I think you can argue, as Tim Lacy does, that the time is right to come up with some more custodial/shared structure, in line with many other changes taking place in how universities have slowly stepped back into an in loco parentis role, sometimes at the demand of their own students. The difficulty there, and I despair a little sometimes in talking with current students about this, is that some of them believe that they can situationally demand that custodial involvement when they want it and reject it completely when they don’t. The letter some Pomona students sent about Alice Goffman is a bit of an example of that–wanting to be able to demand an outcome, without conversation or negotiation, when they want it, and otherwise be uninvolved when they don’t. You’re either partners in governance all the time, with the same heavy sense of responsibility for the consequences of your agency, or you’re not; you can’t just be in charge when you don’t like the outcome of someone else using their agency or judgment and then leave it to someone else when the outcomes suit you.

So if we make a structural change, I think that students, faculty and admins working together to approve speakers will find they haven’t escaped the contours of the issues as they’ve developed since 1950, especially not at public universities. Even working together, they’d find for one that the hostility of conservative legislators will still be there to be reckoned with. The problem of creating a shared standard that would not just amount to “conservatives bad, leftists good” would still be there. The degree to which a shared committee would likely fall into a risk-averse, duller, more mainstream sensibility strikes me as an immediate issue. I also think you’d find that such a panel or structure would immediately be rent by divisional and disciplinary rivalries that students would either get held hostage to or be partisans within.

Is our position not the equivalent of “let a thousand speakers bloom”? let the students do their thing, faculty will do theirs and so on. Or do the historical times require a structural intervention based on lessons learnt from the past in accordance with some collectively identified ethic?

Cheers,
bart

The Ulrich Baer piece reminded me about Shockley and Wallace at Yale, and then I spent this morning looking up old cases in the NYT. I hadn’t ever read the Hacker or Hook essays before, and those were absorbing. (And in the case of Hook, pretty damn annoying–he is 100% what Garry Wills so beautifully indicted in Nixon Agonistes.