Christopher Sloce provides the following piece on Virginia Commonwealth University’s handling of the recent controversy surrounding Students For Life events and what it says about the state of university life
On April 1st, the President of VCU, Michael Rao released a statement titled “Protecting freedom of expression at VCU”. The impetus for the statement was a 30 minute disruption of a Students for Life of America event. SFLA, a pro-life organization, invited its founder Kristian Hawkins to speak at VCU Commons on her “Lies Pro-Choice Believers Believe”.
Of the 70 people in attendance, the vast majority were protestors, as you would expect for a socially liberal university located in one of Virginia’s deep blue pockets. After 30 minutes of protesting, a fight broke out: video of the fight was captured by independent Richmond journalist Goad Gatsby and is included here. In the video, you can see a protester, as they’re attacked by the security guard.
The police were called, arrived quickly, escorted out Kristian Hawkins and crew. There were two arrests made: one for a misdemeanor assault stemming from the “attack” on the security guard, and another charge given for disturbing the peace by bringing a megaphone into the VCU Commons. In a later recounting of the event, protestors, including one of the organizers of the event, McKenna Willis, said that the incident was not accurately portrayed in national media, citing that VCU’s security failed to protect students when SFLA’s security detail attacked students.
Rao’s statement is not notable for the content. On display is the usual logic presented by technocratic, neoliberal functionaries: focus on the constitution and the right of free speech for whatever version of political belief. But emphasized by the harsh formatting of darker font and italics, the statement reads: Neither individual was a VCU student nor had any connection to the university, shades of the panic around “bad protestors” during the George Floyd protests.
It should be noted this wasn’t enough for Kristian Hawkins, who went on Fox News to decry the “terrorists” who shut down civil discourse in this country. In any event, SFLA wanteded more from VCU: the total shut down of any sort of alternative. If there had been 20 protestors and 20 pro-life attendees, the 20 protesters would have been as much of a sign of radical antifa elements as the higher number of protestors.
SFLA is not, in any way, acting in good faith. Just after an event at George Mason Univeristy where SFLA’s GMU chapter compared abortion to slavery at an event called “Abortion is Not Right”, a student organization called the Black, African, and Caribbean Coalition (BLACC) released a statement on Instagram criticizing the event: “We recognize that Mason encourages diverse viewpoints and beliefs, but in order to function as a campus society, deference must be practiced…. The loose language and insane idea of abortion being a ‘version’ of slavery is imprudent.”
BLACC requested in this statement that the efforts be responded to by “meeting with Students for Life; in the presence of University Life administrators, Center for Culture, Equity and Empowerment officials, and all other necessary parties to swiftly reduce this harm”. GMU’s Center for Culture, Equity, and Empowerment was open to the meeting, and reposted the BLACC’s statement to their Instagram story.
Even the small amount of criticism given to the SFLA by the BLACC was too much. Student’s for Life’s legal counsel, Zachary S. Kester, drafted a letter to both the BLACC and the Equity Center demanding a cornucopia of reprisal, including an apology from the Equity Center itself as well as the BLACC being “reprimanded”, with a turn around time for all demands to be met within 5 hours of receiving the letter. In a rather skeptical interview with Reason magazine that doubles as a definitive recounting of the event, Kester argued the following:
“Those consecutive sentences [that the idea of abortion being a human rights abuse tantamount to slavery and that saying so is harmful, even unintentionally] is the functional equivalent of BLACC calling Students for Life of GMU racist….Is that not the impression that you were left with? I’m pretty sure that any reasonable observer would be left with that impression. In fact, the legal standard of defamation is ‘what’s the impression left upon the observer.
Defamation per se includes statements about people’s mental state or mental condition, and given that BLACC called the version slavery ‘insane,’ that speaks to mental condition and it constitutes defamation per se…. There’s not a generalized, overarching First Amendment right to call someone ‘racist.’”
An opinion is, of course, not defamation. Defamation requires the presence of material harm done to SFLA or their GMU chapter, and can be quite a bit of pain to prove. I can call Kristian Hawkins an idiot and unless she can prove I caused her to face any sort of financial repercussions, I did not defame her. I may have been rude (but correct), but there is nothing illegal about being rude to someone.
The pattern here is one that should be obvious to anyone who has followed any of the numerous skirmishes that have taken place in America’s university system, from the Sixties to the interruption of Milo Yiannopolous’s appearance at Berkeley. The right wing has made itself the defenders of free speech, but entirely on their terms. Any sort of injunction on their free speech is viewed as the state failing to protect its free speech, and never one person’s free speech being louder than theirs.
