Protest Was Learning Experience

To the Editor:

As there will undoubtedly be many articles and letters about the Larry Summers protest in this week's Review, I would like to raise some questions/points that may be left out. I saw Monday as a learning experience for all those involved and I welcome productive responses.

Were the protesters offensive? In 1998, several Oberlin students and other Ohio activists disrupted a speech being given by Secretary of State Madeline Albright at Ohio State University on the eve of renewing the bombing of Iraq, verbally holding her accountable for the more than one million Iraqis killed by U.S./U.N. bombing and sanctions. The protest earned national media attention and bombing was called off. I have since heard Oberlin students, residents, faculty and administrators refer to this event with great pride. So why then do many of these same people consider what happened in Finney on Monday to be offensive?

One reason I have heard is that anyone of any viewpoint should be allowed to speak uninterrupted. My response to this is twofold. One, Summers was not prevented from speaking. In fact he spoke for 40 minutes, twice the length of time he told the College he would speak for. If protesters wanted to stop him from speaking altogether they would have done something different. A conscious choice was made to allow him to speak but to make that process uncomfortable for him. Two: while it is true that everyone has a right to free speech, there are times when preventing someone from speaking sends such a strong message to the speaker and the public that is an effective tactic. Oberlin's history is filled with people using tactics like this to make a morally imperative point. I would hope that if a Hitler or a Pinochet came to speak at Oberlin we would do more than politely wait for the Q&A session to hold them accountable for their actions.

I agree that the tactics that were used were not effective. Many people who went to the speech opposed to Summers's policies left siding with him and this is a regrettable outcome. The tactics may also have been annoying to many people, but I disagree that they were offensive. In the recent past, Summers has promoted exporting toxic waste to developing countries which he has deemed "under-polluted." On Monday, Summers defended sweatshops and "free" trade zones, arguing that people choose to work in them, neglecting to mention his own failure to provide alternatives.

These are only two of a countless number of examples of Summers' racist and classist politics. You may have thought that the protest was annoying, but compared to the negative impact Summers' policies have around the world, was the protest really so out of line? It is my belief that a little bit of annoyance, a little acting outside the norms of civility to challenge the status quo is both important and necessary.

--Jackie Downing, College Junior

Obie Ashamed by Summers Protest

To the Editor:

Yesterday, for the first time I was embarrassed to be an Oberlin student. If you are wondering why, it was because of a small group of students who behaved in a very immature fashion during the talk given by the Secretary of Treasury Larry Summers. Well, if that small group of students wanted to disrupt the talk I can tell them that they were successful and they can congratulate themselves. I was sitting in the first row and I could not hear a lot of the speech because of the cat calls and other noises they were making.

What I fail to understand is what they achieved by the disruption they caused. The only thing they did manage to do was prevent people like the students and faculty from hearing the talk. I ask them how they can call themselves responsible activists if they deny people the right to choose what they want.

If these students disagreed with Lawrence Summers they should have heard him talk and then used the time after the talk to ask questions to achieve their aim in a more civilized manner. To their credit, some protesters did ask questions, opening up a dialogue, which was much more effective than the other methods of protesting. Before the talk in Finney I had the privilege to meet Mr. Summers personally along with about 10 other Oberlin students. He told us what he thought about globalization and other issues pertinent to the demonstrators. I felt that he was quite reasonable in hearing us out, and I felt that we achieved much more in that half hour with him than the protesters did with the ruckus they created.

