University research in the Age of Protest

[Frabjous]

The system will self correct because the protestors have a strong instinct for self preservation. If a tragedy in a science building occured, they would refocus back on the safety of the administration buildings.

 

[pinball1970]

I had a look at Stanford and the recent criminal behaviour, the graffiti those guys did.
Not good, vile crap.
Should they find themselves in a dangerous situation yet continue to vandalize and disrespect the campus? Breaking lots of laws?
I'm a Brit.
Protest? Absolutely.
Acting like a mindless criminal and getting injured in the process?
No tears only jail.

 

[Frabjous]

I had a look at Stanford and the recent criminal behaviour, the graffiti those guys did.
Not good, vile crap.
Should they find themselves in a dangerous situation yet continue to vandalize and disrespect the campus? Breaking lots of laws?
I'm a Brit.
Protest? Absolutely.
Acting like a mindless criminal and getting injured in the process?
No tears only jail.

They were charged with felony burglary and had to post $20,000 bail.

11 of the 13 have been identified as current students. One is an alum. At least 6 are seniors. It will be interesting to see if Stanford will award them degrees.

 

[berkeman]

At least 6 are were seniors.

Fixed that for you.

 

[Vanadium 50]

As far as the Stanford case, the university can immediately defer their graduation date one quarter, and they can in that period be required to pay restitution and/or perform community service (e.g. help with a Hillel food drive) as a condition of graduation. I don't believe they can normally be expelled immediately.

But this isn't really on point. Does one think even expelling a dozen students will deter others? There have been, according to NPR a month ago, hundreds of students arrested, suspended and/or expelled. Didn't deter the kids at Stanford.

If not, what happens when the next group of protestors break into a lab with a big jug of demethyl mercury or nickel tetracarbony? Even my own lab has exposed high voltage and isobutane, as well as various volatile and flammable solvents. Heck, my undergrad lab had that - along with radioactive sources, cryogens, lasers bright enough to blind, and so forth.

 

[BillTre]

I think it is a mistake to treat all protesters on different campuses as the same.

It will vary between different campuses and the group of people at any given campus will be a collection of people with different motivations.

Here are some of the groups one might expect:

• True believers who will do anything for their cause. They won't care if they don't get their degree if they are students and may not even be students at the school.
• Students who care about some cause, but do care if they get their degree or have other problems with the school.
• People not affiliated with the school, but are protesting about some cause. School policies won't usually affect them.
• Employees of the school in some way (including grad. students, post-docs, faculty, and others). Probably few. Have more at stake.

School policies will not equally affect them all.

 

[Vanadium 50]

The criminal justice system is slow, and universities are not much faster. So probably zero have been convicted or expelled. And there hasn't been much time:

You can see that while demonstrations have been going on a while, most of them are fairly recent.

 

[Frabjous]

Even my own lab has exposed high voltage and isobutane, as well as various volatile and flammable solvents.

You do not have to wait for the university to take action.

 

[Frabjous]

At the end of the day, this is a philosophical question. How much of your freedom are you willing to give up in order to protect the safety of people engaged in criminal activity? For me, not much.

 

[Andy Resnick]

And "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien." (Usually translated as "The perfect is the enemy of the good.")

Don't flatter yourself- your idea isn't even good.

Have you learned how medical schools handled the wave of anti-vivisectionist vandalism in the 1980s and 1990s?

Here's a clue- medical schools still experiment on animals.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Have you learned how medical schools handled the wave of anti-vivisectionist vandalism in the 1980s and 1990s?

Please tell me.

(Boy, I'm glad I am not a university administrator. One group's slogan is "Don't kill the pigs" and the other is the opposite....)

 

[BillTre]

Please tell me.

Here is my post #6 above:

In the 1980s-1990s there was a strong local PETA group that often protested and one time broke in a vandalized some animal facilities at the University of Oregon (Eugene). This group was very much personality driven and stopped being active when a particular person left town.
When they broke in, they caused a bunch of damage and some humorously funny stupid things.

