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Ok, so we have a college student who was “oppressed” at one of the top universities in the country. Someone may have yelled something. His SJW friends claim that someone smeared a poop swastika on a mirror. Though of course, there is no proof. Because when you see a poop-swastika, you don’t document that crap, you keep walking and Tweet about it. Also, we’re sure white privilege played a part in all this somehow.
Here’s the rub though. Butler complains about white privilege and how it played a role in his oppression and poop-swastikas? I wish I was this oppressed… (special thanks to the Tweets of Paul Watson and Jim Hoft for bringing this to our attention):
Johnathan Butler is a member of a prominent Omaha family. The newspaper says Butler’s father is Eric L. Butler, executive vice president for sales and marketing for the Union Pacific Railroad. His 2014 compensation was $8.4 million, according to regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
That’s right. The student in the middle of all this Mizzou hype? He’s just another overprivileged college student living off of daddy’s millions.
In other words, he’s your typical modern liberal activist.
Allow us to re-cap the timeline for those who haven’t been following or are confused about WTF is going on with this school.
Kid complains about racial slurs. Goes on hunger strike.
#SJW Students at #Mizzou Create Human Shield To Block Reporters
So this is happening. The students of Mizzou are as open minded as their physical stance of linked arms and scowled countenances, not allowing the press to report on the story at hand. The group which preaches tolerance and acceptance is demonstrating exactly why we think they’re hypocrites, creating a human chain to trap in… the truth? Aw, hell. Here’s what happened:
COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) — The president of the University of Missouri system stepped down Monday amid criticism of his handling of student complaints about race and discrimination.
President Tim Wolfe said his resignation was effective immediately. He made the announcement at the start of what had been expected to be a lengthy closed-door meeting of the school’s governing board. He largely pre-empted that session in a halting statement that was simultaneously apologetic, clumsy and defiant.
Tim Wolfe received complaints that students were being made fun of and they couldn’t handle it. Is that an over-simplficiation? Maybe. But this president of a university just resigned because people were unhappy with how he handled people being mocked. Sure, about their race. Sure, it’s not a nice thing to do. But mocked nonetheless.
For months, black student groups have complained of racial slurs and other slights on the overwhelmingly white flagship campus of the state’s four-college system. Frustrations flared during a homecoming parade Oct. 10 when black protesters blocked Wolfe’s car, and he did not get out and talk to them. They were removed by police.
Here’s my issue with this “issue” at the college campus. Everyone is dragging their safety blankets and crying to daddy to do something about the meanie white kids who are making fun of the poor, put-upon and helpless black kids. No word yet on if any black kids ever said anything derogatory to any white kids, because that doesn’t matter. It’s racist for you to even think it. Stop thinking. Rather than the students dealing with whatever issues they were having amongst themselves (like adults, because you know, college is for 18 year olds and above) these “strong” confident students put their thumbs in their mouths and wailed, bashing the mean, white man in charge of the college “patriarchy.” When daddy told the kids to stop being a bunch of crybabies, they called for his white privileged, cis-gendered head. There was screaming, wailing and gnashing of teeth to get their way.
Yet again, we have a free speech problem coupled with an overly sensitive people problem. Sorry if that’s triggering you, but maybe you should go shred a founding document to make yourself feel better (yes, that happened. We wrote about shredding the Constitution here).
Now the college students are hindering another first amendment issue: the press. Instead of allowing the press to come and report on what’s going on, they’re locking reporters out.
Students gather on the University of Missouri campus to show support for Jonathan L. Butler, a 25-year-old graduate student who held a hunger strike for seven days, until his university president resigned. (Photo: Bill Greenbklatt/UPI/Newscom)
America’s universities are supposed to be places
where students can get an education. The vast
majority of students want that. Some, however,
do not. They want a “safe space” where their
strange ideas about society can be aired
without criticism, and where they can
unilaterally punish other students for failing to toe the mass line. These student activists want blood.
University of Missouri Associate Professor Stephanie Shonekan said that the killing of Michael Brown was the most recent catalyst to protests that led to the resignation of University of Missouri system President Tim Wolfe and “students realized that what they’ve been feeling here is linked to what happened just down the road” on Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Wolf.”
When asked how things at the school got so bad, Shonekan responded, “You know, this is — what we saw with the football team and we’ve seen this semester is just not — another few episodes in a long line of events that happened over the last — I’ve been here for about four-and-a-half years, and there has been tension in all of that time. I think that with the football players, it just brought it to national attention, which is wonderful, but students have been passionate about this for a long time, and I think most recently that the catalyst was last year when Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson. Our students realized that what they’ve been feeling here is linked to what happened just down the road, and so they started agitating for change on campus. I should mention the agitation has all been very peaceful. It’s been very thoughtful, and well done by a group of leaders, who have been very intentional in getting action done.”