All that the protesters did was to tell him and the rest of the world that Oberlin students are immature, and that they do not know how to get their opinions across in a civilized manner. They failed to give respect to someone who has been the youngest professor to be tenured at Harvard, someone who has been lauded with the prestigious John Bates Clark medal naming him one of the most productive American economists under the age of forty. Come on all you people. If you can't respect this man for his views, his status or his contributions to this country and the world at large, the least you can do is respect him as the guest of this institution of which you are all a part. For all those of you who are interested, I am an international student who comes from India, a country where more than 50 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. I have grown up seeing the poverty and what you people read in your textbooks and label as exploitation with my own eyes. I have helped these people with my own hands, going inside their homes which are single rooms made of dried cowdung. Do not tell me that if I can sit and hear what Lawrence Summers had to say, that all you folks who have grown up in centrally heated, carpeted homes for whom the suffering of which you speak is not as daily reality, find it impossible to do the same. Shahana Siddiqui, a first year from Bangladesh summarized this in a concrete way: "Me being a person who is from a Third World country, who has seen the poverty and who is also against globalization, if I can sit there and listen to Secretary Summers speak without making any noise, I don't see why the rest of you couldn't do the same."

--Nipun Nanda, College Sophomore

Finney's Sad Sight

To the Editor:

On Dec. 4 we witnessed a sad spectacle in Finney Chapel. The lecture on the New Economy by Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence H. Summers was drowned out by a group of groaning, hooting, howling and whistle blowing Oberlin College "students". This was the most gross and puerile demonstration of self-indulgence many of us had ever seen.

Freedom to demonstrate and to do so discourteously is well ingrained in our society and especially so here at Oberlin. However, license to destroy the exchange of ideas between a member of our nation's cabinet and several hundred listeners is not. This was a very bad day for Oberlin. A group of those who are supposedly here to study and learn did the College great injury. Their hostility toward it and toward their fellow students must be profound.

There were many people in Finney Chapel Monday who feel equally strongly about the injustices which are occurring in the name of globalization. As most mature people in a civil society however, they had enough courtesy to listen and to engage, plus enough self-respect to prevent the regression to infantilism indulged by the disrupting minority.

Why are people who feel this strongly for those whom they consider victims not on the front lines in Indonesia, China and Africa? Why are they violating the rights of otherss, many of whom hold views like their own? They rant in the safety of a privileged sanctuary which it appears will endure anything short of physical violence. Are these the future leaders of government and of industry who will some day achieve through personal effort the insights and positions to right the wrongs they perceive? This is doubtful, since form rarely achieves over substance. We saw nothing here Monday but form.

--John J. Picken, OC '56

Summers Protesters Provide Abridged Statement

To the Editor:

What they don't say about the "new economy" is that real wages haven't increased since the mid-1970s, that working people now must work more hours for the same pay and still end up without healthcare coverage because they have "temporary" jobs.

Productivity is increasing, but the increase comes not only from better technology, but also from downsizing, causing layoffs and increases in mandatory overtime. According to an Economic Policy Institute report, "The typical married couple family worked over six more weeks in 1996 than in 1989, despite an 8 percent growth in the economy's productive capacity." The "new economy" produces great profits, but people are working harder and still not receiving their fair share. Income inequalities have increased over the last 20 years. The 1998 United Nations Human Development Project Report says that the world's 225 richest individuals have a combined wealth of $1 trillion ‹ equal to the income of the poorest 47 percent of the world's population.

This problem is exacerbated within the Third World; the last frontier for U.S. economic expansion. Continuous growth in these countries is crucial for creating new markets for First World multinational corporations, thereby preventing a crisis of overproduction, as happened in the 1970s with the collapse of Fordism.

That is why Larry Summers supported free trade with China. Summers, on behalf of the Clinton Administration, urged Congress to grant China permanent trade status; he said, "There is no disadvantage to the U.S. in passing this legislation." Never mind human rights violations or workers rights. Summers argues that "trade is the pursuit of peace by other means." He says peace and democracy come from an intercourse of ideas; therefore, free trade achieves democracy. Yet in practice, free trade translates into tying governments' interests to transnational corporations, rather than making them accountable to their people.

Summers defends the virtues of trade, "We should never forget that it is also the pursuit of higher living standards for Americans . . . even if closer integration did not help to make America a safer nation, we would still want to support it because it helps make us a more prosperous one." Obviously Summers and other advocates of the new economy prioritize First World prosperity, but at what cost?

