The Morris campus of the University of Minnesota is quiet. We’re small and rural, so I think we lack the critical mass to spark substantial protests, but universities in the Twin Cities are taking up our slack. They’re organizing, building an encampment, and delivering demands.

Students rallied and set up tents at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus, as well as at Hamline University in St. Paul, as anti-war protests continue into a second week.

At the U of M, hundreds of protesters called on the school to divest from weapons manufacturers and companies tied to the Israeli military. The students also want the school to end study abroad programs in Israel.

At around 7:30 p.m., police gave dispersal orders, prompting many to link arms around the grassy area in front of Northrop Memorial Auditorum, where more than 30 tents stood.

Good for them! They are demonstrating peacefully and righteously, although that doesn’t prevent campus police from moving in and arresting students. And, as usual, there are accusations that protesting Israel and Zionism is anti-Semitic — it’s not, but we have to recognize that there are anti-Semitic groups all across the country who are exploiting these protests.

Columbia University administrators are doing a fine job of showing how not to respond to student protests. They set deadlines for students to leave and have threatened them with the thugs called cops, and in response, the students ignored the deadlines and have occupied several campus buildings. Stupid administrators. Instead of listening and recognizing student grievances, they’ve managed to escalate the situation. The problem here is that the administrators are incompetent and don’t believe they have any obligations to the students. The students are the reason the university exists!

The real rioters are cops and college presidents. Students and faculty are linking arms and condemning genocide, while administrators shriek and wail in dismay and send in cops with clubs, guns, and gas to break them up.

The past week or so has been, in many ways, unfathomable: Palestine solidarity protests sprung up at college campuses across the country; Local and state police resorted to violence to break many of them up; Some universities changed their rules last minute just so they could criminalize previously benign student and faculty activity; Prosecutors in most jurisdictions with arrests won’t say if they’ll charge the protesters. Meanwhile in Gaza, multiple mass graves filled with hospital patients were uncovered.

On top of it all, Christian Zionists—in and out of Congress—tried to take over as the true defenders of Israel, while failing to mention why they so zealously defend it. (Hint: If the Jews return to Israel, it will hasten the return of Jesus and an armageddon. Just don’t ask them what happens to the Jews once armageddon happens. Another hint: We go to hell.) Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested in a speech on Columbia’s campus that it might be time to send in the National Guard. Evangelical preachers led a crowd that yelled things like “Go home, terrorists!”, “Go back to Gaza!” and “You want to camp? Go camp in Gaza!” at student protesters. If this all sounds crazy, that’s because it is crazy.

Oh, and about those prohibited activities — here’s a list from the University of Florida.

As has been pointed out online, many of those prohibited activities would shut down tailgating at football games, which most universities regard as a sacred rite.

Faculty, with a few notable exceptions, have been supportive of students’ right to protest. In fact, the Barnard AAUP faculty voted unanimously to make a statement of “no confidence” in the college president. I had to gasp at that — a group of 102 faculty members all agreed on something? I can’t imagine the Morris campus senate doing anything like that, and it probably would take hours of wrangling back and forth to even get a tepid statement out of them. Things must be getting extreme at Barnard.

They tried to do something similar at Columbia, but fell short, and settled for a compromise resolution that was still pretty damning. That’s more like the fractious faculty I know.

At Columbia University, a proposal to censure university president Minouche Shafik fell short, but a resolution calling for an investigation passed by a vote of 62-14 on Friday, according to the New York Times. Shafik has been scrutinized since a decision last week to summon New York police to the campus and authorize them to dismantle an encampment, resulting in the arrest of more than 100 student protesters.

After a two-hour meeting on Friday, the university’s senate approved a resolution that Shafik’s administration had undermined academic freedom and disregarded the privacy and due process rights of students and faculty members by calling in the police and shutting down the protest.

