What’s the matter with Vassar?
The students I contacted were angry about the walkout and embarrassed for Vassar. The protesters, on the other hand, tweeted a proud picture with a poster they’d ripped down. These students may fancy themselves courageous, but hiding behind masks and refusing to risk public contradiction by questioning a political opponent is cowardly.
As for the talk itself, you can watch it on video. The walkout comes at about 29 minutes into the tape. You can hear students criticizing the protesters as they leave. (A brief video with a better camera angle on the walkout can be found here.) But the real takeaway from the video is that, agree or disagree, the dreaded Epstein laid out a perfectly reasonable case for the importance of fossil fuels and the dangers of putting the industry that produces them out of business without an economically viable substitute. The notion that a talk like this is out of place at a an institution of higher education is pernicious. If anything, students desperately need to hear Epstein’s side of the story.
I asked Vassar’s administration for a comment on the walkout, the ripping down of ads for the talk, and on the threat by a student to harm himself at the talk as a protest. Acting Vassar College President, Jonathan Chenette has so far addressed only the walkout. Chenette’s statement, forwarded to me by Vassar, emphasizes that Epstein took the walkout in stride (true), yet added that the students who “[exited] rather than engaging” had “lost an opportunity for exchange and questioning.” (I have some serious concerns about this statement, but I’ll raise them when I reproduce the full text in a follow-up post.) My first response to Chenette’s statement is that it won’t do much to address the underlying problems at Vassar, which run deep.
There may be faculty at Vassar who still respect the ideals of liberal education as classically understood. Notwithstanding that, Vassar appears to have passed a tipping point beyond which these ideals no longer meaningfully operate where they’re most needed. Classes filled with courteous and respectful discussion don’t mean much if students dare not raise questions that half the country might ask.
If only the problem were just at Vassar.
And always remember, it’s a right-wing war on science.
Turn off the electricity to Vassar for a couple weeks. Get the service stations in the area to refuse to sell gasoline to cars with Vassar parking decals. Let those morons know what like without energy is like. That would be a teachable moment.
This kind of lunacy is going on at many universities. It makes me wonder about hiring any of their graduates. If this is representative of what they’re being taught, they’re too stupid to hire.
The college I went to had a steam plant that provided heat for the campus. I wonder if Vassar is similar. If so, shut down the steam plant (too bad they didn’t get this bright idea during January).
Camping is fun, everyone should go camping for a week a year just to remember what it is like to live in the woods and poop in a hole in the ground. I wonder if any of these students have ever been camping? They might want to try it before getting too deep into their movement.
Sounds like they’ve been moving into holes in the ground for some time.
They aren’t merely ignorant, they take great PRIDE in that ignorance and throughly wallow in it.
They also take great offense if you attempt to remove it from them. It is a thing they bitterly cling to.
People also get upset over CFCs and fluorescent lights and WiFi, don’t they? Shutting down all electric power and disallowing any combustion on campus (breathing is probably ok, but no heavy breathing–too much CO2) and prohibiting non-organic/non-local/machine-harvested foods and not allowing fabrics made with artificial materials or animal byproducts should make the college experience much more environmentally friendly.
Karl, you’re assuming they can tell the difference between a hole in the ground and… something else.
Pet peeve of mine: blog posts that don’t say what they are about but only give you a web link to follow.
There are a lot of busy people out there. They would like to know beforehand if its worth their time to follow the link before they click it.
Bob Clark