Yes, of course you ask the question as you watch Keene State University students yet again burn down their town and call out all the riot police in a hundred mile radius: Where are the professors? Don’t professors teach there? Haven’t they noticed the decades of rioting that have made the name Keene State detested all over New Hampshire? (“Freshman Heather M. Fougere said she walked into Cumberland Farms on Main Street Sunday wearing a Keene State College sweatshirt. While there, an elderly couple glared at her, then looked away, she said. She kept her head down, she said.” Incoming! Freshman orientation at Keene State will soon include recommended evasive maneuvers when the local terrified populace bites back. Keep your head down! Lose the sweatshirt!)
So where are they, the people charged with educating Keene State’s students, the people who set academic policy, etc., etc.?
Well. You know. Keeping their heads down. Teaching in a charming New England town is a great gig, and you wouldn’t want to mess that up (the way Craig Brandon did) by complaining about anything, or putting any pressure on the kiddies. Use as your model the faculty at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill – if you see something academically or behaviorally, uh, non-standard, keep your trap shut. For twenty years.
One reporter did manage to find a couple of professors willing to talk. Let’s see what they said.
First, the whole thing is the media’s fault.
[A Keene State professor] attributed student behavior to cultural signals and the media, which faculty and administrators have little to no control over.
The same guy makes another salient point. All American universities burn down their host cities and towns.
“I don’t think there’s anything specific about Keene that makes it especially vulnerable to these kinds of events. These kinds of events — campus riots, student riots, alcohol-driven student riots — have become increasingly common across campuses.”
Nothing to see here! And anyway – when a certain behavior is common – let’s say for instance rioting – the only response is no response. I mean, it’s so common…
But the main faculty response, says the president of the faculty union, is the sniffles.
“I think generally faculty are saddened by the whole thing,” [Peter] Stevenson said.
October 24th, 2014 at 3:14PM
You know, tenure isn’t given because we want putatively wonderful people to get life long sinecures. Actually, it’s function is to allow the best/brightest to be the conscious of the academy, if not the nation. Having grown up in the Bay Area, with a neighbor, a retired CAL professor, who voted to uphold the Free Speech movement at the school, despite the assorted state powers that wanted to smash it, I can spot a principled stand when I see one. The KS profs don’t have the cajones to address the fact that their university has been converted to an open air no host bar, in order to get marginal students to plunge into unmitigated debt, hoping that keeps the pigeon drop scheme cycling a little while longer.