• One was they tried releasing some pigeons but they didn't go far and wanted to come back their home.
• They also released some white inbred lab rabbits into the "wild" (just off of I-5) where they were observed getting attacked by dogs. So sad.

It was easy to make fun of them. They were generally uninformed about what they were protesting and some of them wore leather belts.

Fortunately for everyone they didn't get to the real labs where the nasty stuff is kept.
Or scramble our genetic lines or databases.

Everything new got doors with card readers with the money from grants for the new facilities.
Older buildings got outer door card readers along with some interior door card readers. I am kind of surprised that this is not the case everywhere. Any new building budget should include this in their budget. It would be hard to refuse. Older places should be upgraded by the University using the indirect funds they get from each research grant which is supposed to support the funded research. This also would seem difficult to refuse.

A few years after this, I is was involved new designing new fish facilities all over campus and got put on a kind of task force for controlling some other spaces with some local cops and people from the physical plant. It was fun because I always prided myself on being able to break into our house when we got locked out. Because I knew how the buildings were put together I could figure new and devious ways to get in.

ˇThese changes are quite doable, and the costs could be covered by overhead the university gets from grants. Things like this are what overhead is supposed to go to, not just money for the university.
These changes don't have to be disrupting to school activities.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I saw that, but my reading of Andy's post is that he was talking about something wider than a few protestors led by a single individual at one university.

If the point is "you just have to wait it out and they'll lose interest," well, maybe that will work. It will certainly work until it doesn't.

As far as "better locks on the doors" - card readers and such - these are ineffective if people are willing to break the doors. As we have seen. Further, a lot of university architecture is designed to look pretty, not to deter angry mobs.

 

[BillTre]

As far as "better locks on the doors" - card readers and such - these are ineffective if people are willing to break the doors. As we have seen. Further, a lot of university architecture is designed to look pretty, not to deter angry mobs.

This would be poor design. A proper door would at last slow them down for several minutes which should give time for at least campus cops to show up. The doors we used were metal and robust. They had little windows with wire in the glass, but not within easy reach of the door handle.
The drywall walls would normally be easier to get through, but they were reinforced, due to my pestering.
There should also be tampering alarms (lock electronics and sounds).

Alternatively, the protesters could just get a bomb or bazooka and blow a hole in the wall or door. That would be hard to prevent but would be expected to attract attention of cops etc..

 

[Vanadium 50]

Alternatively, the protesters could just get a bomb or bazooka and blow a hole in the wall or door

That is so 60's!

If you make the doors too hard to get into, first responders can't get into them either. And remember, during an incident, you may not have power. Further, a door is only as strong as its frame: a vault-type door (yes, that's a thing) doesn't work so well if its set in a wood-and-drywall wall.

When an undergrad, I had my office/lab in a building with lots of defense research (although not mine), and if we left a door open too long or such it would trigger an alarm. My experience was that campus police were not exactly speedy, and usually they would just send the low man on the totem pole to look around. You don't get the SWAT team.

As your story tells, people were able to get in and cause damage.

Oh, and "overhead should pay for it", sure. But "should" and "will" are two different things.

 

[berkeman]

If you make the doors too hard to get into, first responders can't get into them either.

https://www.dreamstime.com/photos-images/fireman-saw.html

 

[Rive]

Without proper enforcement of security any door is vulnerable to dedicated people. No help for that.
It may be that the doors in question lacking. People might occasionally fix that.
But I'm sure that the 'enforcement' part is lacking and that needs some fast fixing first.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Let me describe a building I worked it (somewhat simplified) so the "better locks" idea can be more thoroughly explored.

There is a nice glass lobby, leading to two wings. Anyone with a brick and motivation can get into the lobby. The North Wing has lecture halls and seminar rooms and you can just get there from the lobby. The South Wing has labs, and a locking steel door. (Both wings have offices too) Sounds sufficient, right?

