Noah D. Arney

Tag: Students

  • When the opposing protest is the speech

    It was interesting to read this article in Inside Higher Ed today:

    Shouting Down Speakers Who Offend
    Over the course of a month, students on several college campuses shut down speakers they disagreed with. Why is it so hard to forge a consensus on what protecting free speech really means?

    https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/free-speech/2023/04/13/shouting-down-speakers-who-offend

    The article portrays using crowds and shouting down speakers vs providing a platform for a speaker some consider controversial portrayed as a left-right division of free speech. The specific example is the SUNY Albany students protesting Ian Haworth at a Turning Points USA student event. To me this all seems more in line with the American understanding of free speech that loud group free speech is an appropriate response to something that is harmful (side note, I’ve seen similar confusion a lot from US academics as they conflate academic freedom and free speech in odd ways, I don’t know if that’s the case here).

    We see this when groups try to shout down a right wing speaker, we see this when groups try to protest an abortion clinic, we see it when groups try to shut down drag story time at a library. In all cases those protesting see the thing they are protesting as being harmful and therefore the protest is a legitimate display of free speech. In two of the cases it’s a matter of free speech vs free speech. In all cases those on the other side of the political spectrum see it as too likely that the protesters will resort to violence (as has recently happened in some of the library protests) and therefore consider it illegitimate protest. But that’s not what this article is critiquing. It seems to be saying that controversial (non-illegal) hate speech at an event is an exercise of free speech, but shouting down the speaker is not. And that seems strange because of how the US views protest on public property.

    In the US most state universities would be considered public property, so the bar for stopping these protests is very high (similar to trying to stop them in libraries, though because they are protesting events targeted to children instead of to adults there may be nuance I’m missing), which means that shouting down a speaker as long as you don’t bar them from accessing the venue (they didn’t in the main case used here) and you don’t stop them from speaking (they could speak but it would be hard to be heard over the crowd) would be legal. Of course when the event was moved to a private area of campus that disallowed the protestors the laws would have changed.

    That leaves us with a question, because if we put two events up against each other we have left and right both protesting in public buildings to stop events they feel includes harmful speech. My basic understanding of US law is that the government isn’t supposed to shut down a speaker just because the hecklers *might* get violent in response, neither are they supposed to stop non-violent protestors in public spaces. However, at this point nearly everyone (though maybe not in a legal sense) has agreed that if the actions of the protestors include violence then that is a threat that prohibits the speech.

    Context is important

    This event didn’t happen in a vacuum. Although TPUSA is a big national organization it took about ten seconds to find that their last big event on campus brought in just under 30 students and no protestors, it was held in a closed room that wasn’t open to a public space. This second event then was in a larger room fitting over 100 people and directly connected to a public space, meaning two things: 1) they expected over three times the number of people from their prior event 2) they held this event specifically in a space that would be considered public property. Finally when they did move to a closed private space for the event, none of the media coverage or even their own comments, mention not fitting their attendees in, and all of the photos of the event show that the space was nearly entirely filled with protestors.

    The other thing to know is that the first event gathered no press at all, I didn’t even see something in the local paper. The second event had a week of national media coverage over it.

    Which implies to me that there was intent here. The meta speech of the event by the hosts *was* the protest. That is what publicized and amplified their speech, it’s what made people listen to them, see them, and pay attention to them. Thus there are three speech items at play, not two.

    • Group A held event (speech)
    • Group B peacefully protested event in a way that made the speech impossible to hear at the time (counter-speech)
    • Group A was able to have broader and louder speech because of the protest (counter-counter-speech)

    So if group A got what they wanted and intended out of the event then is this actually a crisis of free speech, or is it exactly how the US system of free speech operates? No one was directly violent, and the closest thing to violence reported is that someone destroyed a bible. Which brings me back to the beginning. How should universities respond to this?

