This is an interesting article about political tumult between Oberlin (administrators and students) and their surrounding community.  It's behind a paywall right now, but hopefully that will change.

Short story is this: the day after Trump's election, an African-American student was caught shoplifting from a local store in Oberlin, Ohio.  The circumstances of how he was stopped and what was happening to the store owner who stopped him--all involving violence, that seemed to be not from one side only--and the arrest of the student, and two other students who had tried to intervene (to speak neutrally as the facts there are contested), all of this sparked a huge controversy, protests, and all sorts of ugliness, mostly, it seems, from the side of the students and administrators at Oberlin.  A jury has agreed with that appearance, and has now awarded the store with a $32 million award from Oberlin.  Bad news for the college, which is one of the most remarkable places in the higher ed world.

I don't want to talk about the facts of this incident, as I don't really know them beyond this reporting and a few other places.  There's a fair amount of reporting and opining about this online, so if you want to be depressed, or angry, or feel vindication for whatever your view might be, the interwebs is here for you, as ever.

What I want to talk about are two features of this case that are not centrally about the Oberlin incident but about structural things that universities should think about, from it.

First, this reveals Oberlin's extremely tenuous "seatedness" in its place of Lorain County. This is not unique to Oberlin; far from it. Particularly elite institutions of higher ed often have much richer and more well-embedded relations to an archipelago of places around the world than they do to places five miles from their campus. The structures of "global" education, recruitment from around the world, and the global nature of the academic disciplines' focus all conspire to make colleges all feel like it'd be easier to have a hundred students and faculty visiting Shanghai, or London, or Manhattan, than to have them visiting a town two towns over from their own.  (To repeat myself.)  

There are always town/gown problems, of course.  But they also may be exacerbated by migration and polarization patterns across the United States as well.  Many of the most "liberal" of liberal-arts colleges and universities are in bucolic country spots.  They've been becoming bluer, while the regions they're in are becoming redder.  Also the aging of rural communities, especially as younger people move to cities, exacerbates generation gaps.  

More pointedly for professors like me, the associated incentive structure of academic advancement, which has zero to do with your service or teaching on your home campus and everything to do with your reputation in "the field," because the only way you get a real raise is by getting an offer from outside which leads to a counter-offer from inside.  In other words, you don't get rewarded for being good at home; you get rewarded for looking good from a distance.  And as ever, we devalue what is familiar to us; the grass is always greener on the other side of the street.  

As for students: If you are at a college or university, ask yourself: what incentives, what encouragement, does the institution provide for recent graduates to stay in the area, to work and live around the place where they received their college education?  Many colleges especially are in bucolic locales, but they seem to think of their areas as the backgrounds to resort life than a vital ecology of work.  (To this, I note that the final Oberlin student quoted in the piece is currently "a master’s-degree student at the London School of Economics and Political Science."  I think that that's a great thing, but it simply reinforces the narrative that Oberlin is closer to Bloomsbury than it is, say, to Elyria.)

Second: it's hard not to notice that it was not so much the faculty but "administrators" who were the college's primary interactive agents with the students.  That is interesting as well.  It seems to me that students have increasingly to do with administrative intermediaries than with faculty--deans of students, "Res life" heads, and the like.  My friend and colleague Chad Wellmon has noted the importance of the shifting center of gravity in American higher ed over the past half-century or more:

The transformation of American colleges and universities into corporate concerns is particularly evident in the maze of offices, departments, and agencies that manage the moral lives of students. When they appeal to administrators with demands that speakers not be invited, that particular policies be implemented, or that certain individuals be institutionally penalized, students are doing what our institutions have formed them to do. They are following procedure, appealing to the institution to manage moral problems, and insisting that the system’s overseers turn the cant of diversity and inclusion into real change. A student who experiences discrimination or harassment is taught to file a complaint by submitting a written statement; the office then determines if the complaint has merit; the office conducts an investigation and produces a report; an executive accepts or rejects the report; and the office "notifies" the parties of the "outcome."

These bureaucratic processes transmute moral injury, desire, and imagination into an object that flows through depersonalized, opaque procedures to produce an "outcome." Questions of character, duty, moral insight, reconciliation, community, ethos, evil, or justice have at most a limited role. American colleges and universities speak the national argot of individual rights, institutional affiliation, and complaint that dominates American capitalism. They have few moral resources from which to draw any alternative moral language and imagination. My students have adapted the old Protestant college’s moral mission to the demands of the institutions in which they now find themselves.

The extracurricular system of moral management requires an ever-expanding array of "resources" — counseling centers, legal services, deans of student life. Teams of devoted professionals work to help students hold their lives together. The people who support and oversee these extracurricular systems of moral management save lives and inspire students, but they do so almost entirely apart from any coherent curricular project.

It is entirely reasonable, then, for students to conclude that questions of right and wrong, of ought and obligation, are not, in the first instance at least, matters to be debated, deliberated, researched, or discussed as part of their intellectual lives in classrooms and as essential elements of their studies. They are, instead, matters for their extracurricular lives in dorms, fraternities or sororities, and student-activity groups, most of which are managed by professional staff members who, for many faculty members, seem to work in a wholly separate institution. The rationalization of colleges and universities has led to the division not only of intellectual labor (through academic specialization) but also of basic educational functions.

As someone who has worked for a long time with people in these offices, I am not one of those contemptuous professors who dismisses them as "deanlets".  I have been in several situations where I believe these people have literally helped to save lives.  (And not just from suicide.)  I know the intelligence, energy, commitment, and care they give to building a university out of the hodgepodge of classes faculty increasingly provide, and the anarchic (and often terrifying) social life with which the students equip themselves.  

But what I am saying is that the two halves of the university--and the scale of these administrative offices does make them increasingly proportionate to the faculty--do not self-consciously talk to one another, nor have they aligned their interests in any real way.  There is a real tension here, and American higher ed would do well to acknowledge that, and work to confront it more directly and forthrightly.  I don't know that it would have changed the outcome in the Oberlin case; but I suspect it will help us going forward as we face other tensions between the various institutional and structural energies of higher ed.