Our View: More than one outcome for protests, kids
Another week, another demand for a resignation. That’s the way it is on America’s college campuses.
It started with the University of Missouri earlier this month – an understandable reaction to months of unaddressed racist incidents, including a swastika scrawled in feces on a dorm wall. When the football team, and its coach, threatened to boycott a nationally televised game, the system’s president stepped down. He was followed a short time later by the chancellor.
Since then, the floodgates have opened. There have been protests on dozens of campuses across the country, from Ivy League institutions such as Yale and Harvard to liberal arts bastions like Occidental and Claremont McKenna colleges in California.
Students are mad as hell. They want safe spaces for marginalized communities and an immediate end to microaggressions. They want diversity training and ethnic studies classes added to the curriculum and, in some cases, made mandatory. They want justice!
And if they don’t get it, well there can be no peace. Like a fire-breathing pet dragon, they will summon the power of social media and burn the reputation of any school or person standing between them and immediate gratification.
Problem is, many of these young adults don’t seem to have grasped the concept of proportional response.
Claremont McKenna College offers a sad, but ideal example. Dean of Students Mary Spellman responded to a Latina student’s email that the college, and she personally, wanted to help kids “who don’t fit our CMC mold.” Soon, a few students were conducting a hunger strike. The head of the college publicly sympathized with them. After that, the dean quit. The students issued a list of demands anyway.
When wronged, not every a remedy must start with, “quit – or else!” Sometimes an explanation is in order. Often, the words “I’m sorry” should be a good enough response.
While the comment from Spellman, who is white, could have been better phrased, there’s a difference between an insensitive remark and indifference to the needs of students. Her faux pas appears not to be born of malice, but of hurried phrasing. Her email was actually an invitation to meet with the student.
To be just, punishments must fit the crime. Losing a job is a severe punishment that should be reserved only for the most egregious crimes.
Clearly, these students have learned that while they are ensconced in our nation’s campuses they have the power to right some very real wrongs that students of color have faced sometimes for decades. But that epiphany is meaningless without the rest of the lesson: With power comes a responsibility to use it with care.
This story was originally published November 23, 2015 at 4:24 PM with the headline "Our View: More than one outcome for protests, kids."