    If the protest was prevented from happening not only would the speech of the protestors have been stopped by government actors, but the speech of the hosts would not have been as public as they wanted.

    I think I’ll end off here by bringing up the idea of violence. Violent acts change the equation, but legally violent implications without immediate action isn’t supposed to. However, in the US it is difficult because it is so easy for things to change from implication to action because of their lax firearms laws. At what point of the violent spectrum should we step in?

    • Violent potential (where this protest was)
    • Violent implication
    • Violent possibility
    • Violent threat (where most of the anti-drag protests are)
    • Violent past actions
    • Violent preparation
    • Violent action

    I think that’s a much more important discussion for us to have, and one that completely sidesteps any discussion of academic freedom but instead focuses on when we should shut competing speech down.

    Post event story changes

    In the immediate reporting by one of the hosts it’s clear that the event moved and proceeded. In the post event reporting it was said (by the same person) that the event had to be canceled. In addition, no one claimed the bible, which makes me unclear whether it was a protestor bringing it to destroy it, or a protestor taking it from an attendee and destroying it. Since grabbing a bible out of someone’s hand would clearly be something that would be reported in the media since it fits a certain narrative of the event I’m suspicious. Mostly it lends credence to the idea that the counter-counter-speech wasn’t only a benefit for Group A, but was in fact the point of the event.

  • Indigenous Students in BC

    I was considering Indigenous student recruitment this week and I decided to check to see if we have data about where Indigenous students go to post-secondary, and because BC’s PS data system is pretty good, we do have that data. Take a look at it here. Here’s the highlights. FYI I’m using 2019 as the stable year because it is both pre-pandemic but still recent enough to be similar to today. We could do this again using 2022-23 data when it comes out in two years.

    First, the average Indigenous student enrolment at a public PSI is 6%. That’s actually a good thing because Stats Can tells us that that is also the percentage of Indigenous people in BC. So we get a win there, in that Indigenous students are no longer underrepresented in postsecondary. The work of Indigenous PSI staff in this between recruitment, mentoring, and supporting initiatives off the side of their desk cannot be ignored. They have done amazing work to shift college’s and university’s perspectives on Indigenous students and remove barriers.

    Now for where Indigenous students go. 19 public Post-Secondary Institutions make up 90% of Indigenous student enrolment, and all of the research universities are included in that group. Of course, that means that the other 7 institutions only make up 10% of provincial Indigenous student enrolment. Specifically I’d like to call out the abysmal recruitment of Langara College, especially because they used to have good Indigenous student recruitment, but their new numbers are under 2% Indigenous students while 30% of their students are International.

    In student recruitment the students are often classified by Domestic Non-Indigenous, Domestic Indigenous, and International for better targeting of recruitment money. There is a lot more breakdown depending on the strategic enrolment management done by the institution. Because of that I’m looking at number and percentage of Indigenous and International students at the different PSIs to determine who’s doing what type of recruitment.

    Top recruiters from a percentage standpoint are:

    • NVIT**
    • Coast Mountain*
    • College of New Caledonia
    • Northern Lights
    • UNBC*
    • North Island College*
    • Vancouver Island University

    All of whom have more that 12% Indigenous students. Those starred also recruit more Indigenous students than International students, an important number, because the average institution recruits three times more International students than Indigenous students. NVIT gets special mention as the only institution that is majority-Indigenous.

    The worst recruiters are:

    • Langara College*
    • SFU*
    • UBC*
    • Kwantlen Polytechnic*
    • Douglas College
    • Emily Carr

    All of whom have 3% or fewer Indigenous students. Those starred recruit 10 times more International students than they do Indigenous students.

    Now, percentages aren’t everything. Here are the Institutions with the largest Indigenous student populations:

    • Thompson Rivers University
    • JIBC
    • Vancouver Island University
    • Okanagan College
    • BCIT*
    • UBC*
    • College of New Caledonia
    • UVic*
    • NVIT
    • University of the Fraser Valley

    UBC and BCIT both have poor Indigenous student recruitment and UVic has below average recruitment, but all three are such large institutions that they make this list anyway.

