Ohio State University stands up to student protestors

April 11, 2016 • 1:30 pm

According to a report on April 6 by the NBC channel in Columbus, Ohio, Ohio State University students staged a sit-in the University’s Bricker Hall about issues of “diversity, sexual assault, and the university’s budget.” Here are some of the student statements and “demands” linked by the station:

PDF: #ReclaimOSU Press Statement

PDF: An Open Letter to President Drake From Concerned Faculty

PDF: #ReclaimOSU-Demands

The administration decided that the sit-in was a violation of the student code of conduct, as it disrupted people who worked in the building. The students who remained after a deadline would thus be subject to arrest and likely expulsion. In the video below, OSU Senior Vice President Jay Kasey explained to the demonstrators about their impending arrest and expulsion should they fail to leave the building:

This is a rare instance of a university standing up to students protests. (Most have let the students continue illegal sit-ins.) Of course, the students complain during the video that they shouldn’t be arrested, but that’s the nature of civil disobedience: you disobey the law, and you take the consequences—something that was part and parcel of the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties. Now, however, students want the right to break the law, or violate university regulations, without consequences.  After all, they’re Special Snowflakes.

Later that evening, and before the deadline, the students dispersed. I guess they didn’t adhere to their claim that they wouldn’t leave the building until their demands were met. Here’s the list of those demands:

Screen Shot 2016-04-11 at 7.57.31 AM

You can read more on the NBC site.

64 thoughts on “Ohio State University stands up to student protestors”

  1. Good news.

    Personally, I would have demanded a Ferrari.

    I am oppressed by virtue of not having one:(

    1. This bunch folded like a house of cards, and they weren’t too demanding to begin with. They would have settled for having just one of their short list of demands met. As it happens, they settled for none. What wimps.

  2. Look, there are most definitely instances in which entitled kids make entitled demands. I can’t emphasize this enough. But what on Earth is wrong with these demands? My God, that’s just the Progressive platform.

      1. What qualifications do they need to oppose moral turpitude? Perhaps just a brain capable of certain elementary moral calculations, leading to conclusions like: divest from companies that have a history of human rights abuses (if properly verified).

        1. They are specifically interested in human rights abuses allegedly perpetrated by Israel, which tells volumes about the way their brains operate.

          2. Amnesty has pages for many countries. To honor the host country of this blog, I am quoting the first sentence of the report about the USA:

            “There was no accountability nor remedy for crimes under international law committed in the secret detention programme operated by the CIA.”

            Nevertheless, I do not see the snowflakes demanding divestment from US companies en masse :-). They are interested specifically in the only Jewish-majority country in the world.

          3. “Nevertheless, I do not see the snowflakes demanding divestment from US companies en masse”

            Name that fallacy…

            I responded to the claim that by its wording seemed to imply that any human rights abuse allegations are bogus when aimed towards Israel.

          4. What horse hockey Peter. The comment was obviously a suggestion of antisemitic bias. Did you miss “specifically “?

      2. That would be none, seeing how they need someone to explain the budget to them.
        Then there’s the affiliation to BDS because Israel is evil.

        Oh noes, the big mean police wouldn’t let people bring them their homework or snacks. And then, sniff, they said I’d be arrested if I didn’t leave, sniff sniff, after they promised I could stay, sniff.

        What happened to being arrested as a badge of honor for protesting something you believed in?
        /rant off

    2. Yes, they do reflect the malign obsession of self-styled ‘progressives’ with the Arab-Israeli conflict. how many people have died in the conflict and how does that compare with other situations where I have literally never seen a Campus Left response (e.g. west Papua)?

    3. I’m on your side here. I’ve looked around, and I’m having a hard time finding anything too radical. One mention of fighting against ‘white supremacy’ raises an eyebrow for me, and their mention of supporting Palestine seems like typical leftist anti-Israeli stuff, but… that’s hardly demanding that race-segregated dorms be constructed.

      It looks to be a protest over ethical use of campus funding. For all I know, the school actually is engaged in unethical practices and that’s why they were so willing to threaten the students with expulsion.

      I should also note that the school did something I’d dissaprove of even if the students were regressives, and that was saying that they’d allow them to remain in the building until 5 AM, and later showing up around midnight and telling everyone to leave now. They made an arrangement with the protestors, then violated it for no particular reason I can think of.

      That, combined with the list of demands, gives me the tentative first impression that it is in fact the university in the wrong here. Obviously, I’d want to hear more, but this is definitely not the smackdown of regressive leftists I had initially thought it was.

