Middlebury: Disruption is not Violence

Below you will find a letter from the president of Middlebury on the recent protests around the presence of Charles Murray. My basic take is that giggling GOP student groups have hacked the free-speech pieties of my generation. Those pieties were based on a pre-internet information culture, and perhaps still hold true, but they should be engaged rigorously not merely repeated as truths.

What troubles me about the president's letter is the loose conflation of disruption with violence. Here's a key quote:

I want to state that peaceful, non-disruptive protest is not only allowed at Middlebury, it is encouraged.

There's been a lot of disruptive protests over the past few years, from people shouting at Trump events to Black Lives Matter blocking highways. True protest is disruptive. To limit protest to polite non-disruptive action is to to take a position opposed to protest. Protest cannot be civil.

Protest can be non-violent though. To threaten people's bodies (I care less about threatening, say, Starbucks, as happened in Berkeley when Milo was blocked from speaking) is a good place to draw a line, and at Middlebury a professor felt very afraid, and that's a problem.

But disruption is necessary.

Here's the letter:

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Dear Middlebury Community Members,

This is the first of what is likely to be a series of communications from me in the days and weeks ahead.

Many of us still are processing what happened inside and outside Wilson Hall and McCullough Student Center last Thursday. The protests and confrontations in response to Charles Murray’s appearance laid bare deep divisions in our community. The campus feels different than it did before. It will take time and much effort to come together, and what the future ultimately looks like may not be anyone’s ideal—at least not for a while.

Today I write on the topics of accountability and community.

Let me turn first to accountability. Because of the complexity of the events and actions that took place, we have initiated an independent investigation to establish a baseline of information. Once that work is completed, the College will follow a process of determining a course of action for each individual understood to be involved in some way in the events of last Thursday.  This will take some time.  Our process must be fair and just.  To be clear, I want to state that peaceful, non-disruptive protest is not only allowed at Middlebury, it is encouraged.  We all have the right to make our voices heard, both in support of and in opposition to people and ideas.  Our concern is acts of disruption and violence, where available means of peaceful protest were declined.

Separately, the Middlebury Police Department will investigate the confrontation that took place outside McCullough following the event, which we believe involved individuals from both on and off campus. We will cooperate fully in that investigation and encourage all members of our community to do the same.

Let me turn next to community.   Creating true community is hard work, and yet that work is essential and is our collective responsibility.  This week, we will mark the beginning of opportunities for reflection and engagement.  We have already heard from many community members on all sides of the issues and that has been deeply encouraging. Existing groups on campus have written to help us understand what the community is feeling and might need going forward.  We have much to discuss—our differences on the question of free speech and on the role of protest being two of the most pressing examples.

In addition, I am extending an invitation to everyone to submit community-building ideas for consideration.  These ideas may be modest or bold.  We will work with existing groups of faculty, staff, and students to collate these ideas into plans of action over the next semester and beyond.  Katy Smith Abbott, Susan Baldridge, Miguel Fernandez, and Andi Lloyd will provide information about how to share your ideas in a subsequent message.

This was an extremely difficult episode, especially because in the last year we have worked so hard to affirm that Middlebury is committed to unlocking the potential and brilliance of every student, no matter their race, class, sexual orientation, religion, disability status, or any other personal characteristic. If you are here, it is because you earned your way here, and you belong.   We are also committed to upholding the right to speech, even unpopular speech, especially in times of division or uncertainty. If colleges and universities cannot serve this role, who can?

I urge us all to keep listening and connecting, and am myself in active communication with students and faculty on all sides of the issue. I want to acknowledge the anger and frustration that many people feel. There is hard work ahead for all of us:  learning to be accountable to one another, and learning to stand in community with one another.  We must affirm our shared values and goals and hold each other to them, and we must listen differently, helping others to be fully heard and seen.

My faith in our collective ability to grow into a better place is unshaken.  I look forward to the many conversations we can and must have over the coming months.

Laurie Patton
President

Complicity - #ComplicitNoMore

Last Wednesday, a group of African-American students staged a public protest against racism on our campus. You can see video and read about it here. They chanted, "Silence no more," vowing to call out the racism that they saw.

As of yesterday, faculty response coalesced around the phrase "Complicit no more." There will be an in-person show of support today, posters to sign publicly, buttons, social media, and more.

