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Nancy Smith

FAMU, Penn State Student Protests Misdirected

December 18, 2011 - 6:00pm
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When did student protests, once incubators of social and political change in America, become little more than cheering sections for criminal behavior?

Recent protests involving students at Florida A&M and Pennsylvania State University make me wonder.

Let's have a quick look at Penn State first.

Penn State football's defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky is a guy facing 40 counts of sexual abuse on underage boys.

Between 1994 and Nov. 5, 2011, when Sandusky was arrested, all kinds of Pennsylvania household names -- including the legend, Coach Joe Paterno -- were made aware more than once of Sandusky's lifestyle. But they did nothing, they let it happen, coddled Sandusky's lascivious secret without reporting him to the police.

Yet, what do Penn State students care about? Not the victims, it seems, just their own Shangri-La, their university's reputation and the loss of their beloved Coach Paterno.

Student protesters trashed their campus. They tore down lamp posts, flipped a news van, threw stones and bottles at reporters and blitzed Facebook with notes of support for their beloved Penn State.

And the alleged victims? What about them? It took weeks before alleged victims, members of an organization Sandusky founded for underprivileged kids, got a second look from university students.

The FAMU student protest a month later follows the murder of Florida A&M drum major Robert Champion.

The 26-year-old student was beaten so badly from the chest down that he died from shock caused by internal bleeding -- the victim of a suspected hazing incident within the school's famed marching band.

If you didn't know better, you might think student protests at FAMU over a thing like this are a natural. After all, a little righteous indignation for the brutal culture of hazing at their school, involving their friends and classmates, is a good reason for students to get angry. So is the university administration's blind eye to a practice students acknowledge has been a way of life within the Marching 100 for many years.

But, no.

Curiously, FAMU students are protesting Gov. Rick Scott's recommendation that the university's president, James Ammons, be suspended while authorities conduct an investigation of problems and allegations at the school -- particularly within the band.

What we've got here is a mind-your-own business protest. It's a what-happens-in-Vegas kind of protest.

Apparently Scott was supposed to look the other way.

Apparently the death of a state university student in Florida falls exclusively under the jurisdiction of the Board of Governors and that's what fires up students these days -- not a fellow student's death, but jurisdictional geography. So, for butting in, Scott gets placard-carrying students chanting slogans and finding the time and the outrage to march on the governor's mansion.

Scott explained himself in some detail Sunday night.

Following reports of the beating of one student and the death of another associated with hazing activities, I asked the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to provide any and all assistance necessary to help find answers through an investigation. After financial irregularities were discovered, I committed resources of our Inspector General to assist at the request of the Board of Governors.

The FAMU Board of Trustees has already publicly reprimanded Dr. Ammons. This week, I learned of reports of at least one child molestation case that took place on campus, an incident Dr. Ammons told me in my office he was not made aware of until months after its occurrence. Based on all of these facts, I merely suggested it would be wise for Dr. Ammons to step aside until these investigations are completed."

Here I am asking myself, does protecting Ammons from the Big Bad Governor rise to a student protest occasion? I'm an old-timer, remember. I remember May 4, 1970, just days after President Richard Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia, when about 2,000 students at Kent State University in Ohio gathered to protest this new escalation of the divisive, years-long war. The Ohio National Guard was called in to disperse the group, and used tear gas -- then fired on demonstrators and bystanders.

Now there was a student protest and a consequence. And oodles of cause for any number of protests that followed.

But now we have U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown, D-Jacksonville, jumping in to join the protest. She's pretty mad at Scott, too. In a letter to the governor last Friday, Brown, an alumna of the university, called it unfair to make Florida A&M University a scapegoat and possibly jeopardize the academic accreditation of FAMU." Why should FAMU be picked on, she asks, when other Florida universities have been in the news for hazing on their campuses?

Let's see, congresswoman -- how about because the hazing incident at FAMU involved the brutal killing of Robert Champion? How about because a hazing incident at FAMU a month earlier left freshman clarinetist Bria Shante Hunter with a fractured femur and enough fear for her to relinquish her $85,000 band scholarship? She won't ever be the proud alum you are.

No offense, Board of Governors, but if incidents of hazing -- call it what it is, thuggery -- persist without solution at multiple state universities, then maybe Rick Scott is a welcome intervention.

Maybe a Florida governor should have dared to crack the universities' secrecy code, break with tradition and embarrass a president or two a long time ago.

As for student protests, interesting -- perhaps a little sad to some of us -- what passes today as a campus cause celebre.

This is an opinion column: Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at (850) 727-0859.

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