure the protesters to accept compromise, the administration should make its offers public.
Perhaps the only lesson out of all of this is for the nation's high school seniors, many of whom will be choosing their colleges this month. The lesson is that universities and colleges differ not just in size and location, but also in curricula, not just in flavor but also 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 as well. 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.
Avi Green
Columbia University '96
New York, N.Y.
This item appeared in the Opinion section of the April 19, 1996 issue.
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