I like this phrase very much, as it's aspirational and confessional. It acknowledges that each of us may be complicit in structural racism. It looks past specific incidents - a one student asked in class if they were talking to their drug dealer when on the phone (to use the calculator); a student in a suit asked if they had a court date; intimidation by security services - and pushes each one of us to get to work changing our campus climate. We are accountable.

Microaggressions matter. They compound. They exclude. And the fact that so many people think they don't matter is just a sign of the work we have to do.

Still more to come.

My Campus, Like Your Campus, Is Probably Racist

UPDATE: Dominican Star article on the protests. Administration has been speaking out in solidarity with the students and we'll see what happens. Meeting today at 8:30 of Faculty to discuss actions.

Last week African-American students at Dominican University protested racism on campus. Here are two videos. The first is a short protest in the cafeteria. The second is long and outside the office of our President. Both videos are shared with permission of one of the protest organizers.





So what are the issues on our campus? That's a bit complicated. We've had several incidents of racist graffiti in dorms and at least one racist epithet uttered on campus by one student to another in a public space. These have been scattered over the years (and were well publicized on campus in both our student media and official condemnatory statements from administration). Students also speak of micro-aggressions in the classroom, from faculty, although I don't have permission to share these details. I expect in the week to come to have more information, hopefully a statement with demands detailing issues and demanding change. I promise to share them as appropriate, always mindful of the students' right to control their own narrative. I'm not a disinterested journalist here, but a white male tenured faculty member.

The protests came as a shock to some of my colleagues, judging from comments on social media, and even more so to alumni who viewed Dominican as a safe, nurturing, space. We are a relationship-centered university. We form close bonds among students, between students and faculty/staff, and are proud of our community. We are, or will be soon, a majority Hispanic institution, with 65% of this year's first-year class Latina/o. Our ties in the Chicago Latina/o community run deep (as I wrote about in this piece on our president's leadership on immigration reform). We also proud of our commitment to social justice. To be told of a campus climate of racism jars against our sense of self and mission.

It's also certainly true. There's no reason to question the lived experience of others, especially students taking the risk to protest publicly. Moreover, Dominican, like all institutions, partakes of the hierarchies of the society in which it exists. There is no ivory tower. Racism permeates Chicago, Illinois, and America (and beyond). Why should Dominican be exempt? Moreover, to acknowledge its truth does not erase the good things, the real change that our students undergo as a result of their education here, or the intense efforts of faculty and staff to make our campus safe, inclusive, and welcoming. Structural change is hard!

I take these protests as a moment to self-examine, first of all. I know my values and I know how I want to behave. But I, too, partake of the hierarchies in which I live. The pernicious nature of micro-aggressions is that the aggressor can be fully ignorant of his or her actions and be fully of good will, yet still turn a campus into a hostile space.

The inequalities run deep. Here are two recent pieces on structural racism in American universities, both written by African-American women with PhDs. Stacy Patton, for Dame Magazine, writes about the ways that American colleges and universities were never designed with racial equality in mind.

The irony is that many predominantly White colleges and universities appear to have the signs of progressive campus cultures with healthy race relations, especially in comparison to their 1950s predecessors...The problem is that they are signs of an alleged commitment that is rarely realized, and they give the false, and dangerous, impression that race relations on campus are much better than they really are. It is no wonder that so many universities lack even the basic data on faculty diversity or a plan to address systemic racism (much less define it). 

Tressie McMillan Cottom, in The Atlantic, writes:

Given the history of racism, wealth, and institution building on which all U.S. universities are constructed, the debate about Calhoun is specific but not unique. It may also be missing a larger point about the relationship between memory and politics. The legacy of racism is not just carved into the facades of university buildings; it is found in the persistence of inherited privilege that shapes the composition of the curriculum, the student body, and the faculty.

These things are true at Dominican University, for all its lack of fame and money. It's in a fantastically wealthy mostly white suburb of Chicago (River Forest), surrounded by West Chicago (Austin neighborhood), the African-American suburb of Maywood, and the heavily-Latin suburb of Melrose Park. Our buildings are gorgeous and gothic. As the forest preserve to our west adopts the fall colors, the campus glows in the late afternoon with reflected sunlight. We should not be surprised with our African American students articulate ways in which this environment is less than perfect for them.

I am grateful to these students for speaking out and for letting me share these videos. More to come.