The raw numbers of protestors at the VCU event shows that on one campus, they are simply not popular. Another attempt to flex their mettle resulted in a blatantly ridiculous charge of defamation, and no follow up from the university. For all of Kester and SFLA’s attempts to use legal pressure on BLACC and the GMU Equity Center, nothing has resulted from it. One of Kester’s key charges in the Fall 2022 Demand Letter is that by the GMU Equity Center responding to BLACC’s open letter, the GMU Equity center “affirmed the unfounded accusations” and have “impermissibly chilled the speech of Students for Life at GMU and other pro-life students”. But where this chill has taken place is anyone’s guess.
Anyone who’s been around the American right wing knows its specific distaste for the university and student life. The story of this slippage is told mostly as a story of a fall from grace, where once upon a time colleges taught useful things that would teach you how to work, to now, where a bedlam of studies–gender, African American, and so on– has been injected into the educational discourse, mostly by Marxists who avoided the repression of the Red Scare by burrowing themselves inside academia, where they would infect new minds.
The likelihood that SFLA doesn’t feel this way is nil: when the event at VCU happened, one of the people to boost Hawkin’s recollection of events was Andy Ngo, a fly who always situates himself down-wind from any privy. By making VCU a breeding ground for radicals, the stakes are higher than just one protest gone awry.
For all of the conservative harrumphing about liberal bias, there is a simple answer as to why universities trend liberal, and it’s for the same reason we don’t make arsonists firefighters. College professors and other civil fixtures trend liberal because the work that those people do is valuable, and liberals, on some level, recognize that they’re valuable.
The administration of these universities do have some base in trying to make sure that the universities function properly. However, these functionaries are still functionaries to the overriding ideologies of their time. And in neoliberal America, where the unquestioned supremacy of the market as a self-correcting mechanism is believed in by both liberals and conservatives, their function is ultimately not that different.
Just as in Network, the imposing Arthur Jensen sneered to Howard Beale, “What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state — Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do,” whether a college is to be run by the paragons of order of the Obama mold or the ideological Cold warriors in the Ron Desantis mold is immaterial; the prescribed solution in a world where profit matters is to always tend towards spending less on overhead or raise prices.
VCU chose to first raise prices. In the period from 2009-2019, tuition doubled, including a dramatic, Volcker shock jump of 32.8% in 2010 from 2009. Along these lines: enrollment for students has decreased in the last four years. It’s this fact, among others, that VCU higher ups cite when it comes to the coming budget shortfall, one that Chief Financial Karol Kain Gray cited when she makes hay out of a loss of 250 jobs that would be lost in the event of an apocalyptic $25 million shortfall, compared to the conservative estimate of $2 million.
Either way, the justification given is that tuition should raise between 3% to 5%: the failures of the university to meet its own expansionist goals falling on a declining student body whose expensive education is not getting as much per dollar as it did. Who wants to pay 5% more to a university that just three months ago, paid $73 million to back out of a real estate deal in the city’s old Public Safety Building?
Obama or Desantis be damned, administrative bloat always results in austerity’s go-to: the slashing of services. In this instance, we see it in the university turning a vast majority faculty contracts into “term” contracts. Rather than the prior model of giving out contracts for 1-3 years, now all contracts will be awarded on 1 year basis.
It’s one of the foundations of VCU that is being affected first. The Focused Inquiry department, where first and second year students are taught the basics of education at VCU, including research, currently sits at 65 employees, with the university preparing to cut 15 of these employees. The cited amount of money that would be saved from this action is estimated to be $1 million, ultimately a glass of water compared to the tsunami of a $25 million budget shortfall.
But even if the $1 million slashing of jobs staved off fifty percent of the best case scenario the university is putting forth, in the meantime, the staff of 50 would have to make up for the decision by increasing class sizes, decreasing the amount of time each professor can spend with a student and teach them the way that works best for them, as opposed to the bare and standard recitation of expectations for university life. At some point, austerity renders the product worse.
What is most evident about civil society, across ages, is that the various functions of civil society are subject to the same laws of struggle as anything else. VCU Workers, a chapter of United Campus Workers, have made the university’s issues and the contradictory logic that underlies their strategies for managing the shortfall evident throughout their campaign against the elimination of multi-year contracts and existing layoffs. VCU students, who throughout the year have protested tuition raises, are introduced to the austerity measures neoliberal economics makes its bones on.
