BEYOND WINTER: Musings of
an Old Man for his Own Purposes—
I thought about going over to the Indiana University campus to join the demonstrations. There were 2 problems, though.
The first is physical. I would have to park so far away from Dunn Meadow that I probably could not walk there. And once there, I probably could not stand up without falling over, at which point the heavily militarized state cops—machine guns, and all—would think I should be arrested for impeding their movements. I have drunk jail coffee, and I don’t want to do it again.
The second was the demonstrations themselves. Some were pro-Gaza. Some were anti-war. Some were pro-Palestinian. Some were pro-Israel. Some were anti-antisemitism. Some were anti-Hamas. It was just confusing. I would fit into any of those camps, but then I’d be on the wrong side of everybody else.
I was in plenty of demonstrations in my campus ministry days—school segregation, civil rights, voting rights, Viet Nam, apartheid… Those demonstrations were successful in the context of my campuses—Indiana State [Terre Haute] and Illinois State [Normal-Bloomington] because they were not violent, and we always left a way out for the authorities to back off without losing face.
That’s a tricky thing when dealing with young hotheads. They don’t want to let anyone save face. They want to push the faces of their opponents into the mud and grind them down into it. That is happening on a lot of campuses right. Their methods are counter-productive. So are the face-grinding counter methods of university administrators and police.
The state of Indiana is currently ruled [that’s the right word] by a secretive cabal of billionaires and state legislators. The Indiana University Trustees are chosen either from their own ranks, or they choose people who are beholden to them, so that they can control them. So it is that IU has a president pulled from the lower ranks of the administration of a second-rate university. None of the stake holders--such as faculty and students--were involved in choosing her. They didn’t even know about her until she was hired. She and the Trustees have chosen to take authoritarian stances on all matters, and to do no communication about them, before or after. That is not how a university is supposed to operate. This is certainly not the university of Herman B Wells. That is not a university at all.
Maybe I’ll go over there after all…
John Robert McFarland
I thought you were going to give up writing any more! Glad you didn't. As my dear departed friend, Danny Young used to say about his little restaurant business..."To Stupid to Stop".
ReplyDelete"Too stupid to stop" is a good explanation, but most of what I have posted is stuff I wrote in the past and never had an adequate venue to share it. Now that CIW is "beyond winter," and I don't have to worry about wasting your time looking for something worthwhile, I just post any old thing that bubbles up from the bottom of my computer.
ReplyDelete