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Whose university indeed
Earlier this week, we looked at a newspaper article in which a Florida State faculty member was quoted as saying his colleagues' continued employment is "what a university is about." Now, there's a brief piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education that notes a similarly problematic claim by students at the University of California, during a protest of a proposed 32 percent tuition increase:
Fourteen protesters were arrested at UCLA when they disrupted the meeting and refused to leave. Protesters then stopped the meeting several times, shouting "Whose university? Our university!" and chanting "We Shall Overcome."
It's certainly understandable that students would be upset about such a large tuition increase. But it just isn't so that UC is the students' university. Just look at the its stated mission (emphasis added):
The distinctive mission of the University is to serve society as a center of higher learning, providing long-term societal benefits through transmitting advanced knowledge, discovering new knowledge, and functioning as an active working repository of organized knowledge. That obligation, more specifically, includes undergraduate education, graduate and professional education, research, and other kinds of public service, which are shaped and bounded by the central pervasive mission of discovering and advancing knowledge.
The importance of students to a university cannot be understated. But the students who happen to be at UC today are not its owners, nor are they the reason it exists or that it receives generous subsidies from California taxpayers. Rather, UC exists (and receives substantial public support) in order to serve the public. In fact, one student told CNN essentially that, offering a much more effective critique of the tuition hike:
"It's going to prevent a lot of students from low-income families to be able to afford to come to this university," said Leah Johnson, a UCLA undergraduate student. "If there's a public university, it's suppose[d] to represent the public."
Certainly, the students quoted by The Chronicle don't represent all their compatriots, just as the FSU professor we discussed before is only one man. But still, it's amazing how many times internal constituencies -- professors, as we saw earlier; students, as we see here; and others -- can forget their institutions' public purpose. Every time they do so, it is to the detriment of the university they say they are protecting.
Posted by Charles Mitchell on November 19, 2009 at November 19, 2009 09:15 AM
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