NYU Actually Has Some Adults on Staff

On screen: How to Rein In Student Mobs
This too: Long After Protests, Students Shun the University of Missouri

It's nice to see a college that is run by the adults in charge and not the kids. There was a student sit-in to occupy the NYU student center for the usual basket of progressive causes, and they figured they'd get concessions from the admin. They did get a response...

The extent of student fortitude was mapped out in a natural experiment conducted at New York University last week, when students vowed to occupy a student center around the clock (it normally closes at 11 p.m.) until their demands for a meeting with the board of trustees were met. A photo in the Village Voice showed seated students blocking access by taking up most of the space on a stairway. The underlying ideals appeared to be the usual dog’s breakfast of progressive fancies — something about divesting from fossil fuels, and also allegations of unfair labor practices.

NYU administrators showed little patience for the activists disrupting the proceedings at the Kimmel Center for University Life. But how to dissolve the protest? It turned out that there was no need to bring in the police. Ringing up the students’ parents was all it took. The phone calls advised parents that students who interfered with campus functions could be suspended, and that suspensions can carry penalties of revoked financial aid or housing. The students “initially planned to stay indefinitely,” notes the Voice’s report. “Instead, the students departed within forty hours.”

Emphasis mine. Forty hours seems a bit long to allow a mob to linger, but otherwise, I approve. Further:

Flustered NYU students, unfamiliar with the proposition that open hostility to the university could be repaid in kind, reeled. A Puerto Rican student, Carlos Matos, told the Voice he didn’t expect administrators to call his father on him. “I don’t believe it is appropriate for NYU to use emergency contacts in this way,” he said.

NYU spokesman John Beckman told the paper that the tactic used by the school was “in line with our long-standing practice.” He insisted that the administration did not “threaten students about their housing or other financial aid, but it is simply the case that certain possible disciplinary outcomes — such as suspension — would have an impact on those matters.”

I suppose Beckman and I will have to agree to disagree on whether to inform a parent, “If your son doesn’t vacate the premises, it might blow up his financial aid” constitutes a threat. The point is: It worked! Order returned, unimpeded access to the student hangout was restored, and students were generously freed from their monotonous sit-in and pointed back in the general direction of the classroom.

Again, emphasis mine. In other words, "nice college experience you're having - it would be a shame if anything were to happen to it".

You'd have to have a heart of stone to not laugh at this. But maybe the people in charge have been paying attention to what's been going on at Mizzou (second link):

Freshman enrollment at the Columbia campus, the system’s flagship, has fallen by more than 35 percent in the two years since.

The university administration acknowledges that the main reason is a backlash from the events of 2015, as the campus has been shunned by students and families put off by, depending on their viewpoint, a culture of racism or one where protesters run amok.

Before the protests, the university, fondly known as Mizzou, was experiencing steady growth and building new dormitories. Now, with budget cuts due to lost tuition and a decline in state funding, the university is temporarily closing seven dormitories and cutting more than 400 positions, including those of some nontenured faculty members, through layoffs and by leaving open jobs unfilled.

Few areas have been spared: The library is even begging for books.

I'm amused by this article, because it appears to emphasize the idea that minority students are staying away in droves because of racism or something. But the numbers don't lie. 

Students of all races have shunned Missouri, but the drop in freshman enrollment last fall was strikingly higher among blacks, at 42 percent, than among whites, at 21 percent. (A racial breakdown was not yet available for this fall’s freshman class.)

Black students were already a small minority. They made up 10 percent of the freshman class in 2012, a proportion that fell to just 6 percent last fall.

In other words, look to the 90% for the actual story. The drop in enrollment is almost entirely due to normal families (all races) who don't want to send their kids into a place where social justice nonsense threatens their kids' education, freedom of speech and, quite likely, their physical safety. 

If nothing else, the admins and students at NYU may have taught the rest of academia a potent lesson in how the real world works.