The slashes at VCU are supposedly based on what the VCU Provost cites as “student interest”. The student, who is only given the minute economic democracy given to every consumer, is no longer somebody who is supposed to be taught, but another customer. This orientation to a consumer would come at the expense of some of VCU’s nationally recognized programs. In a conversation with the VCU Chapter Chair of United Campus Workers, Kristen Reed, she had this to say:
“The Provost has argued that the departments facing elimination will follow “student interest,” implying that popular departments will be expanded and less popular programs will be shrunk or eliminated. I do not believe this to be the case. We know from the structural reorganization of the School of the Arts that their school has lost faculty lines and been pushed overwhelmingly to rely on adjunct labor despite the high level of popularity of arts at VCU.
Arts has been a flagship School at our university, with national prestige. That has not protected that School from being affected by cuts at the hands of this administration.The more likely truth is that the Executive Administration will favor profit-generating degree programs and will cut programs that constitute public service, social justice, and other areas of critical need that lie outside the for-profit sector.”
When a company isn’t selling enough of a product any longer, it merely takes it off the shelves. Education does not work so similarly: either it’s fed or it dies. And VCU students and faculty would both be subject to that, and looking for ways to scream “stop” at the hollowing out of their experience at the university. It’s here where students and faculty could align, but where?
The problem of colleges is a political problem, and there’s not an organized political force that would meet both their common interests, one that fights against the vultures who view universities as another market to short and its faculty as another force in the way of the eventual goal: to apply the logic of venture capital to every sphere of common life.
And that organized political force must be one that is in the process of transforming all facets of social life away from the vile maxim of the market. It is not enough to oppose neoliberals running universities; you have to look at the source of neoliberal economics. And there it is an attempt to revert to the robber baron logic that ruled over American life: a world of civic services existing in name only, without the underlying thread that American social democracy found in the mid-century. It is what Fernand Braudel called “the logic of the jungle”, and we live in it.
Viewed as a holistic issue, the problems of education are problems of learning , true, but also problems of capitalism and America’s neoliberal civic structure, where administrative bloat rules the day, and there are bureaucrats as far as the eye can see. But these things were true in the prior decade as well. Rather, what we are seeing now are subjects of neoliberalism slowly coming to the conclusion that every part of their lives that they take for granted are for sale to buyers that do not care what comes of their assets.
And any attempt to reject this schemata results in the repression of the subjects. To borrow a term from Antonio Gramsci, the Marxist tradition’s greatest scientist of civil society, students and faculty find themselves entering the war of maneuver, not in any formation that can meet the intricacies of bourgeois class structure.
And it is a war, at least for those who see the smallest of threats to their power. From all the outgrowths of superstructure, one political goal is to be the obscuring of class relations, interests, and struggle, so as to suppress analysis and continuation of struggle. And it is one that VCU has no problem engaging in: from the jettisoning of multi-year contracts to measures taken towards the student body.
This much is obvious from the second Students for Life event, after Kristian Hawkins did her media rounds and accused the university of breeding anti-fascist vermin. A redo of the original event, now cloistered with security, including VCU police, the end result was arrests of protestors quietly protesting outside the event. I was made aware of the event by speaking with a source involved with the protest. The summary was given as follows:
Students peacefully protested against the rally, brought speakers to play copyrighted music as a disruption tactic. Provost began to rapidly escalate the protest, arrested several students out of the crowd randomly on vague tresspassing [sic?] rumors…
They were all sent into a closed, small room. No access to lawyers, police continued to act in a further intimidating manner. Police then arrested a random person for asking questions within the crowd- took them to the room. Screams were heard of “they’re hurting me” and said person had a panic attack. Had to be escorted by EMT’s. Later, they were sent to city jail in a van, and also strip searched by police. This only happened to women and non-binary individuals.
A review of Goad Gatsby’s on the scenes reporting shows other things: the VCU police presence, including VCU’s police chief. The way the Dean introduced Kristian Hawkins, the demarcation of VCU and non-VCU students with green and yellow wristbands. All of it points towards this: the only lesson the neoliberal world wants to teach now is to know your place and demand nothing better despite the world taking more and more away.
On June 6th, 2023, on a day when wildfire smoke from Canadian wildfires choked the downtown air of Richmond, there was a shooting during a high school graduation took place at the Altria Theater, directly across from Monroe Park and on VCU campus. A young man and his father were killed, and others were injured in the attempts to escape. The sound of shooting had to be audible for anyone on VCU campus.
The shooting required some sort of comment from the university, if only as a matter of standard procedure. But instead: another email was scheduled to go out right as the students of Huguenot High School and their parents were running for safety. The second email apologized for the poor timing of the initial email, and then listed off all the rote cliches we use for mass shootings. What that email had to tell the VCU student body was that their tuition was going to be raising by 3% for the 2023-2024 academic year.
The Virginia Worker 
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