On the South side, there is also a glass breezeway to an annex. That door to the South Wing is never locked. You can't lock it from the outside because it is a fire egress route, and you can't lock it from the inside, because the severe weather shelter is in the South Wing basement.

If you were to design a campus from scratch, you wouldn't do this. But universities developed organically.

 

[BillTre]

If you make the doors too hard to get into, first responders can't get into them either. And remember, during an incident, you may not have power. Further, a door is only as strong as its frame: a vault-type door (yes, that's a thing) doesn't work so well if its set in a wood-and-drywall wall.

Should not be an issue.

Modern studs are metal. Walls can be reinforced.

The campus cops would (at least where I worked) have physical (metal) keys that would let them in. Exit from the inside without keys is mandated by the fire marshal for safety reasons. We required this specifically because if the power went out and took the door and fish water system with it (even though they both had back-ups) we would have to be able to get in and save the 1,000's of fish lines.

When an undergrad, I had my office/lab in a building with lots of defense research (although not mine), and if we left a door open too long or such it would trigger an alarm. My experience was that campus police were not exactly speedy, and usually they would just send the low man on the totem pole to look around. You don't get the SWAT team.

Its the user's responsibility to hold the cops to standards. Research brings in money and has some power on campus.

As your story tells, people were able to get in and cause damage.

Did not happen to the fish facility where I was. It happened at other poorly secured places on campus once. It was a wake-up call and things got tightened up after that.

Oh, and "overhead should pay for it", sure. But "should" and "will" are two different things.

Well, you have to try if you are concerned about something. On a campus with a lot of research, it should be easy, but things don't happen by themselves.

 

[BillTre]

On the South side, there is also a glass breezeway to an annex. That door to the South Wing is never locked. You can't lock it from the outside because it is a fire egress route, and you can't lock it from the inside, because the severe weather shelter is in the South Wing basement.

Door locks can be inactivated by fire alarms or other emergency events (more fire marshal stuff).

 

[Andy Resnick]

I saw that, but my reading of Andy's post is that he was talking about something wider than a few protestors led by a single individual at one university.

If the point is "you just have to wait it out and they'll lose interest," well, maybe that will work. It will certainly work until it doesn't.

As far as "better locks on the doors" - card readers and such - these are ineffective if people are willing to break the doors. As we have seen. Further, a lot of university architecture is designed to look pretty, not to deter angry mobs.

In any other subforum you would have, by now, excoriated the OP for a variety of posting behaviors, for example:

Inability or refusal to provide evidence that the OP has identified a novel problem, or a novel aspect of a well-studied problem.
Inability or refusal of the OP to become familiar with the existing body of relevant peer-reviewed literature.
the OP's continuing inability to acknowledge, much less engage with, substantive concerns and criticisms of the OP's proposed solution.

Even if the posting customs associated with this subforum are different than the others, your badges are not.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Inability or refusal to provide evidence that the OP has identified a novel problem, or a novel aspect of a well-studied problem.

I am saying it is a risk. A risk is not the same as a problem.

Inability or refusal of the OP to become familiar with the existing body of relevant peer-reviewed literature.

Great. Point me at some. In fact, I think I asked you earlier. Go ahead - change my mind.

the OP's continuing inability to acknowledge, much less engage with, substantive concerns and criticisms of the OP's proposed solution.

The alternatives seem to fall into several categories:

• Business as usual. There hasn't been an incident yet.
• Lock up the ringleaders.
• Improved physical security. ("Better locks.")

I think I have engaged with the first and third. I think the 2nd is likely to get this thread immediately closed because that is more a political issue than anything else.

My proposed solution is to move such research off-campus, which is a way of a) increasing physical security, b) limiting activist interest, c) reducing risk to university-affiliated bystanders and at least potentially increasing consequences to the ringleaders.

If you want me to be convinced, be more convincing.

