It might be a good idea for Arizona’s three state universities to offer a course in the history of protests in the United States.
Not just for students born and raised in the narcissistic demands of the internet age, who would find it illuminating, but for the university administration, for whom it seems absolutely necessary.
Last week, authorities arrested 70 protesters in an encampment at Arizona State University, among them 2O students. There also were demonstrations and arrests at the University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University.
ASU suspended the arrested students, which could impact their ability to finish out the school year, among other things.
The university’s Media Relations and Strategic Communications office noted the suspensions online by way of an “ASU Protest Encampment” page it has created, saying violations by students included “tents, overnight presence, creating a university disturbance and being in a reservable space that wasn’t reserved by ASU students.”
All of which — if there was no violence involved — adds up to one thing: Overreaction.
I get it.
Lots of people don’t like the protests that have been going on at universities all across the country. In part, it’s because there is a confusing amalgam of reasons that the protesters showed up. Not all of them good. And some of them — like antisemitism — vile.
In an essay for The Guardian, former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, now a professor at the University of California, Berkley, wrote, “while protest movements are often ignited by many different things and attract an assortment of people with a range of motives, this one is centered on one thing: moral outrage at the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people — most of them women and children — in Gaza.”
These days, a fractured media gets to pick and choose fractured motives for the varying cliques of our fractured society.
ASU, however, like most universities, says that it does not judge protesters on their point of view. Or, as President Michael Crow put it in a statement, “We can share thoughts and ideas without repressing the thoughts and ideas of others.”
Why antisemitic protests:Are far more vile now
Protests are always messy. And the protests that get the most attention — which is the whole point of a protest — often go against the law.
During the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan there were many protests and many arrests.
Some occurred just outside the White House. Some tried to disrupt government services, like blocking the Internal Revenue Service’s Washington, D.C., offices.
During the Vietnam War, thousands were arrested during protests. Sometimes in a single day.
The four freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro who were refused service at a F. W. Woolworth store lunch counter in 1960, and refused to leave, were violating a law. As were the dozens, then hundreds who followed them.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested nearly 30 times. After leading a march through Birmingham, Ala., he was hauled off to jail and placed in solitary confinement, where he wrote his famous “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.”
It included passages like, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere …” and “it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But … it is just as wrong, or even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.”
The students at ASU are not Dr. King. They are not martyrs.
But while you may not agree with them, they took a stand against what they believe to be an injustice. They demonstrated a concern for human suffering. And in today’s cynical world, that should count for something.
You may not want to praise them, but it is a mistake to punish them. We might even lament the fact that in ASU’s vast student body, only 20 of them took that risk.
Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com.
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Drop charges, lift suspensions on ASU student protesters
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06.05.2024
It might be a good idea for Arizona’s three state universities to offer a course in the history of protests in the United States.
Not just for students born and raised in the narcissistic demands of the internet age, who would find it illuminating, but for the university administration, for whom it seems absolutely necessary.
Last week, authorities arrested 70 protesters in an encampment at Arizona State University, among them 2O students. There also were demonstrations and arrests at the University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University.
ASU suspended the arrested students, which could impact their ability to finish out the school year, among other things.
The university’s Media Relations and Strategic Communications office noted the suspensions online by way of an “ASU Protest Encampment” page it has created, saying violations by students included “tents, overnight presence, creating a university disturbance and being in a reservable space that wasn’t reserved by ASU students.”
All of........
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