my other old school
I fell yesterday, as one does, into a rabbit hole of the recent news - this one labeled “Over 100 Arrested at Columbia” that turned out to lead me back to Pomona College.
I have almost entirely fond memories of Pomona, where I was an admissions officer in the early 1990s. It was my first real job, a place where I worked among remarkable colleagues and for a smart and supportive boss who equally was extremely direct when he needed to be (and arguably sometimes when he didn’t need to be). I thought work would always be like that, and while I don’t exactly regret leaving, it is the case that as far as jobs, I’ve never had it so good. And on top of that, we were in the paradise of California where, at least on the days when the air was clear enough, you could look up and see the San Gabriels.
In many ways, I think of Pomona College as my second alma mater.
Well, the college is in the news, not in the best of ways, and as I ventured into the branch of this rabbit hole labeled “Pomona,” boy howdy did I find myself in all of the feelings. I’m still there.
For those of you who haven’t been keeping up, which might be all of you: students from Pomona and its neighboring colleges briefly occupied a chunk of the campus in March to protest the Israeli government’s ongoing violent response to Hamas’s terrorist attacks last October, and support of that response by the United States and by, through its investments and perhaps otherwise, Pomona College. The calls for action have been going on for a while, I guess, and haven’t had any successes - and apparently some of the protest actions have escalated in recent weeks.
I don’t aim to judge the protests or any of the specific actions students are engaging in, or the demands, or the war itself. About the war, the only thing I know is that the bad guys are the ones killing innocent people. About the protests and the demands and what students may be doing, I reflected - as I started to email the current president of Pomona College, Gabrielle Starr - that I’m not there, and I don’t know the details of what happened and has been happening, and the versions of events that one reads might all be truthful and all be different, Rashomon-style.
Best I can tell, what went down was this:
The students had set up a kind of encampment outside the student union, which included large maps showing historical boundaries of Palestine. That stayed there for a week or so. On April 5, the Pomona president told the kids, once and for all, to get off her lawn. According to the college’s account of events, a faculty member suggested that some number of students be admitted to Alexander Hall, the college’s administration building, meet with the president, and she agreed.
(I will pause her to note the incredible own goal committed by President Starr. She could have agreed to meet the students anywhere on campus. She literally let them walk into the big house. I’m sure she thought it was a show of trust, but from this vantage point it looks like pure naivete.)
Then, according to the Los Angeles Times (paywalled), at least one student violated the president’s trust/took advantage of her naivete by opening another door and admitting a larger number of additional students. And they proceeded to have a good old fashioned sit-in. And that was when President Starr, whose bio says “[s]he is an energetic advocate for engaging in challenging conversations and developing the skills for deep collaboration in an age of socio-political polarization,” decided to speak power to truth, and called in the cops.
Members of the Claremont Police Department, backed by others from neighboring towns, showed up in riot gear and, um, persuaded the students to leave.
Look, again, you can think the students’ version of the truth is misguided or worse. You can think their protests were juvenile or pointless or offensive - I am sure they were that, at times - or disruptive. (There seems to be no question about the last, and the college’s own statement acknowledges “we understand that disruption is a goal of protest.”) But calling the police a mere two hours after the students began occupying Alexander Hall was petty, oppressive, and foolhardy.
Petty: there’s a certain amount of President Starr’s statement that suggests she was personally offended that students would do this to her(!) and her staff. She notes - uncorroborated, but plausible - that someone used “a sickening, anti-black racial slur in addressing an administrator.” Well, that’s bad, both as manners and tactics; it certainly represents abandoning the moral high ground and alienates potential allies. But the phrasing has all sorts of extra strums of the dudgeon guitar - “sickening,” “racial” (if it’s anti-Black, it’s obviously racial) and particularly “an administrator” - like, would it have been less offensive if it was one of the college’s maintenance crew? A fellow student?
More to the point, Starr didn’t call the police when she wanted the students removed from the lawn. She didn’t call the police when students were allegedly harassing campus tours. She called the police as soon as the students moved their protest to her building, to her office, as soon as they insulted and inconvenienced her. (And, possibly, as soon as they embarrassed her.)
Oppressive: I mean, yeah, calling the police on non-violent folks is inherently oppressive. But the dramatic show of overwhelming force - riot gear - wasn’t about clearing a building, it was about showing who was in charge here. And, students, it ain’t you. President Starr may fashion herself an energetic advocate for engaging in challenging conversations, but when the chips are down, she’s going to rely on whatever tools are at her disposal to make sure she wins, and to make sure you know that she’ll win the next time, too. The arrests weren’t (only) about the students in Alexander Hall, they were about all of us watching.
Foolhardy, and this is the big one: The president of Pomona only has her job today because no student or police officer did something extremely stupid. In my various life experiences, counting on police officers and college students not to do extremely stupid things is not the way to bet. I have enough familiarity with past versions of the Claremont police to know that extremely stupid is well within their range of responses.
In fact, it rather seems to have been city policy at the time.
If, earlier this month, a kid had reached for a weapon, or if a kid had reached for a Kind bar that a police officer decided might be a weapon, we wouldn’t be debating whether sending in the riot cops was a good choice. We would be hanging Gabrielle Starr’s picture in the same gallery as that of big Jim Rhodes, former governor of Ohio whose Wikipedia entry more or less begins with the fact that he sent the National Guard to Kent State University where they killed four students.
My father worked for Governor Rhodes, closely enough that he introduced me to the man once or twice. That’s neither here nor there, except that I can only imagine working for the administration of the governor of the State of Ohio in May of 1970 may have affected the way he viewed the appropriate response to a standoff. At another time in recent history, when members of a religious cult had barricaded themselves in a compound near Waco, Texas, Dad was bewildered at the increasingly bellicose actions of the FBI. “Just stand back,” he said. “Eventually they’re going to walk outside. And when they do, then you can arrest them.”
Eventually the students occupying Alexander Hall would have walked out. They’d have gotten hungry, or decided they had made their point, or realized they were going to have to try something different. President Starr could have handed them a letter saying they were suspended or expelled, or have expressed admiration to them for having the courage of their convictions. Or had them arrested by a regular old cop in a uniform, if she felt that was necessary, rather than a battalion in riot gear. She chose the dumbest, riskiest, most potentially tragic course of action she could have, and I cut her no slack whatsoever for getting lucky.
I think President Starr ought to resign. I doubt she will; one thing I’m certain of is that she didn’t take these actions without the trustees having her back, or possibly pushing her forward. But as long as she’s there, it’s hard to see how education goes on in an environment of trust.
Then again, as the former dean of the college used to say when I was there, the institutional memory of a college lasts four years. Maybe Starr can ride it out.
I tried to make this shorter, but I can’t right now; I’m too pissed off. I don’t know what was happening, and I don’t know what the right response would have been. I’m just fairly certain of what it was not.