  4. My Alma Mater. I was arrested during a Viet Nam war protest at THE Ohio State University (it didn’t have the ‘THE’ then) in 1970. We made an effort not to block students from classes (and many of us, including me, slipped out of the protest to attend class ourselves; it wasn’t easy to catch up in my grad quantum chemistry class), but we fully expected to be arrested and spend the night in jail. The police performed as expected. Jail with your friends for 10 hours is a relatively benign form of incarceration. Those of us in Columbus certainly had a better experience than the students protesting at Kent State at the same time.

    As I reflect on those times, my impression is that many, if not most, of the protestors were there for comradeship and fun and games. There was, in retrospect, a disturbing lack of understanding of the complex issues surrounding the war and a willingness to believe anything bad about the establishment. A few activists were really hard core and talking about armed conflict. I was myself appallingly uninformed about the war, although I had at least read ‘Fire in the Lake’ and knew some of the history.

    I’m not sure what the official stance of the University was at that time, but no one was threatened with expulsion for simply protesting as long as there was no violence, threat of violence or undue coercion of other students.

    1. Bet you still pine away for the confluence of the Olentangy and Scioto Rivers, doncha squidmaster?

  6. It turns out that everybody I know has lived and is still living on “unreal” food. As an exit strategy from this absurd, I’d suggest to everyone investing in the education of these snowflakes to divest urgently.

  7. This may sound weird but I’m fine with the arrests but wish they wouldn’t expel the students. A sit-in is a fairly standard and certainly nonviolent form of protest, and I’d rather students did stuff like that to voice their disapproval rather than resort to more anonymous, damaging types of protest out of fear they’ll be expelled. I think the University has the opportunity here to say ‘yes, you must accept the civic consequences of your protest. After you do, we’ll continue the conversation.’

    2. Agreed, Eric.
      Some of the protest demands are pretty silly, and interrupting the operation of the university should draw some consequences; but expelling students for protesting when their protests do not cause damage or major disruption to the university seems a bit much. It’s swatting a fly with a sledgehammer.

  8. Have a hard time not seeing this as kind of pathetic. They ask for access to the Budget and personnel who can explain the Budget to them. So I assume these are not Finance students? Hope they someday become interested in their country’s budget, or their county’s budget or maybe just their budget.

    1. A quick look at the signees to date…..
      Most were English, art or women’s gender student/staff/prof.
      Perhaps they don’t know how to read an Excel spreadsheet.

    2. I’m an engineer and ex project manager (not a very good or willing one!) and I’d still want to have someone else’s budget explained to me by someone ‘in the know’. The ways in which management hides stuff in budgets under cryptic and opaque headings still baffles me.

      cr

  9. They might be able to accomplish part of the locally sourced food thing if they did some research about cost and availability, and wrote up a proposal instead of demanding. 40% might not be feasible, but local in season produce at campus cafeterias (assuming they’re not too special to eat heir veggies) could be doable. But if they’re expecting campus catering by Whole Foods.. well, maybe they ought to go buy their own groceries.

    1. They probably think GMOs are dangerous and believe that food from a distance automatically adds more to climate change. Neither is necessarily true.

      1. The anti-GMO prejudice is my pet peeve. Europe is heavily infected with it (partly due to anti-Americanism). It is curious, however, how people make peace with the GMO technology as soon as they are in real need of a GMO product, such as recombinant insulin or growth hormone.

        1. Anti-GMO is a big deal here too, though not as bad as Europe. It annoys the beck out of me as well.

      2. I cringed a bit buying some ‘non-GMO’ strawberries yesterday. They were fresh and the price was right, but there’s nothing really natural about them.

        1. Yeah – it feels like validating them to be buying stuff with names like that. At least they hadn’t added the surcharge for being able to add non-GMO into the name. You probably lucky they weren’t organic as well!

          1. I can check to see if they are. Those were all they had though- it was paranoia berries or nothing. I tossed them in the blender with some store brand yogurt and mixed frozen berries of unknown origin, so maybe the paranoia was diluted.

        2. This is how stupid anti gmo’ers are. They complain and complain about the pesticides. Strawberries especially need to be sprayed with fungicides. So researchers at universities come up with a strawberry that does is resistant to fungicide. problem is everyone in the industry is scared to death to use it so wont fund continue R&D and regulatory safety testing and schools are not going to pay the cost for these either. So more pesticides are used and the continue to cry about MONSATAN.

