I am impressed by the tweets of anger that the events in Paris are taking news coverage from Mizzou.
that is definitely how you gain support for your cause…
^^ Does Amherst’s Dean Epstein have authority over the schedules of all 5 colleges?
Is he supposed to issue this request to faculty at all of them? Is this a polite request we’re talking about, or is it a demand (accompanied by a threat to “escalate” if the demand isn’t met)? Does he have the authority (or do the Amherst faculty have the authority) to excuse students from work shifts? Just at Amherst? At all 5 colleges?
After the Chairman of the Board of Trustees apologizes for “colonialism”, what’s the next step? Full independence for every Amherst colony?
That list of demands is illogical in much the same way that racism is illogical. It assigns automatic responsibility to individuals (or to one institution) for a vaguely-identified set of behaviors and characteristics attributed to an entire class of people. The people who wrote it are mad at the world. Dean Epstein can’t fix that.
“9. Do not threaten the jobs of the faculty, staff, or administrators that support our list of demands. Such threats will result in an escalation of our response.”
Is this a ransom note? Did they rip letters out of the newspaper to create it? Sheesh.
And complaining that the events in Paris take attention off Mizzou - what jerks.
This is unbelievable…my initial question of “is this mentality widespread” has been answered by the events in the US…why are Universities putting up with this?
Re the claim that thug is used primarily to describe black criminals and/or is code for the n word …
On my Facebook feed this morning, from the Chicago Tribune, re the events in Paris -
“And so we will have a terrible Saturday in November of watching the body count in Paris, learning more about the thugs responsible and expressing our sympathies to France, a great friend and ally.”
I’m pretty confident the perpetrators responsible for Paris aren’t African-American.
Yeah. They’re likely brown though.
Oh, so we are now shifting the meaning of thug to be “term for non-white criminals”? The goalposts keep moving on this one, which is enough to convince me it’s neither code for black nor code for the n word.
That’s not really a shift, IMO, thigh I wasn’t one who said it was code for the n word.
Though, not thigh. On a phone here and as we ask know the cc mobile site is non existent and posts are not editable. Sigh.
I’m a part-time lecture at the local commuter college (total enrollment 12,000). There was an event on Thursday and I think 30 students showed up.