AUTONOMOUS ENTITIES?

In December 1991, I obtained permission from the Venezuelan government for me and my son to go on a special three-week long expedition into the Amazonia territory of the primitive Yanomamo Indians. One of our two guides was a dental student at Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV) in Caracas. When I asked him why he was not at the university, he replied that UCV had been closed by a student strike. As a matter of fact, he had been studying dentistry for the past eight years in bits and pieces because UCV gets shut down frequently by student strikes over political issues.

Latin American universities are practically autonomous entities. As long as the students don’t riot, the police do not interfere in their protests and strikes. The problem with that is, as in the case of UCV, the schools are simply shut down until the strikes are over.

While the Latin American universities seem to enjoy a good deal of autonomy, there have been occasions when the police have ‘invaded’ their campuses. That always resulted in bloody clashes with a number of student deaths. In 1968, the Mexican police and army paratroopers ended a student demonstration by killing over a 100 National Autonomous University students in Mexico City.

American institutions of higher education are not autonomous entities.

One day not long after I started teaching at College of the Mainland, I happened to go to the administration building where I saw the Dean of Instruction sitting on the floor with a couple of dozen students. They were discussing the use of Marijuana on campus. Several of the students said they are free to smoke pot because the cops cannot come on campus. The dean, who ranked just behind the president and later became president himself, agreed with the students, telling them the cops could only come on campus if invited by the college administration.

When the dean spotted me he called me over to verify what he had told the students. I told him he was wrong and that the police had a right to come on campus to investigate any reports of wrongdoing, whether invited or not. Then I told the students that some of them better watch out because there may be undercover narcs working the campus right now. The dean turned purple and the students were visibly upset. Needless to say I was on their shit list from then on.

This brings me to the pepper spraying incident on the UC Davis campus. The Los Angeles Times had an editorial very critical of the police response to the student sit-in. The Times, in essence, said that campus cops should be trained to do nothing when students are protesting peacefully and non-violently.

I strongly disagree with the Times editorial. When a protest is lawful, the cops should not interfere, but when it becomes unlawful, even if it is peaceful and non-violent, the police should act to put an end to any unlawful activities.

I’ve always felt that college professors and students wake up every morning in a world removed far from reality. It’s the same with prison inmates. The inmates live in the world of the prison, which is far removed from the free world. College students live in the insulated world of the college or university. The outside world is a lot different and students need to be taught how to live in the real world, a world in which they cannot take part in unlawful activities. Sadly however, that’s not what college and university students are being taught.