Meeting with Bennet
Read Connie’s comment on my previous post for a great report on what happened this afternoon at the CCH open meeting on student outrage at a variety of administration policies and attitudes, outlined in my previous post.
Also, thanks to Connie for the address of the listserv for folks involved in these protests.
Finally, here’s an especially inarticulate article on this afternoon’s meeting from the local UPN affiliate.
Bennet agreed this afternoon to respond to students’ demands in writing by January 19. He will likely respond the way he responded at this meeting — by failing to address the demands directly but instead discussing minor initiatives the administration is undertaking that are vaguely related to the demands. Actually addressing the students’ demands would involve in some cases challenge the way the University spends money, in other cases aggravate faculty, and in other cases require the administration to seriously revisit its decision-making process. All of these things should happen, but they are all things that the administration will be generally unwilling to do.
If anything will come out of this, students will need to have a clear plan to force the administration to make these difficult changes, which in many cases will involve ratification by either the faculty or the board of trustees. This means a solid timeframe for escalation of tactics, and hopefully some more creative and actually threatening tactics than the standard occupations and hunger strikes.
All of this should be worked out before winter break.