    Thompson Rivers University is the single largest Indigenous student enroller at nearly 3000 students, but Justice Institute (JIBC) isn’t far behind. In fact when you add in VIU and Okanagan College you have 1/3 of the provincial Indigenous student enrolment.

    Now to just call out the top universities for Indigenous student recruitment and worst recruitment.

    Thompson Rivers University recruits the most Indigenous students, while University of Northern British Columbia and Vancouver Island University recruit the highest percentages of Indigenous students.

    Simon Fraser University and University of British Columbia do the worst job of recruitment percentage wise, but SFU is the worse recruiter because they have fewer than 800 Indigenous students even though they’re the second largest university in the province.

    So, I’ve talked about recruitment, but what should a good target for Indigenous students at a post-secondary institution be? You should be using the larger of two numbers. Either the provincial percentage of Indigenous people (6%) or regional percentage (7-9% depending on the region). That’s for starters. If you’re below that then you need to re-assess your recruitment. And just a note, that the percentages are for *total current* students, so recruitment means nothing if you don’t retain students. Also, once you’ve reached that percentage the next step is to look at what will make a difference to your community both inside the institution and to the regional community.

    A quick idea here is to look at your percentage of Indigenous students compared to your percentage of International students. If you have parity with your region’s Indigenous students but many of them are still the only Indigenous student in their classes, that’s an issue. This could look like targeting somewhere between 1/2 as many or just as many Indigenous students as International students. And for 11 PSIs they’re already there (star means they are at or above parity with both regional population and International students):

    • NVIT*
    • Coast Mountain*
    • NIC*
    • JIBC*
    • College of Rockies*
    • UNBC*
    • VIU
    • Northern Lights
    • Okanagan
    • CNC
    • Camosun

    Two universities have regional parity and are working on closer parity with International students (UFV and TRU) and two institutions are above provincial parity but not yet above regional parity (Selkirk College and UBC-O). The remaining 11 institutions are below provincial parity and need to do some serious work. Perhaps they need to call up those who seem to be doing this the best? For colleges that’s Coast Mountain College, College of New Caledonia, and North Island College. For universities that’s UNBC and Vancouver Island University.

  • A Response to “Let the Professors Run the University”

    In “Let the Professors Run the University” Dr. Samuel J. Abrams lays out his concerns with how the University has fallen, and he places the blame squarely on the separation of faculty from student services roles.

    His argument broken down:

    Student facing administrators (by which he seems to be trying to conflate the front line student affairs professionals with management level employees but I’ll use his term shortened to SFA) have begun shaping academic discourse at universities. And this decreases deliberative dialogue.

    SFA are more liberal.
    SFA set the agenda of what happens on campus because they control everything that is “extracurricular”.
    From the link to his other articles (strange that he’s mainly citing his own opinion articles) he, again without citation, says that SFA shape the experience of university.
    Again from his self citation: SFA feel that “personal values” are important when educating (and again remember that these are people who only have control over extracurricular) and he implies that this means they are going to push their personal values onto students.

    The backdrop of his argument then is that SFA, through their control of things extracurricular, encourage students to be more liberal and progressive and to become activists.

    With that in mind he goes on to complain about the number of protests (as he is well versed in the literature and history here I’m sure I don’t need to point out that the small local protests of today are much smaller than the university student led protests of the 1960s). He says that the protests have led to his own university capitulating to student demands.

    He follows this up with a complaint that SFA feel that students should be able to direct their own educational path.

    The solution to this is to have faculty members run extracurricular programming. This should include everything from student orientation to residence life to academic advising to career services.