I wonder what it takes to get college presidents to recognize how badly they are fucking up. We’ve got protests sweeping across the nation, they keep generating horrendously terrible optics by sending armored mobs of cops to beat up students and faculty and throwing them in jail, their faculty are sending them strongly worded complaints, and still they keep playing the same stupid games. I don’t have any kids in college anymore, but if they were, and if I saw them getting thrown down and handcuffed at the behest of some asshole college president, I’d be furious and looking to help my kids transfer to some place that isn’t a militarized camp run by wannabe fascists. If I had a kid looking to enroll in college, I’d be torn but what I see at Columbia: the students seem awesome, but man is that place mismanaged. Like a lot of schools right now.

The most encouraging thing I’m seeing about the protests is that wow, the kids are all right. They get it. They are doing the right thing. I would remind them of these words by Frederick Douglass:

Right now, I’m seeing some of the anti-protest Right whining about the encampments, but they’re blocking the siiiiidewaaaalk in the same way that people complained about Black Lives Matter marches, but they’re blocking traaaaffic. Yeah? Too bad. You’re being confronted with a minor inconvenience while Palestinian people are seeing whole families murdered. Get over it.

Stop the genocide, the students will stop troubling your conscience. It’s that easy.

They’re everywhere. In the cities, on the streets, on college campuses.

It’s always a one-sided conversation, but they call it free speech.

A tenured college professor explains why they are quitting.

I’m done. I’m out. I’m giving up my tenure. I earned that tenure through endless nights and weekends in libraries, in front of screens, banging away at deep thoughts on Bakhtin that a few dozen people would read. I earned it grading countless papers and leading countless peer-review workshops. Now, for the first time since my early 20s, there’s no more students to shepherd. No more papers to grade. No more pointless department meetings to sit through. No more conferences or professional development workshops that I’m supposed to get reimbursed for, but never do.

It feels weird.

I’m leaving because my university, like so many others out there, refuses to get with the times. Six months ago, my dean promised to support my bid for a remote teaching position. Nothing would’ve changed. I’ve been teaching online for the last four years. Before asking me to quit, my dean scheduled a special phone call to ask if I was okay teaching a heavier course load for a lower salary, in exchange for this special concession. On top of that, I was already designing a slew of new courses they desperately needed. I planned those courses down to the day, and even wrote a free textbook for it along with videos for other teachers to use. I was also unofficially doing administrative work, and that was going to become an official job duty.

So much of that hits home. Especially that asking “if I was okay teaching a heavier course load for a lower salary.” I’m at a good university that treats the faculty a little better than that, but we do get some bad ideas from the higher ups, like at a recent meeting, an administrator announced that they basically had a predetermined target faculty:student ratio, and because our enrollments were down, they weren’t going to hire any replacement faculty until that ratio was reached. That’s a decision made without regard for the education we have to deliver.

Imagine that you’ve got a budget that can’t cover the cost of four tires on your car, so you decide to maintain three, but the fourth one…well, we’ll just let it wear out, go bald, go flat, maybe shred itself to pieces as you drive down the freeway. The car still runs, it’s maybe just a bit unsafe and kind of inefficient and making horrible noises while you drive. Is that a smart move?

It’s the same with a university. You might think you’re economizing by shutting down foreign language programs or letting the physics department wither away or shaving away at faculty salaries, but it’s going to destroy you in the long run. While deploring the reduction in student enrollment, it doesn’t help to take a knife to the whole reason students come to the university — and it’s not because we have such wonderful administrators. But the university administrators are in charge of the pursestrings, and the purse is filled by politicians and trustees and bureaucrats who wouldn’t be caught dead in a classroom.

The logical conclusion of this trend is summarized by a modest proposal from another college professor.

I will use Pomona College, where I have taught for decades, as a specific example of how easily my proposal might be implemented. In 1990, Pomona had 1,487 students, 180 tenured and tenure-track professors, and 56 administrators — deans, associate deans, assistant deans and the like, not counting clerical staff, cleaners and so on. As of 2022, the most recent year for which I have data, the number of students had increased 17 percent, to 1,740, while the number of professors had fallen to 175. The number of administrators had increased to 310, an average of 7.93 new administrators per year. Even for a college as rich as Pomona, this insatiable demand for administrators will eventually cause a budget squeeze. Happily, there is a simple solution.