Public policy for Summers should "support the market system, [by] establish[ing] institutions that make the private sector attractive, profitable and an engine of economic growth." In other words, the state should only intervene to aid private corporations. In his testimony to Congress in 1995 Summers outlined the benefits of the World Bank: "Every dollar the U.S. government puts into the World Bank's funds, it receives $1.30 in procurement contracts for U.S. transnational corporations." While Larry Summers acknowledges that poverty exists and that it is a problem; that free trade creates a race to the bottom; while he even says we must do something about this; the institutions and policies he represents and supports only deepen the poverty they purport to alleviate.

In the post-war period, it became widely recognized that the free market was incapable of addressing the structural sources of poverty. People realized that human need could not be left to the whims of the market, since certain services are prone to market failure. Globally, health care, education and basic utilities were taken out of the market and placed in states' control.

Today Larry Summers and the Washington Consensus tell us the market and free trade can resolve problems of human need. They promote policies such as tax abatements for private corporations, trade liberalization as in the passing of NAFTA, and privatization of social programs like the Clinton/Gore attack on welfare. They coerce governments of the Third World to adopt neo-liberal policies, arguing that trade brings democracy and peace. While Summers argues that "the 1990s have shown that market economics works in sub-Saharan Africa just as it does anywhere else," we can look at the AIDS crisis in that region, and see that free market solutions fail in important ways.

We are here today to ask, "Whose prosperity, and at what cost?" The New Economy and its prosperity are built on the backs of workers and at the expense of the environment. We are raising our voices to say, ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!

--Sarah Bania-Dobyns, For the Larry Summers Welcoming Committee

Socialists Compared to Dogs

To the Editor:

The recent incident at Finney Chapel is an aggressive example of horror-show mob rule at Oberlin. The activists protesting fanatically and militantly, inside and outside, surrendered any interest to uphold their ideas in the realm of reason. It resulted, in a large part, from the lack of boundaries, law, and order by the administration.

To what goal was the audience subjected? Nothing higher than the right to be a hooligan. What is the activists? Alternative foreign trade policy? Is it American-supported health-care, welfare, and utilities? Why should the United States enact any policies that make it our responsibility to help other countries? Ask any of the persons shouting, snickering, booing, holding the signs, interrupting the speech or laughing in delight at the spectacle how America should deal with foreign nations, and you will hear give, give, give. These are people apologizing for even breathing. Their ethic is altruistic, and altruism's logical end is no less than death for the giver. The United States is not the world police, the world hospital or the world cafeteria.

The students protesting the speech by Lawrence Summers, Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, are of the lowest and dirtiest political breed: the provacateurs. They are disruptive and taunting. They will provoke the audience to respond, and when they receive a response, they will bare their foaming teeth. (As was seen in Finney anytime protesters were told to let Mr. Summers speak). The protest was not directed at Mr. Summers, it was an attack on everyone present. These self-proclaimed fighters for human rights could not even honor the audience's right to hear a speech through the horn-blowing and hissing.

When Oberlin College's acting president would not allow the protesters to clog the microphones and read their statement for five-plus minutes (neither succinct nor to any point), they cried for the same freedom so easily denied of Mr. Summers. Their actions said, "Freedom of speech is only a group right"; it is wrong, and they will try to defend it. The mob stole that right from Mr. Summers, and demanded it for themselves. It is an unjust double-standard. President Koppes' only stance of firmness was proper, but it came too late. President Koppes' denial did not make them look immature or unpolitical, their actions did so. These are your same local socialists or socialist goons that would prefer an America of group rights and mob-mentality. The socialist-mob can break or enforce the rules whenever they want, (which is in keeping with socialism because individual rights do not exist in such a system). They are dogs, and dogs will bark and bite; these are the actions most suited to their nature.

