For What It's Worth

Ah, to be young and delusional.  This morning my department secretary forwarded an e-mail message from some an unnamed and probably unorganized student group.  The purpose of the e-mail was to let the faculty know that students would be politely walking out of classes this week to demonstrate their solidarity with the Wall Street protestors.  In true Mount Holyoke Fashion, they plan to raise their hands first and announce that this is the reason they are leaving class. That way everyone else will know that they are protesting and not just, you know, cutting class.  From class, they will walk over to the student center and have a rally.  As the organizers explain on their Facebook page, they timed this event so that students would miss a minimum amount of class time.  After all, protesting Injustice is nice and all as long as it doesn’t hurt your grade in a course.  Oh, and you certainly want to let your professors know that you are leaving class for a Righteous Reason, lest they think you are a Bad Student or something.  And, all this is to support a larger, even more inchoate, protest against…well, nobody is at all sure what is being protested on Wall Street.  Protesting is the big thing after all.  As the e-mail I received noted, “Princeton Review has listed Mount Holyoke as one of the most politically active campuses in the nation and we would like to prove that we deserve that ranking.”  New standards in Protesting:  We Protest to Prove that We Protest.

All of this is reminds me of a book I read this Summer that I never did get around to reviewing here: White Guilt, by Shelby Steele.  I read a lot about this book when it came out in 2006, but I finally got around to reading it this summer after I saw a copy at a library book sale.  It’s better than I thought it would be.  The general thesis is that the Civil Right movements in the 1960s developed into an exercise of White Guilt, and then once that set in, the leaders of society simply lost all ability to articulate their firm belief in anything at all.  The end of white supremacy also marked the end of authority of any sort at all.  So, now protestors can protest with the certain belief that nobody will tell them they are out of order or just plain silly. 

Want proof?  Imagine if after some students walked out of my class to protest, I handed out a surprise quiz to the remaining students and did not allow any absent students to take the test at a later time.  Would the protestors feel a Righteous Pride that their protest actually had a consequence?  I doubt it.  I suspect they would complain bitterly that their protest should not affect their grade and that I had no right to hand out a surprise quiz after they left the room.  Students do not believe that college officials have the moral authority to do anything that students do not like.  And interestingly, most college administrators agree with the students on that point.

Oh, and if the organizers of the Protest are looking for a catchy tune to play at their protest, may I suggest this?