  10. “We demand access to the budget and also demand you help us because we don’t understand it.”

    Pretty rich.

          1. Ah yes, that was the actual line. “Beer Bad” was the name of the episode.

            I like this exchange and also Xander yelling NOTHING CAN DEFEAT THE PENIS!

            Giles: I can’t believe you served Buffy that beer.
            Xander: I didn’t know it was evil.
            Giles: You knew it was beer.
            Xander: Well, excuse me Mr. I-Spent-the-60s-in-an-electric-kool-aid-funky-satan-groove.
            Giles: It was the early 70s.

          2. A while ago I bought all 7 seasons of Buffy, and all 5 of Angel, on DVD. I am looking forward to watching them from the beginning again (soon to be retired, so will have the time to do so).

          3. I began watching them on DVD after several different friends told me I’d like them and so I bought most either on sale or used.

    2. If only there were some way for university students to access one of those thingamabobs that provide the skills and knowledge that equip people to understand things. What’re they called again? Edu….Something?

  12. I wonder how many of the student protesters and concerned faculty personally adhere to the campaign demands listed? I support efforts to increase the use of locally sourced and sustainably grown/harvested food in most contexts, but it’s not exactly easy to achieve the 40% goal, even with a good-sized backyard vegetable garden. Perhaps by 2025 it’s reasonable, but local and sustainable food is about more than making demands and protesting. Usually such goals require that people give up some things, including favorite processed foods, and out-of-season produce. Not all OSU students might be on board with those sacrifices.

    What’s the source of their Reclaim OSU T-shirts, and other clothing worn by the students, for that matter? That would be one of the first questions I’d ask them, since the student protesters are against sweatshops. I’m against sweatshops too, but it’s not always easy (or budget-friendly) to avoid items made in sweatshops. The smartphones that they can’t put down might have been made in sweatshops. Student groups that I work with aren’t always careful about this kind of thing, and sometimes it’s too late: the shirts are already printed. I’m sympathetic with youthful idealism, but I think the “concerned faculty” have some responsibilities to make sure that the students’ choices and behavior are consistent with their ideals.

    1. Most likely the smart phones they use have components mined from war torn areas in Africa where exploitation and violence occurs to acquire such materials.

  13. Hey, I don’t agree with all of the demands listed by these students. Hell, some of them I expressly oppose. And most of the rest I frankly don’t understand, given that their coherence scales toward the jejune and inchoate.

    But, just maybe, we should pause a beat, give ‘am a chance to sort themselves out, before dismissing the thing out-of-hand, before, that is, we toss the noble tradition of student protest out with the bathwater made of melted snowflakes.

    When it comes to conducting effective protests, it seems to me these students labor under at least two major handicaps. First is their own lack of self-reliance (probably bred into them from the time their parents meticulously scheduled, then carted them across town in an SUV to attend, their first “play date”).

    For example, I have no idea how arcane or indecipherable the available OSU budget and investment information is (and the school certainly should be making that information public in a transparent and reasonably comprehensible form), but before the students go whining to have it spoon fed to them by the people they’re protesting against, they should be endeavoring to mobilize their own resources to accomplish this and the other tasks foundational to meaningful activism (including redrafting a tight set of clearly articulated goals).

    Second, these students lack a model — or even much in the way of any role models — for conducting effective protests. When Sixties students were protesting the war in Southeast Asia and fighting for their free-speech rights, they had available an extant tradition of protest and social activism, including the civil-rights movement, a still-thriving labor movement (the UAW under Walter Reuther, in particular, as well as a broader tradition stretching back to Eugene V. Debs and the Wobblies), and the activists who had a decade-and-a-half earlier stood their ground against Joe McCarthy and HUAC.

    These older, experienced activists provided not only a model for political activism, but would themselves often participate in workshops and training sessions or mentoring relationships. Legal counsel, many of whom had cut their teeth in the earlier efforts, were available, usually on a pro bono basis, to represent activists who might be put in legal jeopardy and to consult on proposed protest activities.

    Today, when student protest (aside from the usual whining and haphazard assertion of spurious, often ludicrous, demands), and citizen activism more generally, has been so long dormant, similar resources are not as readily, or visibly, available.

    But such resources are still out there, particularly among the earlier generation of student protestors, many of whom are now winding down their own professional careers. If student protestors such as those at OSU have legitimate beefs; if they’re seeking remedies reasonably tailored to redress their complaints; if they’re willing to knuckle-down, suck it up, and do the hard, tough-minded work required to achieve their goals, then they ought to seek us out and make their case for help.

