Is it institutionalized racism or is it random events in an area with 25,000+ college students? The whole thing seems a bit weird, including the hunger strike. I also don’t understand the teacher trying to strong-arm the press – what’s wrong with the press covering it?
Those of contradictory ideological persuasion forgive the source but there are now questions if the reported poop swastika that “triggered”, no pun intended, the events of the last several weeks at Mizzou ever actually existed.
Alstein
1903
The way I’m seeing it, is that the football team and others went on strike in support of a hunger strike that was triggered by racism at Mizzou.
Given the importance of football to an SEC school, the President was forced to resign.
Other elements took advantage of the situation to push their own agenda, which was tangentially related at best, and IMO is a form of intellectual/social bullying with demands for safe spaces, campus police going after people for “speech violations”, etc. I see it as an attempt to stifle dissent.
The problem with my statement is the whole “when does it cross the line” problem, and my only response is “I know it when I see it.”
Quaro
1904
This was happening the day after:
The professor resigned from the journalism school.
Just to be clear, she is still with the University; her main job is with the Communications school.
Is the Entire Mizzou Protest Based On Lies?
There are a lot of parallels between this story, and the Rolling Stone fiasco at UVa.
Quaro
1907
I don’t think it’s fair to characterize the lack of confidence in Wolfe’s leadership as due to a few incidents. For example over the last year he had gotten multiple votes of no confidence, the university stopped providing health insurance for grad students for a period which was widely attributed to his incompetence, which led to a lot of people widely distrusting him.
I get that, but it seems weird that the football team would really care about that stuff. Do football players normally care about health insurance for grad students? Also, going on a hunger strike over it? It all seems over the top.
It will be interesting going forward. Imagine if all the SEC football players got together and said if we can’t make some money from autograph signings, we’re not playing. I’d enjoy seeing the fallout from that one.
Again, those were just the documented incidents. The problem really started to spiral when people started sharing their similar anecdotes.
Side note, A team will not go on strike in order to break NCAA rules about payments to players. Not unless there is a union and a contract.
The reveal on the hunger striker’s father was pretty funny. Reminds me of another Yale piece at The Atlantic, in reference to catastrophizing:
According to The Washington Post, “several students in Silliman said they cannot bear to live in the college anymore.” These are young people who live in safe, heated buildings with two Steinway grand pianos, an indoor basketball court, a courtyard with hammocks and picnic tables, a computer lab, a dance studio, a gym, a movie theater, a film-editing lab, billiard tables, an art gallery, and four music practice rooms. But they can’t bear this setting that millions of people would risk their lives to inhabit because one woman wrote an email that hurt their feelings?
Also, please stop putting a space in front of your paragraphs. It’s killing me in Tapatalk. :)
When feminist researchers looked into sexual assault figures in the 80s they were somewhat surprised. The numbers just weren’t as bad as they expected. After some contemplation, they theorized that they were simply missing cases and so they rebuilt their surveys to capture this missing data. Thus the Koss survey, and a generation of literature about 1 in 4 and subsequently, 1 in 5.
On the face it’s a crazy figure - and when you compare it to the FBI survey, it just falls apart. There were no missing cases, they were simply twisting the survey answers to reflect their beliefs. Yet no one had challenged them, in twenty plus years people had just taken it at face value… and it led to all sorts of crazy behavior, culminating in the now infamous Rolling Stone article.
So I get I suspicious when people use the phrase documented incidents. If you can’t find the data, it doesn’t exist.
Truthfully? I wasn’t surprised.
The loudest voices in these movements are the children of privileged families.
Also, please stop putting a space in front of your paragraphs. It’s killing me in Tapatalk. :)
Mea culpa!
I still don’t understand how this happened.
