Who Has the Right to "Disrupt" the University? Perhaps the most egregious example of the administrator-as-disruptor is Gordon Gee, currently the president of West Virginia University (WVU), whose administration pushed through extraordinarily deep cuts to the institution's academic offerings last fall. During a meeting of the faculty senate, Gee said "I want to be very clear that the university is not dismantling higher education. We are disrupting it . . . And many of you know I am a firm believer in disruption."
Protesters seek not only to advance their points of view, but to change the facts on the ground on their campuses. In doing so, they correctly recognize that the contemporary American university is much more than a marketplace of ideas; it is an unprecedented institutional form that acts as a powerful force in fields from real estate to healthcare to finance—to, indeed, weapons manufacturing. In fact, it is precisely these operations—and their entanglements with the Israeli and US war machines—that student protesters are targeting, with demands that are not only expressive (asking administrators to join calls for a ceasefire, for example) but also material. When the very point of protesting is to put a stop to business as usual, the right to disrupt becomes a central part of the right to protest.
Indeed, university administrators are aware that campus protest is about disruption rather than just expression—not least because they have spent the last few years contending with a wave of "disruptive" union activity that has spread to nearly every part of the large and growing university apparatus.
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