 

[Frabjous]

I am saying it is a risk. A risk is not the same as a problem.

I also remain unconvinced by the argument "we're safe - we haven't had a fatality yet".

At some point, someone is going to die at Stanford because of an earthquake. Should we relocate the entire campus?

Societies generally perform some sort of cost-benefit to address situations like yours. Human lives are valued at most a few $million. You are proposing billions of spending, so the cost outweighs the benefit.

I agree with @Andy Resnick. Where is the @Vanadium 50 that we all know and love?

 

[Frabjous]

You have documented 0 protestor deaths over the last fifty years. Let’s call it 1.
Let’s value a human life at 1 million dollars.
So we need to spend about $20k per year to prevent this.
Divide that over 200 campus’s and you get $100 per campus per year.
This is more than the cost to print, post and inspect warning signs.
This signage already exists, so the university administrations are already ahead of you.

 

[Vanadium 50]

At some point, someone is going to die at Stanford because of an earthquake. Should we relocate the entire campus?

I might argue that we should evacuate all of the SF Bay area!

Cost-benefit analysis is a fine way to look at it. But first, lets go back to your earlier point - are the protestors rational actors? They seem to be patterning themselves after the 1960d Vietnam war protestors, and it's hard to say they were a success. The mid-1960's advanced the political career off Ronald Reagan, and the 1968 DNC protests advanced that of Richard Nixon. Neither were the preferred outcomes of the protestors.

A proper analysis revolved around numbers we do not know. In industrial safety, there is a focus on "near misses", with incidents usually the result of a confluence of multiple factors. I would consider the Stanford lab break-in a near miss, and the Dartmouth dimethyl mercury accident a near miss. Because they happened at different places and times, only one person died. Had they happened together, it would have been a disaster.

I am sure all of us have our own estimates of these risks. I would place the probability of breaking into a lab at a few percent - you have a handful of break-ins and a hundred or so encampments, and the probability of a fatality given a break-in that is similar. So I estimate the joint probability as a few 10^-4 up to (but probably not reaching) 10^-3.

How many opportunities are there? Eyeballiing the plot I posted, maybe 1000? So the probability of an incident is, in my estimation, on the scale of 10%. Maybe a few 10's of percent, maybe in the single digits.

Now the consequences. Can a university survive this? Maybe Harvard can. A state university probably can. But in either case, the whole adminstrative team is toast. And tehy will surely be asked "why didn't you move this off campus?" And if instead it was at a private school with a relatively poor endowment, I am not sure the university itself would survive - suppose the unlucky place was somewhere like Temple. Can they survive the cost of the settlements, legal fees and eneollment decline? Maybe not.

 

[Frabjous]

How many opportunities are there? Eyeballiing the plot I posted, maybe 1000? So the probability of an incident is, in my estimation, on the scale of 10%. Maybe a few 10's of percent, maybe in the single digits.

Those numbers cannot be right. We have decades of data and the DEATHS/INJURIES ARE NOT THERE. There used to be radioactive materials and plenty of currently banned chemicals on campuses, so it is not clear to me that campuses are fundamentally unsafer today. The protestors of the 1960’s went after the military industrial complex. Someone else mentioned animal rights. These protests had direct reasons to go after technical buildings. Todays protests are interested in the university power structure which are housed in the administrative buildings. The Dartmouth incident was a genuine accident and did not involve protestors. One can argue about how much “danger” is acceptable in a university lab, but that is independent of the protestor question. The liability is in the university allowing a campus to descend into chaos, not in accidents caused by criminal activity on the part of the protestors. I do not believe that the protestors are rational; I believe the protestors have a strong survival instinct. There are too many masks for me to believe that they have full confidence in what they are doing. Kent State survived the shootings in the sixties, so I do not think that the risk is as severe as you make it out.