Political ideologies aside, the hippie-puppets' behavior was not representative of any self-respecting, decent, or dignified human being.

The administration allowed the disruption, in Finney, to go on even though the protesters had every intention of taking over. The chanting outside, before the speech, was the first indication that they were out to make trouble. Next was the booing as soon as Mr. Lawrence reached the podium. Their canine appetite to strike out continued throughout his entire speech. It was all very needless, and they should have been kicked out from the beginning. As one professor jumped up and pointed out, it was "spineless" on our acting president's behalf. Mr. Lawrence could not even complete a sentence before one particularly heinous girl decided to inform him that protesters were present.

The administration bears a lot of blame. Embarrassment could be felt by all civilized persons present and witnessing the disgracing of Oberlin. The audience went into Finney for a speech, what we received was a bar room of college communists. If the administration does not set any rules or boundaries, such provacateurs will continue to act irrationally and to degrade academia. Neutrality does not work. Oberlin College is being dishonored, scorned, and humiliated while too many students stand aside. I oppose Socialism with reason and logic on my side. A few of the socialists oppose me by dastardly writing on my fliers.

--Janee J. Garcia, College Junior, Director, Intellectual Activists Sophomore

Side-Stepping Issues

To the Editor:

The entire campus seems to have rallied behind the free speech rights of Larry Summers (and thereby side-stepped the actual issues involved). Free speech is a complicated "right." It works much like free trade in that it tends to benefit those who are have what is being sought. Larry Summers has unlimited access to the media to disseminate his views. Those who oppose him do not.

What those of you who came to Finney Chapel witnessed was not the full story. After a series of meetings with the College administration and with Summers' aide, the coalition that organized the protests had negotiated to be able to read our brief statement during the Q&A session. Acting President Clayton Koppes talked to us about the importance of dialogue and academic debate; the reasons, as he saw it, that we should permit Larry Summers' to speak.

In the spirit of having our voices heard, we tried to negotiate permission to read our statement as an introduction to Secretary Summers' talk, since the format of a Q&A session inevitably creates unequal power dynamics. Koppes refused to us this opportunity for dialogue, but agreed that we could present our statement as part of the Q&A session. Yet when the time came for us to read our statement, Koppes again eliminated the very dialogue that he purported to support; he thereby silenced our voices and allowed the dominant voice of Larry Summers' and his support of free trade to triumph.

In the process, the College administration and Larry Summers' managed to once again delegitimize the voice of opposition, making our only public face one of "immature" and "disrespectful" heckling (in the same way that the media selected images and sound bites from the protests in Seattle, DC and Prague that would make the protesters appear reactionary) - hence taking away from us the informed, thoughtful and political backing that our statement could have provided.

--Katharine Cristiani, College Senior

Evaluate Your Prof.

To the Editor:

In the coming days, your instructors will be soliciting your reactions to the classes you have taken this semester through course evaluations (and, possibly, through other means as well). We are writing this letter because we want you to know that your comments on evaluations are reviewed very seriously by the faculty, are used by your professors to adjust and improve course content and format, and assist departments and programs in making a variety of personnel decisions (e.g., reappointment, tenure, and salary). You are in a unique position to offer your insights to the faculty.

For all of those reasons, it is critically important, both to the faculty and to your fellow students, that you reflect carefully upon your academic experiences this semester and take the time to respond fully and thoughtfully on course evaluations. Please let the faculty know what, in your opinion, went well this time and what could be better next time. Your candid and considered critiques are valued and appreciated.

Student Tells Activists to Shape Up Or Ship Out

To the Editor:

I am writing this in reaction to the conduct of the Oberlin "protesters" at the speech given by U.S. Secretary of Treasury Lawrence Summers. Getting right down to it, I was terribly, terribly shocked and appalled by how disruptively, impolitely and immaturely the Oberlin activists behaved. I was embarrassed to be sitting in that room and I was embarrassed for our school and for the rest of the numerous students around me who obviously felt the same way as I did.

