Ithaca students from Ithaca College in NY recently rallied their way via a Solidarity Walkout with the University of Missouri, calling for the resignation of their school’s president, who they believe to be inadequate to respond to the emerging racist incidents in their schools.
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We want Tom Rochon to resign or be removed from his position.
But a few see adding diversity staff as simply contributing to administrative bloat on college campuses. And hundreds of Yale University students held a “March of Resilience” on Monday after two full weeks of protest. It lists institutional failures to increase campus diversity (in fact, the anonymous letter authors write, faculty diversity has decreased since his tenure) as well as his “questionable ethics”, a charge that is evidenced by the member composition of the Board of Trustees, which they say is “81 percent corporate”.
Ithaca President Tom Rochon has been accused of inadequately addressing occurrences of racism on campus, and both students and faculty are using this opportunity to voice their discontent.
“Nobody thinks we’re going to graduate and step into a world that is anything like Yale”, Lewis told MTV News.
“Whichever way the vote goes, I think it will create a period of instability and uncertainty”, Rothbart said.
By Wednesday afternoon, the University of Missouri student collective known as “Concerned Student 1950”, whose name pays homage to the year Mizzou admitted its first Black student, took to Twitter to call for Black students and alumni across the nation to share their experiences with the hashtag #blackoncampus. We are demanding what students deserved generations earlier.
The environs were a far cry from the University of Missouri. The event was closed to media, but in a statement, the college said “several incidents this fall have served as fresh and painful reminders of a longstanding problem on Ithaca College’s campus surrounding issues of racism and cultural bias”.
“It’s the microaggressions in classrooms”, Raven Fowlkes-Witten, a junior who organized Wednesday’s demonstration, said in an interview. “It’s students not feeling represented”. “I love IC [Ithaca College]”, she exclaimed. “I am certain that Ithaca College will emerge from this chapter stronger and more resolute in its direction forward, and the board and I are actively partnering with Tom Rochon and other campus leaders to make sure that happens”. There was a panel of Ithaca College alumni, and one of the panelists, a woman of Afro-Cuban descent, described herself as having a “savage hunger” for success. The moderator, Bob Kur, a former NBC News correspondent, joined in, pointing to Burch, saying, “You are driven”, and pointing to Sy and saying, “You’re the savage”. J. Christopher Burch: “It’s a compliment”. She was an integrated marketing communication major from Mahwah. “Throughout the last couple of months”, she said, “it’s grown into a large percentage of this campus being active and paying attention”.
MTV News spoke to a number of campus activists about the speed with which this protest movement is spurring accountability, and what they hope this protest movement will mean for them and their peers.
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Officials at Ithaca College say a student from New Jersey has died after a brief illness.
