Welcome to back to the ongoing adventures of Little Beirut!
I've been enrolled at PSU as a post-bac student since 2013. Because I've been taking a break for the past several years, I can't say what campus culture is like in May 2024. However, I can say the administration's reckless handling of PSU's pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas protesters is entirely in keeping with the way things are done there.
After having made the PSU library my home away from home for a number of years because its quiet floors were the ideal place to study, I abandoned it when the school refused to exclude the homeless people who had discovered it was a great place to hang out, talk, fish for deposit bottles in the trash and take sponge baths. As if that weren't bad enough, some homeless people refused to be quiet on the quiet floors. Who wants to approach a surly looking tough guy and ask him to please be quiet? It's generally known the homeless are armed.
That dismal state of affairs wasn't the result of an oversight on the part of the bloated bureaucracy. It was intentional. As campus security informed me more than once, the PSU library was deemed a public place and the homeless are members of the public. End of story. I briefly considered trying to get to the bottom of this shocking disregard for students' need to have a quiet, orderly and safe place to study. In the end I just found someplace else that wasn't nearly as suitable as the PSU library.
Letting the homeless have the run of the library must have led to tears eventually, because it's my understanding that a PSU ID is now required.
In any case, if there's one thing I learned about PSU culture during the years I attended classes on its campus, it's that PSU students just don't get worked up enough about things to turn out for protests. I attribute it to the student body's demographic. The school's motto, after all, is "Let knowledge serve the city," not "Let knowledge serve the entitled, carefully curated and terminally self-righteous children of the upper middle class meritocracy." As a commuter school with many nontraditional students, PSU doesn't support the kind of student leisure class that causes problems on residential campuses. Most Viks are too busy working and/or have pressing family commitments that prevent them from becoming involved in organizing protests or taking up causes that have no direct impact on their lives. The school's sizeable contingent of Saudi students are among the least likely to turn out for the Palestinian cause.
That's why I was surprised to learn that a protest had sprung up at PSU. Of course the lawlessness has been co-opted by outsiders. Did anyone think the hundreds of home-grown anarchists who slipped through Mike Schmidt's catch-and-release program of law enforcement had left town? If the powers that be ever did a thorough intelligence review the anarchists' 2020-21 war on property to document exactly how it came about, who the chief suspects were and how to prevent a recurrence, they've held it very close to their chest.
Essentially, it's the über-woke ACLU and soft-on-crime Mike Schmidt who are running the city's response to left wing violence. That's why nobody was ever brought to justice for organizing the scores of anarchist direct actions that stormed through Downtown and close-in districts for so many nights in the '20-'21 period.
The situation at PSU has the potential to become repeat of the lawless Red House scam, only much more costly in terms of the harm to property and to the city's reputation. Anarchists don't believe in negotiation, compromise or, for that matter, the democratic political process. They're mad maximalists and accelerationists who thrive on chaos. The saving grace is that the occupiers are now effectively besieged in the library, unable to obtain reinforcements or food.
Good interview, there was a now fairly archaic phrase "Chewing the Cudd" which loosely meant consisered contemplating before responding Now we can add "Doing the Cudd" which is to dither,.delay, equivocate, negotiate and surrender in the face.of criminal behavior
Welcome to back to the ongoing adventures of Little Beirut!
I've been enrolled at PSU as a post-bac student since 2013. Because I've been taking a break for the past several years, I can't say what campus culture is like in May 2024. However, I can say the administration's reckless handling of PSU's pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas protesters is entirely in keeping with the way things are done there.
After having made the PSU library my home away from home for a number of years because its quiet floors were the ideal place to study, I abandoned it when the school refused to exclude the homeless people who had discovered it was a great place to hang out, talk, fish for deposit bottles in the trash and take sponge baths. As if that weren't bad enough, some homeless people refused to be quiet on the quiet floors. Who wants to approach a surly looking tough guy and ask him to please be quiet? It's generally known the homeless are armed.
That dismal state of affairs wasn't the result of an oversight on the part of the bloated bureaucracy. It was intentional. As campus security informed me more than once, the PSU library was deemed a public place and the homeless are members of the public. End of story. I briefly considered trying to get to the bottom of this shocking disregard for students' need to have a quiet, orderly and safe place to study. In the end I just found someplace else that wasn't nearly as suitable as the PSU library.
Letting the homeless have the run of the library must have led to tears eventually, because it's my understanding that a PSU ID is now required.
In any case, if there's one thing I learned about PSU culture during the years I attended classes on its campus, it's that PSU students just don't get worked up enough about things to turn out for protests. I attribute it to the student body's demographic. The school's motto, after all, is "Let knowledge serve the city," not "Let knowledge serve the entitled, carefully curated and terminally self-righteous children of the upper middle class meritocracy." As a commuter school with many nontraditional students, PSU doesn't support the kind of student leisure class that causes problems on residential campuses. Most Viks are too busy working and/or have pressing family commitments that prevent them from becoming involved in organizing protests or taking up causes that have no direct impact on their lives. The school's sizeable contingent of Saudi students are among the least likely to turn out for the Palestinian cause.
That's why I was surprised to learn that a protest had sprung up at PSU. Of course the lawlessness has been co-opted by outsiders. Did anyone think the hundreds of home-grown anarchists who slipped through Mike Schmidt's catch-and-release program of law enforcement had left town? If the powers that be ever did a thorough intelligence review the anarchists' 2020-21 war on property to document exactly how it came about, who the chief suspects were and how to prevent a recurrence, they've held it very close to their chest.
Essentially, it's the über-woke ACLU and soft-on-crime Mike Schmidt who are running the city's response to left wing violence. That's why nobody was ever brought to justice for organizing the scores of anarchist direct actions that stormed through Downtown and close-in districts for so many nights in the '20-'21 period.
The situation at PSU has the potential to become repeat of the lawless Red House scam, only much more costly in terms of the harm to property and to the city's reputation. Anarchists don't believe in negotiation, compromise or, for that matter, the democratic political process. They're mad maximalists and accelerationists who thrive on chaos. The saving grace is that the occupiers are now effectively besieged in the library, unable to obtain reinforcements or food.
Good interview, there was a now fairly archaic phrase "Chewing the Cudd" which loosely meant consisered contemplating before responding Now we can add "Doing the Cudd" which is to dither,.delay, equivocate, negotiate and surrender in the face.of criminal behavior
and "so it goes" - Kurt Vonnegut.