Before Mr. Summers could get out his first sentence, which rather ironically was, "I'm very happy to be here," several people were standing up and reading statements off of sheets and blowing various kinds of noisemakers. This continued for the rest of his speech, and he couldn't get more than one or two sentences out without catcalls and slide whistles taking attention away. Personally, I didn't even think that most of what was being shouted pertained to what Mr. Summers was saying and the whole experience hearkened back to a middle school assembly with a few students making farting noises in the back rows. The difference is, we are college students, and we had a speaker who I daresay deserved a good deal of respect. Also, the catcalls were much more numerous, malicious and daring than I ever could have expected. I think the one that appalled me the most was when Mr. Summers began a sentence by saying, "Many years from now..." after which someone immediately interjected, "When you're dead!"

It's really kind of disturbing. I am normally a peaceful and calm person; I can't even remember a time when I lost my temper over something. But in this case, it took all the effort I could muster not to go up to some of those students and spit in their face or punch them out. I was completely outraged and in shock.

I'm not particularly for a Global Economy or the WTO or any of the things that were being protested, but I'm also not particularly against them. I'm not particularly savvy about politics or economics, but since coming to Oberlin I've gotten the impression that there are many things in these social realms which are wrong and unjust. Naturally, I wanted to hear Mr. Summers speak, if only to hear his side of the argument and how some of the touchiest issues in our contemporary economy are being rationalized by the movers and shakers. I think that I actually came away from the speech with that much.

What I also came away with was a nearly complete loss of respect and trust for Oberlin activists. I know it wasn't all of them acting that way, but in my mind now they are all a bunch of irrational, immature and insensitive fanatics. They are also hypocritical in that they wouldn't even allow the free speech of a man invited here for the sole purpose of speaking to us. I think that rarely, if ever, again will I take any activism seriously at Oberlin unless they change their entire strategy. What I saw at that assembly precisely reminded me of the technique Brother Jed and Sister Pat always use in their visits to Oberlin. That is, get our attention with emotional ranting and insults and then expect us to buy into their ideology. Well, guess what you guys. That really, really doesn't work.

I think I am not alone in saying that the best way to convince me of anything is through calm, rational and respectful discourse. I don't want to be shocked; I don't want to be amazed; I want to be calmly and matter of factly told. Anything else and I begin to shut my mind off and back away slowly. In this way, the various messages of the student activism during Mr. Summers' speech were completely lost on me when they became secondary to the shocking and pathetic behavior I witnessed.

So, to the Oberlin student activists: Clean up your act or be despised, ridiculed and ignored by much of the student body. It's your choice.

--Alex Galaitsis, Double-degree Sophomore

Challenging the Dictatorship

To the Editor:

I protested neo-liberal globalization on Monday as part of the Larry Summers Welcoming Committee. That protest has given rise to a lot of angry discussion within and without the Oberlin activist community. I wanted to address one specific issue that has come up in the aftermath of the event: how we see free speech and how that view relates to our political opposition to free trade. Many students are angry that we did not respect Summers' freedom of speech; the administration is angry that we did not respect free academic discourse. But I see a relationship between how Summers and his partisans regard free trade and how they regard free speech.

Both of those "freedoms" are only actually free for those who begin the intercourse in a position of power. Free trade works for the benefit of the trading partner with the comparative advantage in a given traded good. In other words, those who have productive strength and wealth accumulate more power and wealth by being able to determine the terms of trade. Free speech, as Summers sees it, is that he stands up behind a lectern and gives a speech, and then we're free to ask questions, and he'll answer them. He, who already has authority and power, is perfectly free. We, who challenge his politics and policies, are not free at all.

Lawrence Summers can get on national television any time he wants and address 40 million people with whatever lies he cares to spew that day. At Oberlin College and around the country, economics departments teach a veiled version of Summers' political program. Summers can also come to Oberlin and speak to a crowd of 1,000 people drawn there by controversy, or his national prominence, or the requirements of their economics classes.