Pomona’s professor-administrator ratio has plummeted from 3.21 to 0.56. A linear extrapolation of this trend gives a professor-administrator ratio of zero within this decade. This trend can be accelerated by not replacing retiring or departing professors and by offering generous incentives for voluntary departures. To maintain its current 9.94 student-faculty ratio, the college need only admit fewer students each year as the size of its faculty withers away. A notable side effect would be a boost in Pomona’s U.S. News & World Report rankings as its admissions rate approaches zero.

And just like that, the college would be rid of two nuisances at once. Administrators could do what administrators do — hold meetings, codify rules, debate policy, give and attend workshops, and organize social events — without having to deal with whiny students and grumpy professors.

I think it was supposed to be funny, but I didn’t laugh. It’s far too close to the actual strategy being implemented on college campuses right now.

I suspect that most people who read this site don’t read the Gateway Pundit blog. I don’t either, but I know of it because that blog was founded a year or two after Pharyngula, and quickly skyrocketed to amazing amounts of traffic — it made me wonder what the secret was. It turns out that the secret was to lie constantly and make crap up, a strategy I wasn’t willing to adopt.

It was also run by Jim Hoft, The Dumbest Man on the Internet. I also wasn’t willing to lobotomize myself to compete.

Don’t waste your time reading it, though — Wikipedia has the short and extremely accurate summary.

The Gateway Pundit (TGP) is an American far-right fake news website. The website is known for publishing falsehoods, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories.

It’s also going away, I assume. Gateway Pundit is bankrupt fiscally in addition to morally.

The founder of the Gateway Pundit, the infamous conspiracy theory site, announced on Wednesday that the company had declared bankruptcy.

Jim Hoft published a message on the website that read, “TGP Communications, the parent company of The Gateway Pundit, recently made the decision to seek protection under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code in the Southern District of Florida as a result of the progressive liberal lawfare attacks against our media outlet.”

They told one lie too many. Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss won a lawsuit against them for their false report that they’d rigged the presidential election. One more propaganda outlet down!

A classic moral panic is growing in Utah. The target: furries. Or, rather, imaginary furries. A few middle school kids wearing headbands has been inflated into wild stories of kids in animal costumes rampaging through the school, bullying and harassing the conservative kiddos.

Last Wednesday, dozens of students skipped class to gather outside a Payson, Utah, middle school for hours and chant, “We the people, not the animals!”—a protest launched over the dramatic accusation that their classmates were running wild as “furries” and attacking other students without consequence.

Much of the hysteria, however, has been blown out of proportion.

Footage from the scene showed them hoisting signs declaring, “Compelled speech is not free speech,” “We won’t be compelled,” and “We just want to learn.” A fourth sign read, “You can’t ignore us,” with a drawing of an animal print covered with a prohibition sign.

“They’re sitting on all fours in class,” one student told conservative livestreamer Adam Bartholomew as the kids (and some parents) lined the road to Mt. Nebo Middle School. “They’re wearing animal costumes. They’re growling at us, barking at us in class, it’s very distracting.”

“It’s very sexual and inappropriate,” the pupil added of their tween classmates accused of being “furries,” a subculture that dresses up as anthropomorphic animals and which has become a conservative bogeyman.

“They’re wearing butt-plug tails underneath skirts. They’re wearing dog collars to school with leashes hanging off. It’s not OK.”

As you might guess from the right-wing buzzwords on the signs being paraded by the offended parents and their dutiful offspring, this is a ginned-up controversy. They’ve got Glen Beck and Libs of TikTok riled up, which is exactly what they want, but none of the ‘extreme’ events they’re talking about have actually happened.

“We’re not really sure how it exploded as quickly and as crazily as it did, but what we can tell you is there have been zero incidents of students biting, licking, all of those things that have been claimed,” Sorenson continued.
…
“We’ve never had any reports, either from students or any observations by teachers or administration,” Sorenson said. “We do have cameras in our buildings, so we can see literally every inch of the building. And we have not captured any of those types of events occurring. So those, as far as we’re concerned, are just completely fictitious.”

