There already is a thread on this:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/saint-olaf-college/1988593-someone-is-targeting-minority-students.html#latest
@barrons -Would you care to add any comments/thoughts on the situation?
St. Olaf is the college where conservatives are physically threatened to the point they leave the school, so that the same group of people would falsify racial threats is no surprise.
http://www.manitoumessenger.com/article/under-the-radar/
Any students involved in this should be expelled.
^Err… St Olaf is considered a conservative college in Minnesota. Ask anyone from Carleton or Macalester.It’s religious and its students are generally described as “nice and wholesome”.
Note however that the populist movement that has attached itself to the conversative party is different - it’s a new iteration that most conservative didn’t consider “conservative” and some of its expression is, to put it mildly, unsavory.
(For what it’s worth, the student who decided to transfer to an urban Catholic college is unlikely to find it more conservative.)
We don’t know who fabricated the note but I find it reassuring that the students, as a whole, decided to defend the student who was threatened. This fact is more revealing about the college than the fabrication - the solidarity all students, regardless of color, felt toward one of theirs who was threatened.
As to whoever fabricated the note or whatever it was they thought they were doing, they’re likely to go before the Honor Board and probably face prosecution to boot.
@Zinhead if you would like to discuss the incident you linked to, there is a thread on that in the St Olaf subform
@MYOS1634 - From the linked letter in the school newspaper:
However, you are right in that a 5:1 D:R ratio would make St. Olaf more conservative than Carleton or Macalester. As for students that are transferring or had transferred, they clearly stated they left because they felt physically unsafe remaining at St. Olaf.
Something is very wrong with this school were the student body feels they can physically threaten and run off other students because they disagree with their political views, and then further that behavior by creating a fake hate crime.
^the 2016 election was weird. Overall, a much larger percentage of college educated voters didn’t vote for the conservative candidate - we’ll know whether that was an outlier, but you can’t use 2016 to define a college campus’ politics. Overall, conservative people completing a degree or with a degree didn’t vote the same way they would have if the candidate had been Ted Cruz, Jed Bush, Marco Rubio, etc. (Also, look at the primaries in Minnesota.)
I read that article and they didn’t say that they left because they felt physically threatened. They said they felt they couldn’t speak up in class even if professors (save for one) maintained balance in class.
It’s a moderate campus and the “nice and wholesome” image is not fake, as far as I know.
They have an institute promoting dialogue, including between political groups. The last people they hosted, based on their website, are professors from Princeton, Oxford, and Georgetown.
http://institute.stolaf.edu/
I think the opposite: that this school is doing things right.
“There already is a thread on this:”
I dont spend any time on that subsite. But the bigger issue is–this false BS happens way too much and real people get really hurt.That’s the issue–not 1 case at St Ollie.
Can you tell me where else this has happened? I would be interested in learning how frequent it is.
I think you are right about people getting hurt. The minority students who did not have anything to do with this have spent time and emotion feeling fearful and stressed. It is bound to affect their exam preparation.
However from what I have heard, the campus climate needs some improving and I think the student body is willing to do the work in order to have a more welcoming environment.
https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/30047
I am not sure how to do links, but in response to Snowball City’s inquiry, there was an incident at SUNY Albany last year, where three female African-American students claimed that they were verbally racially and physically harassed by white males on a public bus. The investigation that followed revealed that the women not only were not harassed on the bus, but that they were the instigators. There was video and audio. I believe they were criminally charged and expelled.
The sad thing about these fake claims is that they detract from the genuine issues that do exist in our society by permitting those who are not inclined to do the correct thing to pick out the phony instances as being the only ones.
@techmom99 Thank you. I will see if I can find the reporting in the Albany newspaper or tv stations. That does sound troubling but I would guess that the instances of racism far outnumber the false reports. Your final paragraph sums up my thoughts very well.
(The College Fix has some murky funding and I am not certain how independent they are. That could be a topic for another thread. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/02/07/betsy-devoss-connection-college-fix-conservative-higher-education-news-site)
The story about the SUNY Albany women and the bus was widely reported. ex. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/02/nyregion/racism-charges-in-bus-incident-and-their-unraveling-upset-u-of-albany.html?_r=0
@“Snowball City” -
I was unfamiliar with The College Fix and chose that link because the article seemed comprehensive and aligned with what I had read and seen elsewhere. I live on Long Island, which is where 2 of the 3 young women hail from, so the story was widely covered down here. SUNY is also my state’s school and I am sending my youngest off to a different SUNY in the fall. Two of his very close friends will be at Albany and neither has a racist or mean bone in his body. As i said earlier, I find it so sad that things like this still occur.
The St. Olaf incident is similar to the Oberlin hoax/“joke” in 2013. College administrators should not cancel classes over these incidents, whether they’re real or fake. It just rewards bad behavior/agents provocateurs either way.
What is the fake part?
The original claim was that a racist note was found on the windshield of a black student.
Was there never a racist note? Was there never a black student finding a note? Did the black student confess to creating the note and making the claim?
I’m confused.
From the original article:
Option Three seems most likely to be correct, but the college cannot comment on it due to privacy concerns and they won’t refer it to the authorities.
To me it is not clear who wrote the windshield note and other notes. It is not clear who wrote the n word on blackboards. The college is not releasing the name of the perpetrator.
It is clear that it caused a lot of worry among the minority student population and that it started a dialog about other ways in which the minority students have been made to feel uncomfortable. The student body is reflecting on that.
My gut says that the cases of actual racist incidents on campus outnumbers the false reports. The actual incidents may be under reported because it comes down to ‘whose word do you take’ situation such as in the he said/she said dilemma of rape.
That was my guess, too.
It wouldn’t make sense if a white kid put a racist note on a black kid’s car and then claimed it was a hoax. I can only conclude that the student claiming to find the racist note created it himself.
I am not going to jump to claiming it was her. Another student of color could have done this.
edited to add: It is also unclear whether or not the same person is behind the other incidents.