    Now lets look at the biggest problem here. The average professor makes between $70,000 and $110,000 a year while the average student affairs professional makes between $35,000 and $65,000. To have a professor take over the job of a staff member making 1/2 their salary would be absurdly costly. Every professor who did so would need to do a job that they have no training for at double the efficiency in order for the university to break even.

    Unfortunately for his argument the main reason why universities today have so many staff members doing things that in the 1950s were either done by faculty, or weren’t done at all, has a lot to do with capitalism. In the shift from elite to mass education many things needed to be offered at scale. This includes things like residence life, student orientation, academic advising, and career services. To offer these things at scale a professional workforce that specialized in those things took over them, allowing faculty to focus on teaching and research.

    If instead a university decides faculty lead student services is an important thing and so will reduce services to ensure that faculty can provide them instead of professional staff then that university will have a harder time competing as they will be providing fewer services for the same price. This problem arises whether you feel that the university is offering “mass” education or “elite” education. Universities are not immune to market forces, and those forces don’t want universities to decrease services, those services are what get students who may not have been able to access post secondary 60 years ago to thrive and graduate on time.

    Unfortunately it is not uncommon to see people write articles about post secondary as if you don’t need to think about 1) how much things cost or 2) where that money comes from. Both errors that Dr. Abrams seems to have made.

    A second issue in the article is a mistake that Dr. Abrams has made before in his article “One of the Most Liberal Groups in America“. And that issue is the conflation of jobs that results in his phrase “student-facing administrators”, referred to in other articles by him as “professional class of administrators”. In the articles he cites, such as “Remarks on Benjamin Ginsberg’s Fall of the Faculty” the definition of “administrator” is very narrow and is used to refer to “vice-presidents and vice-provosts” “deans and chairs” “associate and assistant deans and assistant chairs” and their support staff. Dr. Abrams takes that group and combines them with the Student Affairs professionals to create his term “student-facing administrators”. This allows two things, first it widens the pay scale and second it makes the mean seem like the median or mode.

    Vice, assistant, and associate, provosts, deans, and chairs nearly always arise from the faculty side. They usually have a history as a tenured or tenure track professor, and they almost always have a doctoral degree. They nearly always have a higher salary than faculty. Their direct staff tend to be administrative assistants and the like who make 1/4 to 1/3 of what they make and rarely have influence beyond the office in which they are situated.

    Student Affairs professionals as a whole have either bachelors degrees or, commonly in the US and uncommonly in Canada, masters degrees and are in student facing roles. Dr. Abrams is correct that their role is often one of overseeing the extracurricular activities on campus. But unlike vice, assistant, and associate provosts, deans, and chairs they always have a lower salary than faculty and their say on policy is always smaller than that of the actual administrators.

    By conflating the two groups Dr. Abrams gets to imply that the large influence on university policy held by the actual administrators is also held by the student affairs professionals, thus making the group exercising a large influence becomes bigger than the number of non administrator faculty. This is untrue, as Dr. Abrams no doubt knows.

    I’m sure the last problem here is obvious by now. If you share the salary of an associate dean and imply that student affairs professionals make that salary then you can imply that the ballooning of budgets is because of them. In a recent twitter thread new student affairs professionals shared whether they made in the 30-40k range or the 40-50k range. Virtually no one was above 40k and the majority of them had a masters degree. To conflate that person with the assistant provost making $100,000 more is absurd. And the most frustrating part is that since Dr. Abrams has done the research and knows all of this he must be doing it deliberately.

  • Indigenous Access to Post-Secondary

    Aboriginal people make up 6% of BC and the percentage is rising quickly.

    From an economic standpoint there’s a huge wage gap between aboriginal and non aboriginal workers pay based on looking at full time workers with the same career classification. But the good news is that the more education an aboriginal person has the closer that gap is. In fact the gap almost disappears for aboriginal people with a masters degree or higher. But Aboriginal people are less likely to go to post secondary, with only 45% of working age aboriginal people having a post secondary certificate diploma or degree compared to 62% for non aboriginal residents.

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