NAACP chapter shows support for University of Missouri

“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”.

Concurrent protests at Yale University over alleged racial insensitivity on campus around Halloween were the next to go viral. While they offered no evidence of this, Yale President Peter Salovey humored them anyway, promising to strive for “greater inclusion, healing, mutual respect, and understanding” – all the politically correct boilerplate.

In retaliation, on Homecoming itself, yet another minority rights group calling itself “Concerned Student 1950” surrounded President Wolfe and demanded that he get out of his vehicle and acknowledge his “white male privilege” and “admit to his gross negligence”.

The University of Missouri (also known as Mizzou) has been in the national spotlight since the beginning of November.

“This has been a really tumultuous and challenging year”, Putman said. John Cowan, a white graduate student at the university, said he was on hunger strike until all of the “diversity demands” were met. A student who was one of the original organizers of the group was not immediately available for comment. But many universities have gone out of their way to accommodate those delicate sensibilities.

Students on the UW campus have been building the campaign to “Reclaim the UW”, opposing racism and economic inequality, supporting a faculty unionization drive, and building solidarity with janitors.

William Quan, a Chinese-American who also graduated Fordham College in 2011, sat down to talk with me.

But even increasing the percentage of students of color on campus is not enough, insisted Deborah Bial, founder of the Posse Foundation, which partners with colleges to place minority students. And a few years ago, cotton balls were infamously strewn on the lawn of the university’s Black Culture Center.

Students feel more empowered now to push for change at the very top. This shouldn’t have happened in 1963 or any time.

Activists also are demanding changes to curriculum to address diversity and an administrative acknowledgement of barriers that students of color face. He suggested students argue with those they disagree with rather than try to keep them from speaking. Three Missouri men accused of making online terrorist threats against black students have been arrested.

I’m sorry to have to bring this news, but no such world exists.

Younis, a transfer student from the University of Missouri, told the crowd that she was thankful for the encouragement and unity that has been shown toward her former school.

Of course, the relationship between colleges and the “student athletes” who make money for them is fairly questioned.

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

“It’s been a constant conversation”, Michelle Zuluaga Valencia, 23, the next president of the UNIFY student group at UNG and an worldwide affairs major, said.

“While I am grateful for Rutgers’ recent steps to improving issues of race, such as the formation of the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Populations in Rutgers History, there is a lot more work to be done”, Higginbotham said.

But in the near term, both Reese and Bial emphasized that colleges will have to be quicker to respond to individual incidents of racism. When around 400 students linked arms in Marsh Plaza, shouting “M-i-z-z-o-u”, Jackson said she was proved wrong.

“That’s a team by team, person by person, decision”, Marchiony said. It’s how we saw social change in the late 60s and early 70s.

In addition, anonymous social media posts that made the rounds called black women at SMU “aesthetically unpleasing” and said they “go to crappy high schools and generally don’t deserve to even be at SMU to begin with”.