The Welcoming Committee wrote a statement explaining the basis of our political opposition to Summers' politics. To respect freedom of speech would have been to allow us to give that statement. Acting President Koppes was happy to respect Summers' "freedom of speech." But he refused to let us, the dissenting opinion, read a statement before the speech, or after the speech, or during the question and answer period. In fact, Koppes' idea of a "dialogue" is a set of rules where we were only allowed to ask questions to the authority, Summers and we could make no statements at all. We wanted to challenge his authority and his power to create a more equal dialogue.

Since we were denied the right to explain ourselves politically, we tried to express our opposition to his politics through other means. But the underlying question that I think is far more important than the tactical decision to disrupt the speech, is what happened on Monday? Did we see freedom of speech being disrespected? I think we saw a dictatorship of speech being challenged. I see that as a vital fight, inextricably linked with the fight against all forms of dictatorship ‹ including the global dictatorship in the interests of a tiny economic elite that uses a tactic called "free trade".

--Eve Goodman, College Sophomore

Protest a Step Toward Future

To the Editor:

After Monday's Lawrence Summers protest, an event where I made many tactical mistakes, I was confronted by many people who criticized not my tactics, but my basic political principals. The most appalling of these criticisms was the accusation that we were not properly respectful to Lawrence Summers. I think it is important to be respectful.

When Lawrence Summers says, "The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage countries is impeccable," I think that is not being properly respectful to the people in Third World countries. Summers later claimed that he meant that statement ironically, but the policies of the IMF and the World Bank under his influence have been exactly in line with the quote. For example, the IMF continually imposes austerity measures on countries receiving loans, requiring them to revoke any environmental protection laws.

Perhaps Summers meant those actions ironically also; if so, I don't think people in the lowest wage countries got the joke. I also don't think that Summers was properly respectful to the nine million people the U.N. reported to have died of the poverty caused by IMF austerity packages. To Oberlin students who, like me, are appalled by disrespect; I ask you, about whose disrespect would you rather complain? Is it more odious for me to yell out, 'Only for the rich,' when Summers announces that cell phones are common in Africa than it is for Summers' policies to kill nine million people?

What about the students in the room that wanted to hear Summers' side, people who hadn't heard it enough? Was my protest disrespectful to those people? But everyone in the crowd heard every word of Summers' pre-prepared speech. He said it from beginning to end with the aid of giant speakers on either side of the stage. The only difference is that we didn't allow him to lie. When he said that globalization was good for people, we interjected, "What about Russia?" or "What about Indonesia?" or "What about Colombia?" In Russia, wages fell 70 percent when globalization was introduced. Indonesia has been turned into one giant sweat shop, and, in the name of globalization, the U.S. is currently lending $1.3 billion to the death squads of the military dictatorship in Colombia (to be paid back with interest by the people, of course). The accusation shouldn't be that Summers' message was silenced, but that his lies were exposed.

I said we made mistakes. That is true. I forgot that the audience was the Oberlin community. In Socialist Alternative, as part of the protest coalition, we took a half-assed approach to the protests. This is always a mistake. We had the duty to the Oberlin community to table for the weeks leading up to the protest explaining our political message. We should have had a flier and a great deal of literature describing the political issues at stake. Every person in the crowd should have gotten a copy of the flier. Then we should have prepared the protesters for the protest. We were going to march up the aisles and present our message as a unified group, but when a secret service agent told people they had to sit down, most people did. Of course, the police are going to say, "Don't protest." We have to say, "No."

It is a catastrophe that many people in the crowd told me that they didn't even know what my message was. A stronger, more organized protest would have been able to take the floor, deliver our message and then courteously relinquish the floor to the other side for rebuttal. I am glad to have learned these lessons now, in a little protest at Oberlin, because there will be much more important protests in the future.

--Ted Virdone, College Junior, Socialist Alternative