KU student leaders called on to resign amid racial issues

Many students are hopeful, but want to see more action. “Many of us behind the scenes have been suffering and struggling with administration and students while trying to deal with class and work”. The movement is not over. Like Mizzou, Yale is not the only campus that has a precarious situation with racism and social inequality. The demands activists are making are reminiscent of similar protests decades earlier.

Victoria Turner, a sophomore psychology major who grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, said that her sister attends the University of Missouri. “I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view”.

Well, who really needs safe spaces? The students were part of a group called Concerned Student 1950, in reference to the year when the university accepted the first African American student, according to USA Today.

Jim Marchiony, a Kansas associate athletics director, said there have been discussions about what will happen if there are boycotts in support of a student movement there but “nothing that we’re ready yet to discuss publicly”. Just last week, someone outside of Brower made the remark that racism is over because we have a black president.

Unfortunately, students are still aware of how little influence they have in the search for the next president, even with their newly found voice on campus issues. The University of Alabama’s sororities didn’t begin accepting black women as members until 2013. In March, fraternity brothers in Oklahoma were caught on video singing and laughing about lynching black men – racial slurs included.

That is not to say that an active part of the student body did not try to include peers who had been marginalized. While the threats have led to several arrests, without indications that those posting the threats actually meant to carry them out, these actions have caused fear at many campuses.

“First I was very happy that people knew about it and that people cared about it, but then I was like, ‘What else can we do?'” Jackson said. Students of the black community felt awareness of unfair treatment needed to be amplified. Could universities admit waitlisted students now in protesters’ place and more students next year?

The events at Mizzou have sparked schools across the country, many that are also dealing with their own racially charged incidents, including Howard State, where anonymous death threats were sent to black students, and Yale University, where an alleged “white girls only” sign hung outside a fraternity.

NEWS about the senseless massacre of innocents in Paris, France, last Friday naturally eclipsed other significant events on the twenty-four-hour agenda of news around the world.

Perhaps the most important lesson from the Mizzou students’ protests is that racism is not an issue in decline in the US.

At the moment, it seems, neither the University of Missouri nor its football team has much to be proud of.

The Invisible Hawk hashtag campaign on Twitter – using #rockchalkinvisiblehawk and #howmuchmore – began a year ago after a white police officer in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was black and unarmed.

Campus presidents matter a lot to many minority students. “And the conversation shouldn’t just be happening one time”. The letter also questions tactics, such as hunger strikes, over a dean’s statement.

One relatively simple demand from the protestors, that the University of Missouri have 10 percent of their faculty be comprised of African Americans, would require Mizzou to hire an astoundingly high 400 new educators. I came to college to educate myself and learning how to be a better person is a solid thing to learn (and not everyone can conquer it).

“It shouldn’t take days of our tears and anger to move an administration to listen”, Ibala said.

And so, fellow Commodores, I urge you to be empathetic, to be thoughtful, to be welcoming and warmhearted in the coming weeks as students at other institutions of higher learning cope with the pain, the fear, and the misunderstanding.

But in the near term, both Reese and Bial emphasized that colleges will have to be quicker to respond to individual incidents of racism. “They’re the ones who speak to their neighbors and friends about what Yale is like, so you always want to consider carefully the views of Yale alumni”.