Racial tension in student government, hunger strike at University of Kansas

After the national attention received by the University of Missouri protests and Wolfe’s resignation, students at colleges across the country have increased pressure on campus leaders to address recurring acts of racism and issues of underrepresentation and diversity.

When Payton Head ran for student president at the University of Missouri – a school now known for one student’s hunger strike and other protests against the administration’s handling of racial bias and hostility on campus – he promised to “ignite Mizzou”. Someone has gone on a hunger strike, the football team wasn’t going to play, faculty was on strike.

“I want an activist student body just like I want an activist citizenry”, Obama said in an interview with George Stephanopoulos Thursday, but also added, “I do worry if young people start getting trained to think that if somebody says something I don’t like, if somebody says something that hurts my feelings, that my only recourse is to shut them up, avoid them, push them away, call on a higher power to protect me from that”. I recall the sad days of “Ali Must Go” in Nigeria of the 1970s when the university authorities, with the support of Obasanjo’s military government, used all manner of force to brutalize students who were legitimately protesting the hike in the cost of university education. “We understand exactly what the Mizzou students are experiencing”.

“I am here because I am proud to be Black, ” said junior Hector Caminero.

It’s unclear what the student body president was doing when he was allegedly accosted or even if anyone witnessed the alleged incident, but unless the miscreants were University employees driving a University truck, it’s hard to see what their conduct has to do with the school or its president. The three released a join statement that proclaimed “Black lives matter”.

At the same time, Head described the campus as “more united now than ever”. People of color weren’t intentionally meant to be here.

“Basically, it’s both ethically right and practically more productive and creative”, he said.

The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf, who has written on another Yale incident, has also critiqued what many are calling the “intolerance of student activists”.

At Claremont McKenna College, where a dean resigned last week over protests over comments she had made that many found offensive, scores of students are circulating a letter saying that the protest movement there – while motivated by valid concerns – has gone too far. The university system’s first Black leader was the late Elson Floyd, who was in charge from 2003 to 2007.

Albert Laguna, an assistant professor of ethnicity, race and migration and American studies at Yale University, wrote in an opinion piece on CNN.com, “There is a concrete strategy that universities can employ so (racial) incidents will happen less frequently students of color can feel more welcomed, and questions of race and ethnicity can be discussed productively across the entire campus community”. In my university, as in most universities, we have students represented on the Board of Trustees, the highest governing council in the system.

“Universities remain primarily white because they continue to do business as usual as they have done since they were built as intentionally upper class white, male, elite bastions”, he said.

African Americans make up just 5 percent of Dane County, yet according to the Race to Equity report, they are half of the jail population. Additionally, it seems that President Jessie Pringle is also using her Facebook to ensure that the student body knows that she stands behind the black students on campus. “I think we are also witnessing a reprise to history – college campuses have historically been places where protest to inequality has taken place”.

Fresh from a two-hour “listening session” Friday, University of MA Senior Vice Provost John McCarthy said students made clear the need for change.

Response to growing social and racial unrest is coming quickly at the University of Missouri. Many students and faculty members are Asian.

How have UC Berkeley students and faculty responded? Students across the country have staged sit-ins and marches, demanding US schools acknowledge that racism is an issue.

Rachel Cohen, Catherine Keefe-Harris, Steve Leigh, Scot McCullough, Joan McKiernan, Kevin Moore, Sid Patel, Haley Pessin, Gala Pierce, Kiah Price, Gretchen Sager, Molly Seiden, Coco Smyth, Galo Vasquez, Bennet Wilcox and Eva Woods contributed to this article.