At last we have the perfect statement from a university president who is strongly pro-free-speech but nevertheless has removed pro-Palestinian encampments from her university. The university was Dartmouth, and the president was Sian Bellock, formerly President of Barnard.
According to Vermont’s CBS station WCAX 3, Dartmouth arrested 90 protestors last night after they’d been warned that setting up a camp would mean that disciplinary action would be “imminent.” The protestors set up their camps anyway. And Bellock acted.
Police officers entered and arrested 90 protesters at a pro-Gaza encampment on the Dartmouth campus Wednesday night.
It started with a few hundred people gathering on the Dartmouth Green at about 6 p.m. Wednesday for a liberation rally. We have been told the group of protesters was made up of students and members of the general community.
According to one student, the protest had been peaceful, but school officials said if a camp was set up, there would be no further dialogue and disciplinary action would be “imminent.”
“We wanted this to be a peaceful protest and we have been peaceful the whole way through, but it’s really been frustrating to see the admin escalate without any justification,” said Calvin George, a Dartmouth senior.
Calvin George is yet another person who doesn’t recognize that “peaceful” protests are not necessarily protests permitted by college regulations, for even protests that are uneventful can impede the speech of others, as it has here (our Jewish students repeatedly have their banners and flags removed) or impede and disrupt the functioning of the university. It is, as Jon Haidt has emphasized, the difference between Truth University and Social Justice University. They can sometimes conflict, as they have during many of the “encampments.” President Bellock explains why below.
It is a wonderful statement, sent to one of my colleagues who has a Dartmouth connection, and it’s been made public. It emphasizes “time, place, and manner” restrictions, and explains the difference between true civil disobedience and simple disruption accompanied by an unwillingness to take the consequences.
This could be a model for all colleges who are plagued with illegal and disruptive encampments. I wish our administration would use it.
Jeez, that’s good. Inspiring.
The actions of the police are admirable. But what you enjoy, and we do nor, is that your police recognize, as ours do not, that police action in defence of private property, at least on university campuses,supports freedom of speech by neutralizing the trespasser-occupier’s veto. This is really an enlightened police view of the situation. A shout-out to them.
Leslie.
I presume that the RCMP is controlled by the Canadian Federal Government? What happens when they are contracted by a Provincial Government Legislation to police a particular area as for example Nova Scotia where some towns and cities have their own Police Service and the RCMP police the rest. The Nova Scotia shooting seemed less than integrated policing in that event. Who has the last word?
It varies depending on the province. I think Ontario and Quebec have provincial police forces. But most big cities in Canada have their own forces.
In BC, the RCMP are in charge if there’s no town / city police force and in rural / wilderness areas.
I’m not sure I can answer without taking too much space.
1). When the Mounties do local policing, they are the local police. Ottawa looks after HR like mandatory DEI & indigenization training but has no operational influence.
2). The Nova Scotia shooting spree was entirely in the (rural) jurisdiction of the RCMP. No municipal forces were involved in the manhunt. Several rural detachments had to figure out among them that it was all the same guy in several locations across the province wearing different clothing, including a police uniform. There was no vertical confusion or tussling about jurisdiction. Wiki has a page on it.
Refreshing clarity.
Doesn’t help UNESCO’s sustainable development plans for transformation of higher education, either – people expressing ideas in some boring, non-Revolutionary way. I guess that’s how it works in the sticks of New Hampshire.
I like that she pointed out that, if they wanted the Trustees to do something, there is an established process for engaging them. Really, to do something like the protestors have done is intimidation.
“It is, as Jon Haidt has emphasized, the difference between Truth University and Social Justice University. They can sometimes conflict…”
I would argue that while you can pursue truth without seeking social justice, you can’t pursue social justice without seeking truth. Without a commitment to simple, non-rarified, non-mysticized, truth with a lower case “t”, the pursuit of justice typically becomes a particularly noxious source of injustice. I can’t think of a better example than all the damage being done by “critical social justice theory”.
+1
My God, that is perfect. And so simply written. Almost no unnecessary academic terms at all. Hats off to Sian Beilock.
President Beilock’s 2003 PhD thesis in neuroscience was titled, “When performance fails: Expertise, attention, and performance under pressure”. She seems to have successfully taken her own research to heart. Bully for her.
I agree. I was impressed when I read her wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sian_Beilock.
Notably, she spent 12 years at University of Chicago…
I thought Yale’s was decent too, but I’m biased, I suppose (they pay my salary):
Dear Members of the Yale Community,
Peaceful protest and activism have a long history on college campuses, and I fully support every individual’s right to free expression at Yale. What occurred yesterday on Cross Campus was the opposite of free expression. Some protesters set up rows of tents on Cross Campus and restricted access to the encampment. Those protesters asked individuals who wished to pass through or enter their area, which is a shared campus space, to agree with their political viewpoints. This action is unacceptable and antithetical to the very purpose of a university.
As a university dedicated to learning and the search for truth, we hold the exchange of ideas and the diversity of viewpoints to be fundamental. To claim control of a shared physical space and to impose an intellectual and ideological litmus test are not in keeping with our bedrock principles and values.