You want to put “dangerous” experimental research in remote locations. That means all experimental research will eventually migrate there because of network effects. If the experimentalists are removed, a certain percentage of theorists will follow. How will grad students and undergraduates be granted access to these protected sites? If access is granted, hasn’t the threat moved with them? Will professors be able to function without a supply of cheap labor? You have not thought through the implications of splitting a campus in two. I know at Johns Hopkins, the protestors are currently demanding that APL be spun off.

You want to reorganize the university based on fear and it feels like surrendering to the barbarians. Universities claim to be about educating the leaders of tomorrow. Letting a small percentage of the campus demonstrate that mob violence is an acceptable way to conduct public discourse tells me that there are deeper problems than the safety of the mob.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Those numbers cannot be right.

What numbers do you think would be correct?

he Dartmouth incident was a genuine accident and did not involve protestors.

That is saying because nothing bad has happened, nothing bad will happen. There have been protestors breaking into labs. There have been fatalities in labs. (Not just Dartmouth - there were some terrible ones at Yale, UCLA, Chicago, Stanford, and one at Iowa State where there would have been a fatality except the researcher went out for a smoke) And these are experts - non-experts bent on destruction will surely be more at risk.

Kent State survived the shootings in the sixtie

1970. It was different, as the shooters were National Guard, not Kent State. And even so it almost didn't. Their enrollment had a huge drop in 1971 and did not reach 1970 levels until 1987-8. There were calls to close it.

You want to put “dangerous” experimental research in remote locations.

I do not, and I never said as much. I said "off campus", not "Timbiktu". Examples given were Harvard and Allston-Brighton (other side of the river), MIT and Tech Square (campus adjacent), SLAC (almost campus adjacent), and Berkeley Lab (campus adjacent). The only one that is not walkable is MIT and Bates, where they run a shuttle.

You want to reorganize the university

No, I want to move activities from one place to another.

based on fear

I also want fire alarms in buildings. Based on fear.
I also want severe weather shelters. Based on fear.
I want traffic signals and signs. Based on fear.
Shall I go on?

the safety of the mob.

I like that expression. And while I'd like to say "they made their choices and now will have to accept the consequences of their choices", the world doesn't work that way. If Buffy and Muffy get themselves killed, the narrative will be "the university should have done something to prevent this" and "the poor kiddies didn't deserve the death penalty just because they were protesting". You can see that now - demonstrations are called "mostly peaceful" and not "only a little bit violent".

 

[Frabjous]

What numbers do you think would be correct?

Since you have come up with zero examples, I would use the statistical trick of assuming that we are in the middle of a zero injury period and say that we should not expect a significant injury until 2085.

That is saying because nothing bad has happened, nothing bad will happen.

The numbers back me up. You are assuming that something has changed in the nature of protest without evidence to back you up. I would argue that that campus safety requirements are higher today than they were and that the size and vehemence of the protests are less than they were in the 60’s and 70’s. Lab accidents are a strawman argument and I have never said that there are not dangerous things in labs.

No, I want to move activities from one place to another.

And you have not through the implications of it. You have not addressed whether students will be granted access. If the answer is yes, what have you accomplished? You also name the spaces owned by elite institutions. What about non-elite insitutions that do not already possess nearby satellite campuses?

Shall I go on?

Please do. I believe that every example you gave is backed up by a cost benefit analysis.

the narrative will be

You assume the narrative will be. I believe the narrative will go the other way. Go look at the photos of the Stanford protestor grafitti. These are not people who inspire empathy.

 

[berkeman]

Thread is closed for Moderation...

 

[berkeman]

After further review and discussions, this thread will probably need to stay closed for now. If there are some injuries because of the protests spilling into labs, the thread may be reopened.

BTW, there has been an arrest in the firebombings at UC Berkeley (which involved a vehicle and a couple UCB facilities/construction) -- the motives of the arsonist and his group were political in nature:

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/arson-uc-berkeley-investigation/3568758/

Thanks to all who participated in this thread.