The Lawrence Summers Protests

Student Tells Activists to Shape Up or Ship Out
December 8 Letter

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


Finney’s Sad Sight
December 8 Letter

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


Protest a Step Toward Future
December 8 Letter

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



Obie Ashamed by Summers Protest
December 8 Letter

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