Sorenson said the district doesn’t allow kids to wear masks or costumes, but the accused “furries” were asked to stop wearing headbands with ears; they complied immediately.

Further, all you have to do is look at the parents to see where these stories came from, and why.

“I’m glad this is going to go national,” wrote Eric Moutsos, a dad and former cop who once made headlines for refusing to ride at the front of a Salt Lake City gay pride parade.

The chat also included Bartholomew’s wife Cari, who is running for the Utah State Board of Education and has decried the “hard left educational turn” in the state.

One parent of a student organizer insisted that her daughter single-handedly planned the protest and a petition that collected over 1,000 signatures. “If you are hearing otherwise, YOU ARE BEING LIED TO. #LIVE NOT BY LIES.”

Some messages, however, seemed to indicate the parents shaped the kids’ protest posters.

“The kids really want to hammer this home,” the woman wrote in an earlier message. “WE HAVE TO CHANGE OUR POSTERS. The message needs to be: I will not comply. Compelled speech is not free speech. Live not by lies.”

Pledger, in her own message, advised parents to tell their kids to remain calm and not engage in teasing or bullying. “THE OPPOSITION SIDE WANTS OUTRAGE!” she wrote.

I think I know who is benefitting from outrage, and it isn’t kids, or furries, or the school. Outrage is what the Libs of TikTok and far-right freaks live on, and if they have to, they’ll make shit up.

Caitlin Flanagan is one of those creepy conservatives who manages to get regularly published in so-called liberal magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and simultaneously is loved by right-wing free speech warriors. She gets away with saying things like this, somehow.

What, exactly, are these faculty members supposed to be arrested for? Is it for peacefully protecting the rights of minority students to express their political opinions? I thought that’s what we are supposed to do!

I mean, for decades now I’ve let creationists and far-right students state their beliefs in my classroom (of course, I would then tell them they were wrong, and why, but they could speak their minds). It would have been so much simpler if I could have just called campus security on dissenters from my holy opinions and had them hauled away. Do I get to do that now?

Tom Cotton has a plan to deal with those rioting students at Columbia.

The “mob” of “Jewish brethren” holding Seder.

Has anyone else noticed what a colossal ass Tom Cotton is?

If I lived a good bit further east, I’d be here this afternoon:

There have been several days of peaceful pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University and Barnard College, which is not surprising. That’s what students should do; if other students want to rally for Israel, that’s fine, too. Unfortunately, the administration does not understand free speech at all, adopting the right-wing definition that says you are only allowed to freely agree with them.

They turned the police loose on the students. Protest leaders were summarily dismissed from the university, and evicted from housing, given minutes to clear out and get out.

They attempted to shut down the campus radio station. They prohibited students from putting posters on their dorm room doors. They colluded with conservatives to silence any protests.

The students sat on the ground and sang as police in riot gear approached them. Eventually, more than 100 of them would be arrested; their tents, protest signs and Palestinian flags were gathered into trash bags by the police and thrown away. One video showed officers and university maintenance workers destroying food that had been donated to the encampment, making sure it would be inedible. According to student journalists reporting from WKCR, Columbia University’s student radio station, one arrested student protester asked the police to be allowed to go to their dorm to collect medication and was denied; as a result, they went into shock. The arrested students were charged with “trespassing” on the campus that they are charged more than $60,000 a year to attend.

The day before her administration asked the New York police department to storm their campus and arrest their students, Minouche Shafik, the Columbia University president, testified before Congress, saying that she wanted her university to be a safe and welcoming environment for everyone. But Shafik, who was called to testify after missing a hearing last year where the presidents of Penn and Harvard were each grilled on their insufficient hostility to pro-Palestinian students, appeared eager to please the Republican-controlled committee. The Penn and Harvard presidents who had testified each lost their jobs soon thereafter; Shafik clearly entered the hearing room determined to keep her own.

A “safe and welcoming environment,” hah. Shafik and others made a knee-jerk over-reaction to the existence of opinions that their moneyed conservative interests disliked, and suddenly they’re the Gestapo. Students have since occupied one of the lawns at the university with tents and banners flying, and you can guess how the administration is reacting.

