A student group called Columbia University Apartheid Divest released a statement cited by the Wall Street Journal (“New York mayor says conflict in Columbia must end as police gather nearby», April 30, 2024):
“Don’t incite a new Kent or Jackson State by bringing armed soldiers and police onto our campus,” the group said, referring to deadly shootings that occurred during college campus unrest in 1970. The blood of the students will be on your hands.”
I don’t know why “student blood” should be special (blue blood?) but let’s ignore that detail. They are young and still have to learn about life, history, and hopefully evaluate ideas. I hope they learn something in their “higher learning” institutions. And we must certainly hope that the National Guard is not called in and that the police act with wisdom and restraint.
The idea that gunmen of political authorities should not enter a university must have been inspired by the autonomous universities of medieval European cities. Autonomous universities were part of the polycentric political system of the Early Middle Ages that, according to Alexander Salter and Andrew Young, laid the foundations for the decentralized power that characterized Western modernity in the 18th and 19th centuries (see their work The Medieval Constitution of Libertyand my next review in Regulation).
I don’t know when the idea of near-untouchable universities died in practice, but I suspect that while it was alive, it wouldn’t have stopped university leaders from calling in gunmen to expel d other armed men (either a neighboring lord or a neighboring lord). a crowd armed with batons and fists) invading him. University autonomy was intended to prevent bullies from interfering with their operations, not to enable them to do so.
This reminds us James Buchanan’s concern about the weakening of “ordered anarchy” college campuses in the 1960s and 1970s. This spontaneous order was based on the rules of free inquiry and freedom of expression in an atmosphere of quiet study and civility. Once enough participants break the rules that maintain it, a spontaneous order collapses and tyrants reign. Restoring orderly anarchy instead of resorting to authority can be difficult.
Can we hope that the glaring contradiction between identity groups seeking “safe spaces” and fighting against “micro-aggressions” on the one hand and, on the other hand, the same crowd espousing ideologies of forced exclusion will sound the end of their domination in universities? ?
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I asked DALL-E to imagine a counterfactual historical scene: the Mongols invading the Sorbonne (University of Paris) in the 13th century (in reality they did not dare to go further than Eastern Europe). I don’t vouch for the historical details of the image, but its literary flavor suggests that the Mongols were not concerned about microaggressions in women’s studies classes.