Nesrie
1912
It’s the difference between being a jerk and being a bigot. I think they are on completely different level. It’s not about a ethnic majority either. They could target say someone who is white and homosexual or someone who is disabled. Yes, there are codes of conduct for students and for reason. But let’s keep in mind that even with the code of conduct, there are a lot of ways to be a bigot and not be expelled. If you don’t yell at people, you’re probably fine. You could probably even share hateful views amongst like minds in quiet and be fine, but when you reach that level of hostility, then yes I think it’s within the school’s right to boot you. This is different, of course from say having a discussion in a classroom… it’s not the view that’s expelling someone but the attack.
Nesrie
1913
I thought one of those took into account unreported cases and the other didn’t. Am I misinformed?
So, things at Mizzou-Columbia just keep spiralling.
- In what appears to be separate instances, two white students on other UM campuses have been arrested for making threats to shoot blacks on the Columbia campus on social media (I didn’t even know “Yik Yak” was a thing; its like mobile 4chan?)
- Rumors of a “white power cult chanting on campus” lead to a full-on declaration by Peyton Head, Student Body President (also one of those alleging to have had slurs shouted at him off-campus) that the KKK had been seen on campus, and that he was in contact with “MUPD, the state trooper and the National Guard”
- Twitter aflame about “KKK outside throwing bricks being protected and escorted by police”. Turns out to be “War of the Worlds” level mass hysteria, no confirmed sightings of anything like that; Peyton Head apologies.
4)Student emails professor saying he doesn’t feel safe coming to class tomorrow; professor replies that giving in to fear is letting bullies win, and that class will be held and exam will be given as scheduled.
- Professor is subjected to twitter-storm of abuse and condemnation; He later tries to resign, school doesn’t accept.
Stay tuned for the next episode.
/pol/ are using their black sockpuppet accounts to further the panic ie tweeting a pic of a black guy in hospital bed saying he had his legs broken by KKK racists and getting hundreds of retweets
Also
Prominent Black Lives Matter activist Johnetta Elzie seemingly confirmed those with Caucasian skin were asked to leave the area, tweeting that the group had created a “black only healing space for the students to share, decompress, be vulnerable & real
Er… Does this space have its own drinking fountain?
This is where identity politics has lead us, self-imposed apartheid. Congratulations all.
So the letter of… “demands” has me thinking.
What if this is not about perceived negligence in dealing with racist incidents at all?
What if the incident that really set off this powder keg was Wolfe’s comments about systemic oppression? The letter makes them come off as social justice warriors, not civil rights activists. Thus when you have a white, straight, CIS gendered male questioning systemic oppression, it drove the protesters in to a rage that could only be satisfied with getting rid of him.
I have a hard time believing there is a pattern of negligence in dealing with racism if people can’t even present a single reported event. Just hand waving it away and saying that “those are only the reported incidents” isn’t really an answer either. This is supported by the letter of demands, which has nothing in it asking to fix the school’s alleged negligence in dealing with racism. You’d think if their claims were true, they would have made demand #1 doing something about fixing it.
LMN8R
1917
Look at how fake this all is:
Not living there, I can’t really say. However, if the President of the university was unable to effectively address the issues, that’s a failure of leadership. That’s not the end of the world - leadership will have plenty of failures along the road paired with hopefully far more successes. It also doesn’t mean that the President had bad intentions or didn’t take things seriously. If that particular failure was going to impede his leadership ability to a significant degree in the future, I can see why he stepped down. All those students, right or wrong about the facts, are still very clear indicators that the administration’s earlier efforts didn’t get the job done.
That almost argues against it though.
There’s not much info on either arrest, and I’ll revise my opinion if either of these YikYak doofuses were actually assembling an arsenal or actually preparing to carry out these threats. Right now it just looks to me that they are two random Internet trolls, neither actually all that close to the action, making some anonymous (though not as untraceable as they’d prefer, it seems) threats so that they can later on brag about it over a round of CoD. That’s not much of a culture of intimidation, especially since neither were actually students at Mizzou.
Under what version of the US Constitution do you get to expel someone from a government funded/operated university for speech? You can certainly privately castigate and censure such speech, but expecting the government, in this case a state school, to take action to quell speech you don’t like is just about as clear a Constitutional no-no as you can get. Or am I missing something?