In yet another sign of the ongoing division between students and faculty on one side, and administrators on the other, the Barnard and Columbia faculty members of the American Association of University Professors have loudly deplored the actions of the administration.

Joint Statement by the American Association of University Professors,

Barnard and Columbia Chapters

April 19, 2024

The American Association of University Professors has defined two central pillars of higher education in America: academic freedom and shared governance: the freedom to teach and do research without interference from entities external to the profession; and the “inescapable interdependence among governing board, administration, faculty, students.” In the last three days, Columbia University President Shafik and her administration have seriously violated both. We are shocked at her failure to mount any defense of the free inquiry central to the educational mission of a university in a democratic society and at her willingness to appease legislators seeking to interfere in university affairs. She has demonstrated flagrant disregard of shared governance in her acceptance of partisan charges that anti-war demonstrators are violent and antisemitic and in her unilateral and wildly disproportionate punishment of peacefully protesting students.

President Shafik’s testimony before the House Education and Workforce Committee on April 17 has profoundly disturbed us. In the face of slanderous assaults on Columbia faculty and students and of gross interference in academic practices by Congressional inquisitors, President Shafik not only did not object—she capitulated to their demands. Academic freedom was formulated from its very beginning to safeguard faculty from political or other non-academic sources of intrusion. President Shafik, the co-chairs of the Board of Trustees, and the former Dean of the Law School allowed this freedom for Columbia faculty to be publicly shredded. They effectively pledged, on the Congressional record, to end academic freedom at Columbia.

President Shafik’s decision on April 18 to call upon the New York Police Department to arrest over one hundred students for engaging in a peaceful protest is a grotesque violation of norms of shared governance. Section 444 of University Statutes, put in place after the police attacks of 1968, requires “consultation” with the University Senate executive committee before anything so drastic as yesterday’s attack would be permitted. President Shafik’s administration did not consult; they informed the committee of its decision. “The Executive Committee did not approve the presence of NYPD on campus,” said the Executive Committee Chair, adding that the Committee came to their decision “unequivocally.” President Shafik’s decision to invite the NYPD to campus was thus undertaken unilaterally, disregarding the very idea of shared governance.

In Wednesday’s hearing, President Shafik repeatedly claimed that she was inaugurating a new era at Columbia. Her actions thus far suggest that this era will be one of repressed speech, political restrictions on academic inquiry, and punitive discipline against the University’s own students and faculty. As the protesters’ chant rightly states, “Protest is democracy; this is a travesty!” AAUP Barnard and Columbia pledge continued support for our students’ right to protest and to speak freely, and for our colleagues’ right to teach and to write freely within their domains of expertise. We have lost confidence in our president and administration, and we pledge to fight to reclaim our university.

The administration is selling out the university and betraying faculty and students.

“It’s the most appalling thing I’ve ever seen,” said Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropology professor who was on the school’s lawn when the police entered. “The students were extraordinary. Chanting. Crying. It felt like a total violation of everything an academic institution is supposed to be.” She said the arrests were political theater aimed at appeasing Congress without concern that students were collateral damage.

“Palestine was always going to be the issue that broke this university,” said Ry Spada, 24, a history major who is Jewish and was part of the pro-Palestinian protest Thursday night, identifying as non-Zionist. “This year and this topic.”

James Applegate, an astronomy professor who is part of the executive committee of the Columbia University Senate, said he is more concerned about what happened on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, the ongoing loss of academic freedom and the culture on campus than he is about police making peaceful arrests of student protesters.

I don’t even understand that last comment. Students are being arrested, dismissed, and evicted — it’s important to stand on principle, but these are young people who are being actively harmed. I stand with the students and a liberated Palestine. This isn’t stopping, and shame on any college professor who supports the tyranny of Columbia University and Barnard College.

I’m so used to thinking of myself as a radical iconoclastic weirdo, but now you’re telling me that I’m actually holding traditional American values?

Maybe I am the real conservative here? This is messing with my identity.