You’ve read the thousand or so posts on six different threads, covering college protests that threatened to ripple across the nation like a bad stomach virus… So, come here for your one-stop college protest tournament “micro-aggression edition”. How did they stack up? Who emerged as winners? Who set back the cause of equal rights fifty years?
Here is my completely biased analysis, starting with the most successful and working my way down:
Mizzou - Until about three weeks ago, this was not a college, but, the name of a spicy soup. Then, their football team landed them on the front page of the NYT for something few sports teams ever do: risking their scholarships for a cause. The initial gale wind of the commentariat was against them until the day after their president and chancellor stepped down, two white students were arrested for making violent threats over the internet, thus proving the old adage that “occasionally, even paranoids have enemies.”
Princeton - Say what you will, these kids single-handedly lifted the lid on one of the best kept secrets in American history: Woodrow Wilson wasn’t merely a casual racist, he was an intentional segregationist who used all the powers of his office to overturn the results of civil service exams in order to keep blacks in their place. To paraphrase the Editorial Board of the New York Times: “Who knew?”
Amherst - After seeing Princeton take on Woodrow Wilson, it was heartening to see Amherst answer back with a resounding kick in the pants to a genocidal mascot that should have been retired years ago.
Wesleyan - What initially began as a protest against a badly written student op-ed about Black Lives Matter (which apparently could not be answered by an equally badly written op-ed, supporting BLM), gradually devolved into a tussle over the student newspaper budget. In fact, we would probably still be debating whether censorship is really censorship if nothing has actually been censored - if Mizzou hadn’t blown it off the commentariat radar.
Claremont McKenna College - A dean resigned after a letter surfaced wherein she referred to certain students as “not fitting the mold .” I guess the question here is, “Do you really want to fit the mold?”
Ithaca College - A prominent alumnus carelessly referred to a student panelist as a “savage”. Query: how do you make an alumnus resign? Oh, you ask the college president to step down instead.
Williams College - Though this was not technically about race, the rescinding of an invitation to a controversial anti-feminist speaker was enough to get Williams thrown in with the whole “We’re Coddling Our Children With Anti-Free Speech Trigger Warnings” target zone.
Yale - This was about Halloween costumes.