A Controlling and Indifferent Authority

Last week’s post, “The Seeds of Revolution - The West Chester Story,” included the following paragraph:
 
‘There is no doubt that West Chester University, the other 13 PASSHE universities, and the students who rely upon them, have been subjected to ongoing injustice for many years by a controlling and indifferent authority—the PASSHE Board of Governors—the agent that should be, but it not now, representing the interests of all of PASSHE’s Financial Stakeholders, i.e., its Majority as well as its Minority Stakeholders.’
 
Earlier blog posts cited a news article¹ with headline, “State Colleges Revolt as Years of Cuts Divide U.S. Campuses.” The article described a growing national trend in which state colleges across America have initiated efforts to “shake off government control.”  West Chester University’s effort to achieve a greater degree of independence from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is prominently cited in the article.
 

“A desire to resist oppression is implanted in the nature of man.” 

                                                                                                                        Tacitus
    
So powerful, natural and spontaneous is the human aversion to the thought of being oppressed that individuals throughout history have been willing to defy enormous challenges and suffer great hardships in the struggle to throw off that oppression.  History shows that if tyranny is too onerous and inexorable to overcome in any other way, violent revolution is often seen and undertaken as the only viable option.
 
But in polite society, at least in those societies based on laws that grant and protect individual freedoms, serious injustice of any kind can be confronted and potentially shed via non-violent means—both legal and political—which our society makes readily available to all citizens through its Constitution and laws.
 

Between stimulus and response there is a space.  In that space is our power to choose our response.  In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

                                                                                             Viktor E. Frankl
  
With three decades of “privatization without representation” as a stimulus that has been imposed² on the public colleges across America, a confrontational but otherwise non-violent response in the form of legal and political action to secure the transfer of power and property required to rectify the injustice of that stimulus is both warranted and appropriate.
 
As we saw in last week’s blog post, initiating a confrontation in the form of legal action to force—via the intervention of a legislature or court—a transfer of power and property may be justified as seen below:
 
“When a group of citizens comes to believe it is being subjected to an ongoing injustice by a controlling and indifferent authority, it has a right to confront that authority, legally and politically, in an effort to secure the transfer of power and property required to fairly rectify the injustice in question.”
 
The metaphor of “revolution” (albeit “non-violent revolution”) by the state colleges, as a response to the stimulus of many decades of “privatization without representation” by the States, is so novel as to call out for guidance as to the proper way in which to conduct such a revolution.  Just as I was pondering the words “a controlling and indifferent authority,” King George III of England popped into my mind.

The American Revolution

Like most American school children of my era, I learned to memorize the beautiful and poetic Preamble to The Declaration of Independence, the first paragraph of which begins with these words:

 
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
 
And while I learned to recite the entire preamble from memory many years ago, it wasn’t until many years later that I came to understand and appreciate the significance of the last sentence in the above paragraph.  In making the case for the need for “the separation” from England, the Congress of July 4, 1776 included in its Declaration a very long list of “repeated injuries and usurpations” by King George III.  In fact, half the lines in the entire document are devoted to a “bill of particulars” indicting the King.³ His transgressions are introduced thusly: “To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”     
 
What I take from all this is that, in the non-violent revolutions initiated by the State colleges across America to “shake off government control,” it will be necessary and wise to show proper respect for the opinions of others by enumerating, as part of their own declarations of independence, the “injuries and usurpations” of which the particular “controlling and indifferent authority” in each State may be guilty. 
 
The clarity and accuracy of these bills of particulars will play a key role in influencing the opinions of all those who will read and consider the validity of the cases made by the State colleges in their respective efforts to throw off government control.
 
¹ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2014-06-04/state-colleges-revolt-as-years-of-cuts-divide-u-s-campuses.html.
² http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=angelo%20armenti.
³http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/print_friendly.html?page=declaration_transcript_content.html&title=NARA%20%7C%20The%20Declaration%20of%20Independence%3A%20A%20Transcription.