The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story today about how email and the blogosphere are complicating the lives of university administrators—chiefly, by flooding their email in-boxes with complaints from off-campus, often through organized campaigns.
Reporter Jeffrey Selingo seems basically sympathetic to the beleaguered administrators, and perhaps for that reason, he doesn't make a comparison that might reflect less well on them. Reading college officials' weary complaints about meddlesome, ill-informed outsiders, it's hard not to think back to the 1960s, when intolerant administrators tried to deflect criticism of their policies by blaming it on "outside agitators." Reverse the political polarity--now it's left-leaning bureaucrats against right-wing protesters--add a dash of 21st century technology, and you've reproduced an old narrative: an assortment of activist students and outsiders protesting against university administrators who wield the bulk of power.
Or maybe not--as I'll explain on the flip.
In a gesture of even-handedess, Selingo works hard to provide examples of criticism coming from the left, and over non-political issues altogether (like college sports). Still, it's clear that most of these "outside agitators"--as they would have once been called--come from the political right. Thus, for example, the president of San Francisco State University was deluged with
emails after campus protests against a military recruiter, and
administrators at Tufts found themselves under attack for dealing
too leniently with anti-war students who assaulted editors of a conservative campus magazine.
The essential difference between the outside agitators of today and those of 40 years ago, though, lies in their relation to institutions of power and privilege outside the academy. If campus radicalism in the 1960s surely had its share of "outside agitators" (although never as many as administrators claimed), outside forces--a network of well organized and well
funded right-wing institutions--do almost all the heavy work of right-wing attacks on universities today. David Horowitz's Students for Academic Freedom, for example, is essentially an astroturf organization that does far better at raking in money from the Scaife, Olin, and other right-wing foundations than at enlisting real students in its crusade against "liberal intolerance" on campus.
But who needs more than a few student supporters when you've got the right-wing noise machine at the ready, so that--to take one example--an "affirmative action" bake sale by College GOP'ers at Grand Valley State University in Michigan becomes a cause celebre for the right-wing Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which in turn lands it in the column of angry addled white male columnist John Leo, in US News and World Report.
Impractical and self-indulgent though they often were, the radicals of the 1960s rightly viewed themselves as
rebels against the status quo, and saw changing the universities as one
step in a larger process of changing the country. To the extent that
actual students get involved in right-wing causes today at all, they mostly stick to an agenda set by powerful off-campus interests that already are
the status quo, and that see the universities as one of the few remaining institutions they don't control. Therein lies the real significance of today's legions of outside agitators, but that's something that Selingo's piece--with its refusal to delve deeper into politics--can't begin to address.
Update [2005-4-25 22:57:36 by Hprof]: Substantially rewritten and reposted. As luck would have it, the changes affect the one comment the original diary received--the "Corrigan" referenced below is the president of SFSU, who was quoted complaining about his email load in the original.