University or Day Care?

In this morning’s Wisconsin State Journal story about the ongoing drama on the UW Madison campus I thought there were a couple of especially revealing quotes.

The first comes from Samer Alatout, a professor of community and environmental sociology who claims to have been injured on Wednesday when police removed the encampment of pro-Palestinian protesters on Library Mall. The State Journal paraphrased Alatout: “he sees his responsibility as protecting students’ intellectual freedom and their emotional, social and physical well-being.”

This whole attitude was the subject of an excellent 2018 book, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Somewhere along the line universities took on the idea that they should be day cares. It is not the job of a university to look after the emotional or social well-being of students. Most of them have parents for this and, anyway, they should be adults capable of handling this stuff on their own.

A university does have a responsibility to keep students physically safe to the extent adults can be protected from themselves. I agree that it is a professor’s job to protect intellectual freedom, but I have two observations about that. First. would Professor Alatout be at the ramparts protecting the intellectual freedom of College Republicans who invite a controversial conservative speaker to campus? And second, turning a university space into a campground is not protected intellectual freedom. It’s violating a perfectly reasonable university rule and faculty shouldn’t be supporting it.

So, along those lines I thought the show of support for the illegal encampment by university faculty yesterday was wrong. Support their right to protest, sure, but within the rules.

The second quote comes from Chancellor Mnookin, who said: “A number of people have asked me why I can’t just allow the encampment to stand. I can’t authorize a singular exception under Chapter 18 to one organization to protest in this manner. Not unless I’m prepared to make a similar decision, the same decision, for all other groups who might want something similar.”

Well… okay. We speculated in this space last week that this is one reason she may have ordered the tents removed by police. But then the tents went right back up, there’s even more of them now, and yet she now says that she won’t act because it would create a dangerous situation for all concerned. Well, so, isn’t she back at square one? If neo-Nazis set up an encampment next is she in any stronger position to do anything about it now?

In for a dime, in for a dollar. Once Mnookin ordered the tents down she needed to keep them down. It seems like it never occurred to anybody in Bascom Hall that the protesters would just reestablish their camp. Then she compounded the problem by opening negotiations with the protesters after she said she’d only talk after they voluntarily removed their tents.

On balance we continue to think that Mnookin should have just left the encampment alone. It would have gone away with commencement this weekend. As it is, she’s now provided the protesters with the oxygen they need and she’s actually in a worse position now than she was last week.