In the past month, dozens of colleges across the country have protested racial discrimination on campuses in a movement that is forcing higher education administrators to take another look at racial misunderstandings and reevaluate administrative diversity.
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Padron-Rasines also recognized the event as a catalyst of sorts for University of Florida: “What happened in Missouri is not an anomaly”.
The demonstrations at Mizzou’s campus in Columbia came on the heels of unrest at Yale University, and have been copied – complete with demands for resignations -at dozens of other colleges, including Ithaca College in NY, the University of Kansas and Claremont McKenna College near Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, at the University of Missouri, student activists are reportedly upset that the public is paying more attention to the Paris massacres than to their grievances. African Americans represent only seven percent of the University of Missouri population.
Wolfe hands over to Mike Middleton, a black former civil rights attorney and longtime deputy chancellor of the University of Missouri’s main Columbia campus.
“Being a student of color and going to a predominantly white school, we know about these issues that are happening elsewhere”, said Chelsey Brown, 22, president of the Black Student Association at Brenau and a middle grades education major. What could they do, if all students refused to go to class and pay tuition until we got the changes we wanted? A third troubling instance involved a swastika reportedly being drawn in feces in a dormitory bathroom.
One demand was met as Wolfe resigned, followed by Loftin. Typically conservative, they oftentimes fail to take action and become uncommonly indolent in the face of serious issues affecting their students.
Student protests and outrage over the University of Missouri’s handling of racial issues has brought national attention.
The Senate’s Student Executive Committee supported the student group stating that “black lives matter” and asked that Student Body President Jessie Pringle, Student Body Vice President Zach George and Chief of Staff Adam Moon resign for not backing the group’s demands, the Lawrence Journal-World, a local newspaper, reported.
A few of the protests are expressions of solidarity with the black students at Missouri, but many go beyond that to talk about racial conditions on their own campuses, which many describe as poor. Hashtags such as #InSolidarityWithMizzou, #InSolidarityWithYale, #ConcernedStudent1950 and #BlackOnCampus now have thousands of results on Facebook and Twitter. “I think it is entirely appropriate for students in a thoughtful, peaceful way to protest what you saw with the University of Missouri football team and the coach standing up for something they think is right”.
Also in the past week, leading candidates for the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations to succeed Mr Obama have weighed in on the protest movement – the Democrats sympathetically and the Republicans critically. UC Berkeley students plan to hold a similar march Wednesday.
The disparities were less pronounced when the numbers of all non-white faculty were compared with non-white students.
“To the students of color at Mizzou, we, the students of color at Boston University, stand with you in solidarity”, Jackson said. Unlike, say, the protesters, who have been tweeting things like “It’s typically white media who don’t understand the importance of respecting black spaces” and “If you have a problem with us wanting to have our spaces that we create respected, leave!”
“We’re not that much that different than the people being killed”, said Taylor Lemmons, a junior at Claremont McKenna College. He said that was the first time he dealt with “blatant racism”.
Tim Wolfe, the system’s president, was one individual who failed to address these issues on campus.
Sadly, but unsurprisingly, Butler’s hunger strike received very little press coverage until the Mizzou football time boosted his efforts with a boycott.
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Anyone who makes light of this intimidation doesn’t recognize the dynamics of revolution or the mindset of the totalitarians who are leading the protests.