    Maybe its all bullshit and they have no case to make. Maybe their goals are illegitimate; maybe their proposed means are ill-suited to their professed ends; maybe they’re all just virtue-signaling and striking identity-politics poses. But neither side will ever really know, and none of these protests is likely ever to amount to much, unless they’re serious enough to venture forth and give it a try.

    1. For me, the 1960s was a long decade. It started with the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 and ended with the resignation of Richard Nixon on August 9, 1974. Those of us who lived through that time will never forget how it was marked by the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. Both of these movements practiced civil disobedience, where the participants were ready to be accept the consequences of their actions, i.e., be arrested. The more than 40 years since then the country has been under conservative domination. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were not liberals and Barack Obama has been stymied by a conservative Congress and the political ineptitude of the Democratic Party, particularly on the state level.

      The preceding paragraph is simply my way of providing some background for your comment, which I agree with. To the extent that the demands of the students at The Ohio State or other colleges have merit, its supporters have little idea as to how to go about getting them accepted by the public at large. The 1960s is ancient history to them and so they are trying to re-invent the wheel – rather poorly, I fear. Through a lot of hard work, organizing, and public education, the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement won most of the American people to their sides. The current crop of protestors are failing miserably in this regard.

  14. I cant take them serious because they are all over the map in their requests. The only thing missing is a 9/11 toofer. What does having a stupid agricultural policy have to do with Israel and Palestine?

  15. Well, it struck me that their two demands quoted were substantially more limited and practical than most of the ridiculous demands one sees these days. And ones which the University could comply with, should it choose to, without any excessive cost or effort.

    As a State University – is that publicly funded? – shouldn’t its accounts be open to inspection?

    cr

    1. Yah… this isn’t any special snowflake stuff as far as I can tell. As much as I’d like to see some social justice warriors get the ‘screw you’ they so richly deserve, this isn’t it.

      Not to mention, it’s one thing to arrest them, it’s another to threaten arrest and expulsion.

      Further, the appear to have engaged in tactics meant to screw with the protesters psychologically, by initially promising they’d be allowed to sit in until 5 AM before they took action, and then they showed up and midnight and said they had to get out now. Seems like a deliberate attempt to throw the kids off their guard to make them more susceptible to threats.

      I’d need to know more about the situation, but based one what little I’ve been able to look up, I’m more inclined to side with the students on this one.

      1. Your points are well taken. I’d also want to find out what conversations took place with the university on these these issues, *before* this full-scale protest. “Demands” usually don’t go over very well, as an opening salvo.

    2. “As a State University – is that publicly funded? – shouldn’t its accounts be open to inspection?”

      Within reason, of course it should. That is probably why their current operating budget is available on line: http://www.rpia.ohio-state.edu/cfb/docs/FY16%20Operating%20Budget.pdf.

      The budgets for past financial years, plus independent auditors statements, are also available on line.

      I don’t think these students want to see the budget at all. I think they want to be allowed to carry out a complete audit of the universities’ finances, at the expense of the University, the rest of the student body, and the tax payers of Ohio (basically, everyone but the students demanding the audit), so that they can sit in moral judgement over the Universities’ investments. After all, they are entitled. But too ignorant to know how to ask for what they really want (a presumption on my behalf, but I think it fits).

      But I agree with Smokedpaprika. I think this is the endgame of a much longer process, and we are seeing a very small piece of it. I’d like to know what went before. Of course it’s possible I’m giving the students too much credit, and they really were dopey enough to open with this thermonuclear option. If that’s the case I agree with Eric @ 7 above. Going thermonuclear back at them and threatening expulsion was an over reaction on OSU’s part.

  17. Lots of the signatories of the letter from faculty et al. seem to be from the English department. (I note very few [maybe even none] from science or engineering faculty; they’re virtually all from the humanities.) Perhaps this was nothing more than an English assignment gone awry?

  19. Damn good thing school officials clamped down on this. It’s only a short, slippery slope from here to having a firebrand campus radical stand up and thrust his fist in the air to protest the board of regents’ choice of some hapless dupe of the running dogs of capitalism to deliver the commencement address. 🙂

  20. I find this list of requests (though phrasing it as demands is not a good tactic) much more mild than the others we’ve discussed, for what that’s worth. I also don’t think students should be expelled without a hearing.

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