Yes–at least some of the issues now are about students relating to students. But that still involves us in two ways: first, in the (somewhat contradictory) ways they want us to be involved in regulating or controlling those interactions and second in the question of what is the value we add as an institution to those interactions. (If we didn’t add any value, then presumably young people could simply go live where there are lots of young people without paying tuition and attending classes and so on.)

Of course student age young people do often live in clumps outside of the academic environment and sometimes engage in the same sort of protests etc. In many ways this seems healthier because their concerns are not focused on a single enclosing institutional structure — and that focus seems to me to distort their engagement with the actual situation. We may be making similar points in this respect.

I guess from your other posts we agree that the institutional norms of college are going to change and we should be working to guide that change in positive directions. One change I increasingly see (mostly second hand) is the “flipped classroom” in which faculty can almost entirely reject the role of providing content, and instead focus on structuring, mentoring, critiquing, provoking, etc. Of course in elite institutions like Swarthmore this isn’t so revolutionary, but it is at least a shift in emphasis.

It is interesting to think about a similar “flip” in the institution as a whole. What if the students were required to run the place, with administrators in the role of organizers, mentors, critics, provocateurs, etc. This would rather change the nature of the discussion, I believe in a good way. It would be hard on the students but again I think in a good way. I guess — but cannot prove at this point — that it would be much less hard on the administration or faculty than they might imagine — except for those who like the feeling of being “in charge” and being hard on them would be a good thing.

Of course it would take iteration to get this right. Any new institutional arrangement of any size is subject to all the usual problems of corruption, authoritarianism, petty politics, and so on. But in some sense that is exactly the point. It would be very good for students (at least it would have been good for me and the students I knew) to have to own these problems rather than be able to (somewhat legitimately) demand that they be fixed by “the authorities”.

Perhaps the people with the most legitimate beef against this kind of arrangement would be apolitical students who find these responsibilities an unjustified distraction from the reasons they came to college. This indicates another dimension of the students’ responsibility — to let everyone get on with their work as much as possible, to minimize the disruption of academic life. This is obviously a responsibility that is not felt by some of the current protestors! But again it is not one they could avoid if they were in charge. And the complementary responsibility — to kick some butt if unnecessary disruption is interfering with legitimate institutional activity — is one that even the most apolitical students would have to accept.

I could go on but this is enough. I’ll just summarize: The administration and faculty do add a lot of value, but the nature of this value has shifted over time, and the institutional arrangements have not kept up. These protests offer an opportunity to figure out what that value is now, why some groups of activist students don’t appear to perceive / respect it, and to rework the institutional relationships to fix that.

Stentor: Absolutely there are folks just here (or any other college/university) who want the credential and could care less about the content. But that is, if you take them seriously, not this group of activist students. Moreover, even for the credential-collecting set, I’d just as soon spend some effort convincing them that there is genuine value in what the faculty have to offer them rather than reaffirming their sense that the curriculum is a bunch of useless obstacles that are being sadistically placed in the way of people who are already capable of doing the jobs and living the lives that they have mapped out for themselves.

But… You do make one statement in this post that I’m sure is mistaken, and possibly in a way that indicates some significant underlying issues. You say:

There is no way to get around the fact that students are here (I hope) because they believe that trained and skilled teaching and academic professionals know some things that the students don’t know, have training the students don’t have even by the time they graduate, and that some kinds of authority and hierarchy have to flow out from that disparity. The only reason to stay here if you don’t believe that is out of a cynical desire to collect the credential of the degree as a precondition of middle-class life

There is an important third reason that’s being demonstrated by the very events. Students greatly value their association with other students, the time and space to work out life issues with others, and if they are lucky the projects they are engaged in (mostly with other students) which may last far beyond college. Faculty, facilities, etc. may help with these, but most of the energy, knowledge, choices, etc. come from the students themselves, and much of the knowledge and skill that is acquired in the process is generated by student effort, not faculty guidance or other contributions.

I don’t know how this plays into your construal of events or options going forward, but it seems very likely that if you really don’t see this third motivation for being a Swarthmore student, that not-seeing makes constructive outcomes more difficult.