The University of Rhode Island is eerily quiet.
Less than a month ago, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated on a Utah college campus. Last spring, Columbia University students were facing suspension for camping out while protesting their administration’s financial ties to Israel. Harvard University has become the site of a funding tug-of-war, with President Donald Trump on the other end of the rope.
For centuries, college campuses have been hotbeds of ideas, protest and dialogue. Through the Jim Crow era, the Vietnam War and the United States’ invasion of Iraq, students have been at the forefront of progress.
So, I look to the massive rectangle of greenery in the center of campus, which decades ago was filled with passionate students with something to say. Now it’s empty.
In my two years on campus, in a tumultuous era not only for students, but for America, I’ve seen one student-led protest. During midterm exams in the winter of 2024, a relatively small group of students chanted through a megaphone for a free Palestine.
All that the student body said in response was a Yik Yak message to shut up so we could take our exams.
If you scroll through URI students’ Instagram stories, we look like we care. Infographic after infographic is reposted, but where it matters, in person, there’s simply no one there. We do have political and activist groups on campus, and I don’t intend to diminish their work.
They function without support from the general student body, but imagine what they could pull off with both financial and moral support.
And I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t note my own lack of political involvement — it’s not as if I’m out with handmade signs either. But it troubles me that URI students, including myself, foster a culture where silence is the norm.
What makes our school so different from the universities boiling over with political conversation?
Is protest something only reserved for elite, exclusive institutions? Where the president is threatening their “woke” classes?
Twenty URI employees have been fired this year because of Trump’s budget cuts. Our research budget is being slashed by millions. Changes are being made in our community, and none of us are batting an eye, either because we don’t know or don’t care.
As the story goes, a frog slowly boiled alive doesn’t notice. The water is heating up at URI, slowly but surely.
Yet we stay silent.
I understand reading the news and staying informed is a uniquely draining experience these days. We’re young, in what is repeatedly said by our families to be the prime of our lives, and having constant anxiety about impending federal orders isn’t exactly how I would like to spend my time, either.
No one wants to be the one to burst the idyllic bubble we live in, tanning on the quad and playing spikeball on sunny afternoons. The American sense of hyper-individualism has caught up with us, thinking about only ourselves and our own problems.
I don’t mean to say our own problems aren’t important, but in the grand scheme of our university being undercut by the federal government, they do fall away a bit.
Our silence sends a message of compliance, intentional or not. There is no difference in following orders begrudgingly and following them enthusiastically.
So what do we do?
Honestly, I don’t know. Which is hard to admit, and makes me feel very helpless, but it’s the truth.
I think all there is to do is talk. Talk to one another about what’s happening, even if it’s awkward. Talk to our professors and administrators about what we really think, sharing our dissent (or agreement, I don’t know you) for budget cuts and firings.
Maybe one day, we’ll circle back to our roots of marching across the quad with handmade signs. I just hope the water hasn’t boiled over by then.
