By Business Editor Samuel Insull with
Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling
What's the matter with American higher education?
If you said it's that students are forced to borrow $360,000 that they will never be able to pay back to be taught by unwashed graduate students (also known as the Harvard Plan), you're wrong!
The real problem, according to the very wise suck-ups at New York Times Dealbook, is that rich white men don't have enough power over it.
This may come as a shock to anyone who has observed the death grip that such men have over the ruling bodies and fiscs of America's great and not so great universities, not to mention the destruction of formerly respectable state schools like the University of Florida at the hands of intolerant white men like Ron “These Go-Go Boots are Made for Walking” DeSantis (remember him?).
The great non-white non-rich and half-female unwashed need to get schooled:
Many business leaders have told me they are deeply concerned about incidents of harassment against Jewish students that have taken place at and around universities like Columbia and appear to be increasing.
Inside corner offices, there has been a lot of hand-wringing about the most blatant examples, like antisemitic signs and chants or the assault of an Israeli student. But there has been little action from corporations, which have a synergistic relationship with the schools where they recruit employees.
Some executives are privately pondering what they can do. The most common course of action so far has been to pull back on individual donations. The New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, for example, said this week that he was “no longer comfortable supporting Columbia University.”
And there is nothing more concerning to the editors of Dealbook than the comfort of Robert Kraft, although left to his own devices he appears generally to be able to find some modest comfort in the happy ending spas found in the strip malls clinging to the swamplands west of Palm Beach.
These concerns were shared privately (which is to say publicly on condition of anonymity) with New York Times reporters on the very same day that The Times reported that Columbia had in fact, without busting heads or arresting peaceful protestors, taken action against anti-Semitic hate speech on its campus:
But don't confuse plutocrats with the facts when they're swinging their great big Master of the Universe dicks around. Not content with cutting off donations or organizing to drive out university presidents who dare to disagree with them (see, e.g., Harvard and Penn), they are conniving new ways to impose their views on people like students and faculty who have some nutty idea that there ought to some freedom of thought on college campuses, regardless of which finagler's name is carved over the door:
But businesses have other levers that affect universities, and some of those levers would undoubtedly put more pressure on universities to take action against antisemitism.
Here’s one out-of-the-box thought experiment: Most businesses scrutinize their vendors quite carefully and maintain approved lists of vendors whose policies align with their own. Companies could scrutinize universities, a main source of their talent, as they would any other vendor. They could tell universities that they won’t hire their students unless the schools take decisive action to stem antisemitism....
To be clear, companies would need to define antisemitism and the satisfactory actions to mitigate it — currently both topics of fierce debate.
Thanks, Andy, for the clarification. And of course if it's one thing that billionaire plutocrats are known for, it's carefully listening to all sides before taking a nuanced approach that reflects the complexities of a fraught situation. Like Elno.
In other words, these immensely powerful creeps could punish the innocent – students graduating with a mountain of debt and looking for work – because of supposed delicts on the part of administrators at the schools from which they graduated. That sounds fair – to Andy.
But the stupid idea that some big-buck douchebag whispered into Andy Sorkin's ear during a quiet cocktail at Manhatta got us to thinking about other uses of economic leverage to get universities to do what they should.
Consider the news from Emory University in Atlanta as reported in The Emory Wheel (as usual, the most reliable college news can be found in the student newspaper, Harvard excepted):
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| Heavily armed police on campus: what could go wrong? |
A young woman cried into a cell phone camera as a police officer dragged her off of Emory University’s Quadrangle around 10:15 a.m. this morning, stating her birthday and her mother’s phone number. Ten minutes later, a young man yelled as another officer walked him off the Quad in handcuffs, shouting that the restraints were too tight and were cutting off his circulation. The officer looped an arm under the protestor’s leg and lifted him, carrying him away as the protestor yelled for help.
The two individuals were among several protestors detained during a demonstration this morning. Protestors gathered on the Quad at 7:30 a.m., erecting around 20 tents in an “encampment for Gaza.” They listened as demonstrators took turns stepping to the front of the group to share speeches through a megaphone, cheering for each other as they declared support for Gaza in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Within three hours, Georgia State Patrol, Atlanta Police Department (APD) and Emory Police Department (EPD) officers walked along the sidewalk before turning onto the Quad and closing in on the protestors.
Screams broke out as the protestors attempted to run away and officers began tackling some of the individuals. Less than a minute after the altercation began, officers released irritant gas on the protestors. Officers tased at least one of the protestors.
An officer outside of the Administration Building told detained protesters they were being taken to DeKalb County Jail. Multiple members of police declined to confirm this information to Emory Wheel reporters.
Police officers had gas masks and used non-lethal ammunition. Officers also tackled protestors and used zip ties to arrest individuals on the Quad.
In short, a peaceful protest that had begun three hours earlier and not interfered with the operations of the university led the Emory administrators to treat paying students like John Lewis in Selma.
Now Emory is a perfectly OK B+ university with pretensions to Ivy League greatness. It competes for the best and the brightest. If I were the parent of little Ethan or Sophia, I'd have a few questions of my own for Emory officials before dropping off a $90K kiss and my pride and joy:
1. Under what circumstances could my child be arrested for peaceful protest?
2. Under what circumstances could my child be suspended or expelled for peaceful protest?
3. If my child is expelled or suspended for peaceful protest, will I receive a tuition refund for the semester?
4. Under what circumstances will your university use police forces to arrest peaceful protesters?
5. How do you vet officers on your campus police force to make sure they have not used excessive force in the past or otherwise committed misconduct?
6. Who decides whether to call in outside police forces?
7. How do you confirm that the members of outside police forces you call onto campus have not been found to have used excessive force or otherwise committed misconduct?
8. Are any officers on campus armed? If so, how do you confirm that they have had appropriate training in the use and abuse of deadly force?
9. Who supervises the campus police? Who supervises the actions of outside police forces you call into your campus?
If the people who pay the bills don't like the answers they're getting from university functionaries, they are free to direct their tuition payments elsewhere. It's not like Emory has a unique position at the zenith of the American collegiate firmament. Far from it.
That's the beauty of the free market, amirite, Andy?
Of course the universities siccing armed police on their students already have an economic incentive to call off the dogs: the students they brutalize today are the ones that universities will be schnorring from for decades after graduation. You'd think any university bigwig would remember this before calling in the 5-0.
And yet they don't. Maybe, just maybe, the grandiose overpaid bureaucrats who run America's universities aren't – very smart?
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