We have long-established restrictions on the time, place, and manner of protest to ensure that all members of our community have equitable access to the campus—while still allowing for free expression and dissent. The use of overnight encampments, flags, posters, banners, tents, and ropes to claim a campus space for one individual or group’s viewpoint is, however, detrimental to the free exchange of ideas.
I call upon everyone involved—protesters and counter-protesters—to return to expressing their views in ways that are compatible with the fundamental value of intellectual freedom, that comply with university policies, and that foster civil discourse on our campus. I hope that we can do this without further disruption and without violating policies or laws. Civil disobedience is a time-honored tradition in this nation, and with it comes consequences. I urge every member of the university community to be mindful of the effect of their choices and to be respectful of the need for civility in the way we conduct ourselves.
Most importantly, I call on our community to live up to Yale’s mission and to show the world how we can learn from each other and work together even across a divide.
Sincerely,
Peter Salovey
President
Good statement. With this statement now publicly available, there is zero excuse for other institutions failing to get this right. Simply copy the statement, attribute it appropriately to Dartmouth, and move forward.
It is an inspiring statement of common sense.
I assume the students will be all expelled and the faculty will all be fired, tenure or not.
Thank you Jerry. Outstanding. Good to see common sense at last.
This is the perfect model for other presidents of universities to follow (as others have said here). Sian Bellock’s letter to the Dartmouth community is so rational and fair. To hear someone in power exerting their authority with such sound reasoning rather than twisting themselves in knots trying to placate the predictable objectors feels wonderfully reassuring. It’s become uncommon for people in such positions to simply state the truth and stick with the requirements necessary to safeguard it.Yay! And thank you, Jerry, for including the link to Jon Haidt’s presentation on truth vs social justice. I’ve seen it on WEIT’s website before and bookmarked it, but today I finally took the time to listen to it in it’s entirety. He is great. He reminds me of how exciting it can be to listen and learn from a really great thinker. And one with guts! I really appreciate this post.
Isn’t it the case that this sort of event (the arrests of people who are protesting) is what can actually lead to the social change that the protestors want? Protesting on its own is often not enough. The establishment just doubles down and meanwhile people just dig down into their different positions and stay there. Those who whine about being arrested, as if that step is something wrong, are not seeing the bigger picture. The establishment who says that there are “the right places and right times” to protest are merely playing their part in trying to keep a status quo
The eventual social change, should it ever happen, is that the greater public starts to sympathize with the down-trodden protestors, with their sometimes injured bodies and broken lives. It is that which leads, eventually, to the changes in heart and the changes in a country that the protestors are calling for.
This romantic view I think requires that you sympathize with the goals of the protestors a priori, so much so that you want to undermine the sincere efforts of the establishment to maintain free speech for all, (through enforcing with violence if necessary the time and place restrictions that break the veto of the raised fist.) Thus you eventually get what you want at the “cost” of less freedom of your opponents to dissent against your imposed views. But this is a good thing, right? (To this day in Rwanda it is illegal to question the official view that the Hutu-led government were solely responsible for the 1994 genocide, with now (still) President Paul Kagame’s RPF being the innocent heroic saviours.)
I suppose the task for the rest of us who reject the goals of the protest is to isolate the views of the protestors as anathema, by lying* about them if necessary, so their broken bodies prompt the response, “They had it coming.” I think this is what probably happened at Kent State in 1970. The protestors and the outside agitators who joined in for the hell of it had made a mess of the host town of Kent as well as trashing and burning their own campus. When the National Guard arrived with full-caliber infantry rifles left over from WW2 (and no other crowd-control weapons), the shooting now seems inevitable given poor training and discipline, plus foolish bluffing by protesters against leveled rifles (were they high?) Yet no one faced any criminal or civil censure for the deaths of the four students and the many wounded. The town and the State of Ohio seemed determined to send the message to students: “Don’t ever try that again. The shootings may have been unjustified but we are not going to punish anyone.” This is the approach you would take if you wanted everyone to forget them and hold the line on social decay.
—————-
* “Deceive for the sake of the task” is a Guardian value. “Dissent for the sake of the task” is for Traders. (Jane Jacobs)
A late reply, so possibly not seen.
I did not frame my own views on the current protests since I’d thought it was not necessary. I shouldn’t have to declare loyalties and all that. But ok, I do not agree with these protests if that is somehow needed. I am simply using the protests as a convenient example of how social change often gets done. Historical examples include the women’s rights, the rights of African Americans, gay rights, and so on.
I did see it, thanks Mark.
I was using “you” as the indefinite pronoun, like “one”, “we”, “they”. “people”, not you specifically. Hitchens did this rhetorically. French has a useful indefinite —no antecedent— pronoun on. There is also an indefinite objective en which can be translated as “such things”.
Whatever, I take a dim view of social progress achieved by means that frustrate the ability of the “Guardians” to neutralize the veto of the raised fist, which I don’t think any of your examples involved directly. (Although it has come to pass that there are certain things in those domains we are no longer free to say, so something happened.)
Whether you agree with motives of these protests or not, and I really didn’t mean to put you on the spot, if you tolerate the veto of the raised fist you will not like how the social progress works out. And it won’t matter if you don’t.