"The Coming Campus Protests"

Whelp, here's the kind of bullshit you can expect to come in a torrent. It was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. This should give you some idea of the fallen state of universities:

  The hypocrisy of these statements is reinforced by an unequal distribution of academic resources — something made all the more pressing by the financial headwinds imposed by the Covid-19 crisis. As institutions struggle with diminished enrollment, cuts in state higher-education funding, and the loss of internal revenue from student attendance, it is too often the humanities, the social sciences, and fields like African American studies, Women's and Gender studies, and Latinx studies — the fields that are best positioned to help us engage social problems — that are targeted for elimination. While PR-minded administrators preach that Black lives matter in campus communiqués, their colleagues may be busily strategizing how best to cut Black studies.
   Bacow believes “in the power of knowledge and ideas to change the world, of science and medicine to defeat disease, of the arts and humanities to illuminate the human condition,” and yet Harvard indefinitely suspended its search for senior ethnic-studies faculty in response to the Covid-19 crisis. “I can’t even begin to describe how disheartening it is to have seen this effort begin to bear its first fruits, only to have meaningful progress put on an indefinite timeline,” Claudine Gay, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, told The Crimson. (Gay had been set to hire three to four senior faculty in Asian American, Latinx, and Muslim studies, and campus visits were already underway.)
   As many of these programs are staffed and supported by contingent or non-tenure-track faculty, the looming threat of contract non-renewals during the ongoing Covid-19 crisis has a chilling effect on the ability for these programs to engage in direct action. This chilling effect, and the risk of the loss of the faculty that make these programs possible, is also an existential threat to any university’s professed commitment to diversity and inclusion.
   Indeed, these toothless statements by university administrators show just how unprepared our institutions are for the return of Black students and staff and faculty members in the fall. Everything happening in our streets is going to be in our classrooms, in our committee rooms, our departments. We won't accept "listening sessions," "open forums," meetings with the president, or the other mechanisms that are deployed to disempower us. We will see through empty promises of diversity and see the funding cuts for what they are.
   We will expect and demand meaningful change. And activist students and faculty and staff members will be bolstered by their recent experiences. They will take action to ensure that our institutions live up to their statements. This may mean faculty issuing statements of support for their Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities. It may involve ending campus collaboration with police departments.
   The coming campus protests will not simply be confined to campus police “reform,” or “bad apples” in our academic communities. Instead, it will be systemic and comprehensive. After they are done with institutional racism as represented by the police, including campus police, who do you think they'll come for next?

First, when money dries up, things have to be cut back. And if something has to be cut back, better the humanities and social sciences than the sciences. If the humanities and social sciences have to be cut back, better it be the various grievance studies departments and programs than more important things like philosophy and economics. The alleged fact that grievance studies departments are "best-positioned to help us engage social problems" wouldn't, even if true, be a good reason to exempt them from cuts. First, they're among the intellectually weakest departments. Second, the social change for which they advocate is always leftist, therefore usually bad. Harvard had to terminate a job search. So what? That's happening all over the country, and I'm sure Harvard had to end more than one search. It may be "disheartening," but that doesn't mean it isn't necessary. The growth of contingent and non-tenure-track faculty is a bit of a problem, but it's a problem for everyone. Since we aren't given numbers, we don't actually know whether there's a special problem in the relevant departments or not. And no, that's not what an "existential threat" is. You "won't accept" "listening sessions" etc.? Well, I'd be happy not to have them. Such things are really just another way to infuse leftist politics into the university. Instead of that nonsense, we should be attending to our actual, scholarly and pedagogical responsibilities. Universities aren't about political activism. Their purpose is inquiry. As for issuing statements: issue away. Earlier he said such statements were useless. Later he indicates the opposite.
   Now hear this: my university, at least, won't be "ending campus collaboration with police departments."
   The protests will be "systemic" and "comprehensive"? What does that even mean?
   As for the threat of "coming after" the rest of us next: well come on then.
   Let me remind you that this bullshit was published in the Chronicle.