Category Archives: U.Miami: Strike’06

Picketline reproduces a very informative Daily Business Review article on the state of play in the student discipline hearings. Separately, there is news that requests for delay until the start of term — when students could be involved in the hearing — are being denied. So far, I have heard of one sentence of 30 hours community service and two semesters probation; this is subject to appeal to yet another dean.

Word is that this Thursday, June 15, at noon, the result of the chard check ballot of the would-be bargaining unit will be announced on the UM Campus at the Episcopal Church.

Recall that the settlement of the strike requires the unionizers to get a 60% super-majority in order to be recognized. But it gave them until Aug. 1 to achieve this total.

I have no inside information as to what this early announcement means, but logically it must mean either that they got the 60% or that so many people have voted that 60% is no longer possible. I’ll bet on the former.

Incidentally, the strike-related student discipline cases grind on. Because the formal charges were not filed until the summer term, the cases will be heard in camera by a single dean, acting as judge and jury; had charges been filed before the end of the school year, the students would have been entitled to much more process, to students as members of the tribunal, and to representation before the tribunal. So that’s not so great, unless the administration were to use this as an occasion for clemency — something for which I hope, but I’m not holding my breath.

Picketline Blog has an informative Update on Disciplinary Action Against UM Students. The key point is that the charges have been reduced from “major” to “minor” status — so it appears that no one is going to be thrown out of school.

This is a very positive development!

Picketline led me to Findlaw where I find an article by Jennifer van Bergen, “a journalist with a law degree” entitled Speech on Campus After 9/11: Less Free Than It Used To Be?.

The piece’s thesis is clearly stated right at the top:

Universities have traditionally been places where debate and the free exchange of ideas have been welcomed. But after 9/11, that may be changing — as some recent, troubling incidents suggest.

In this column, I’ll survey some recent incidents suggesting free speech on campus is in peril, …

Exhibit A for this thesis is the UM administration’s reaction to the strike. And Ms. van Bergen, described elsewhere as a south Florida resident, appears to be serious.

I don’t get it.

Please don’t misunderstand: I am not here to defend the UM administration’s appalling conduct during and after the strike. If students were hauled in on charges and asked to identify each other from photos while being treated in an intimidating manner, that’s a violation of our rules (and would be without the intimidating manner, too).

Threatening students with serious consequences for their failure to disperse when ordered is petty and mean, not to mention disproportionate and stupid. Leaving the charges hanging after the strike, instead of resolving them with an amnesty or a wrist slap is unwise (from the administration’s viewpoint): so far it has only martyrized them, and will probably radicalize them.

But all this reflexive administrative behavior has nothing to do with 9/11. It has rather more to do with the flawed temperament of our leadership (either the Board of Trustees or President Shalala, or conceivably both) and the poor judgment and limited capacities of certain mid-ranking administrators. In short, your standard story of people in power unable to transcend petty impulses for revenge, and people in a bureaucracy displaying some really lousy judgment during a pressure situation — then digging in their heels when tempers should have cooled.

But this is the way of the world. People are imperfect. Academic authorities don’t like being forced to do stuff by uppity kids, and they never have. And the fact that the kids are right, and that they enlist noble outsiders to say they are right and to force it down the authorities’ throats, well, that doesn’t help.

But all this has nothing to do with 9/11. UM was like this ten years ago — indeed, arguably, it may have been substantially worse.

If anything — and I admit this is reaching a little — the UM experience with the recent strike proves the reverse of the van Bergen thesis. At one point the administration here tried to float the idea that students protesting were anarchists, or colluding with anarchists, or at least inviting in anarchists, who we were no doubt supposed to believe would in short order turn this pristine tropical campus into some Beirut on the Biscayne.

To the extent anyone paid attention to this silly idea, we just laughed, and it hasn’t been heard from since.

Free speech is not in peril on this campus, and we won’t let it be. At worst, its ankle is being bitten. Whether that bite turns out to be by a mosquito or a Doberman will turn on what sort of treatment the administration administers to the students it has up on charges. And that remains to be seen.

Picketline Blog, Message in a Bottle, is a nice roundup of several of the strike aftermaths. Notable is a link to an article in the Coral Gables Gazette about onging student disciplinary proceedings.