UM board determined to restore order to campus

The American college campus can return to sanity. It won’t be easy, but Ann Arbor is showing how this can happen. The progress of events at U-M deserves careful attention; it shows how determined governing boards and administrators can inspire the sensibility of students tired of the campus dysfunction inflicted by a small group of activists.

On Nov. 8, almost predictably, members of the University of Michigan (U-M) Faculty Senate voted to censure their Board of Regents. They complained that the regents improperly tightened procedures regarding student misconduct. They also objected to the regents’ reasoned embrace of institutional neutrality, whereby U-M would desist from making political statements irrelevant to its role as an academic institution and/or divesting its endowment funds based on political issues.

But within a week, students showed the way forward.  By a vote of 30 to 7, the Central Student Government impeached its president and vice president, whose anti-Israel “Shut It Down” agenda had withheld funding from all official student organizations — that meant dozens of student clubs and activities — in order to leverage their demands that the university divest from companies doing business with Israel.

It was a long road.

Beginning in April, a pro-Palestine encampment demanding divestment had dominated the Diag, the center of the University of Michigan’s flagship campus in Ann Arbor. The demonstration grew particularly noisome when the protesters extended the campus occupation to the private home some 60 miles from campus of Sarah Hubbard, chair of the Board of Regents. She had become a particular target after March 28, when she articulated the board’s position that the endowment would be managed free of political pressure, in other words, with institutional neutrality. The encampment went up within a few days of that announcement. Then, on the morning of May 15, protesters placed body bags smeared with fake blood on her lawn, drumming and chanting over a bull horn. They also made uninvited and unwelcome visits to the homes of two other members of the Board of Regents. Finally, citing safety concerns, including fire hazards, campus police forcibly removed the tent encampment from the Diag.

And yet, the Faculty Senate’s response to this was to complain in the censure resolution that the “Regents have fostered a climate of repression at the university, by authorizing police violence against students.”

The Faculty Senate’s role in supporting the activists was long and substantial. On Jan. 29, the Senate Assembly, a group of 77 elected faculty representatives, voted 38 to 17 with five abstentions to call on the regents to divest from companies involved in Israel’s military operations in Gaza. After the removal of the encampment, the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs “deplore[d]” the administration’s action. Its statement read, “We call upon President Ono and other responsible administrators to respect and encourage students’ capacity for meaningful political activism.”

A campus so given to political fighting should urgently encourage responsible leadership to declare its commitment to institutional neutrality. It is a bulwark against politicization, and it leaves the endowment portfolio to financial professionals to determine, not campus activists. 

On one side, a faculty senate is determined to support disruption regardless of the impact on the university’s ability to function or the impact on other members of the community. On the other, a board of regents, now vindicated by students, is taking the lead to protect and restore one of America’s great public universities with a student body that prizes order and reason. 

This article was first published by the The Detroit News on December 4, 2024.