Shonekan also said, in reaction to the resignation, “I’m elated. I am thrilled that the students are heard. I think that this is one step in what will probably be a pretty long journey. But this is all a good thing, in the sense that it is signalling to our students that they mean a lot to us, that their thoughts and their concerns are concerns to us as well.”
University of Missouri president resigns amid race protest
Reuters
The president of the University of Missouri, Tim Wolfe, is out, forced to resign by protests over his allegedly inadequate response to racist incidents on campus.
In a similar, but much more bizarre, incident at Yale, student activists are demanding the resignation of professors who dared to argue with them about their demand for safe-space protection from hypothetical Halloween costumes. The wheels are coming off the American university system, at a time of skyrocketing tuition costs.
The University of Missouri president lost a power struggle with students, with the decisive blow coming when the university football team “drew national attention to the campus protests by announcing during the weekend that they would not participate in team activities until Wolfe was removed,” as Fox News reports. The team acted in solidarity with a student named Jonathan Butler, who was staging a hunger strike:
“It is my belief that we stopped listening to each other,” Wolfe said during his statement. “We didn’t respond or react. We got frustrated with each other and we forced individuals like Jonathan Butler to take immediate action, unusual steps to affect change. This is not – I repeat, not – the way change should come about. Change comes from listening, learning, caring and conversation and we have top respect each other enough to stop yelling at each other and quit intimidating each other.
“Unfortunately this has not happened,” Wolfe said.
The protests began after the student government president, who is black, said in September that people in a passing pickup truck shouted racial slurs at him. In early October, members of a black student organization said slurs were hurled at them by an apparently drunken white student. Recently, a swastika drawn in human feces was found in a dormitory bathroom.
More recently, two trucks flying Confederate flags drove past a site where 150 students had gathered to protest on Sunday, a move some saw as an attempt at intimidation. One of the participants, Abigail Hollis, a black undergraduate, said the campus is “unhealthy and unsafe for us.”
“The way white students are treated is in stark contrast to the way black students and other marginalized students are treated, and it’s time to stop that,” Hollis said. “It’s 2015.”
This is less about specific allegations of unsatisfactory performance by Wolfe, and more like an avalanche of grievances that rolled into politically-correct fascist territory, complete with impromptu show trials:
The Concerned Student 1950 group, which draws its name from the year the university accepted its first black student, had demanded, among other things, that Wolfe “acknowledge his white male privilege,” that he be removed immediately, and that the school adopt a mandatory racial-awareness program and hire more black faculty and staff.
The Columbia Daily Tribune reported that Wolfe was confronted outside a fundraising event in Kansas City Friday night by protesters who asked him to define systemic oppression. According to video of the encounter posted on Twitter, Wolfe responded that the students may not like his answer before saying, “Systematic oppression is because you don’t believe that you have the equal opportunity for success —”
That statement provoked anger from the protesters, one of whom asked “Did you just blame us for systematic oppression, Tim Wolfe?” as the president walked away.
At least Wolfe’s critics can point to some incidents they think he should have handled better, even if they’re rather vague about exactly what he should have done, and display a creepy enthusiasm for forcing him to admit to thoughtcrimes. At Yale, there was no actual incident behind the student activist rampage. They want scalps because they don’t think the professors were sympathetic enough to their demands for protection from “offensive” Halloween costumes people might wear.
“Students called for the resignation of Associate Master of Silliman College Erika Christakis after she responded to an email from the school’s Intercultural Affairs Council asking students to be thoughtful about the cultural implications of their Halloween costumes,” reports campus watchog group FIRE. “According to The Washington Post, students are also calling for the resignation of her husband, Master of Silliman College, Nicholas Christakis, who defended her statement.”
FIRE provided video of students angrily confronting Nicholas Christakis and screaming obscenities at him, ordering him to “be quiet” so they could lecture him:
Ironically, Christakis was on campus that day to speak at a conference on free-speech issues in higher education. The student mob is essentially demanding punishment for professors who dared to oppose their drive for “safe space” controls on free expression.
Erika Christakis’ “offensive” email included the following unacceptable passages:
I don’t wish to trivialize genuine concerns about cultural and personal representation, and other challenges to our lived experience in a plural community. I know that many decent people have proposed guidelines on Halloween costumes from a spirit of avoiding hurt and offense. I laud those goals, in theory, as most of us do. But in practice, I wonder if we should reflect more transparently, as a community, on the consequences of an institutional (which is to say: bureaucratic and administrative) exercise of implied control over college students.
[…] Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious… a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive? American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition.
Order must be maintained on campus. The students who verbally assaulted Christakis should have been expelled immediately, with their parents left to contemplate the loss of thousands of dollars in tuition spent on kids who clearly weren’t ready for higher education, or even productive spaces in polite society. The University of Missouri is not setting a good precedent by giving their campus activists a scalp.
Among other things, this sort of campus chaos is interfering with the ability of serious students to get an education, while absorbing enormous resources, and making it difficult to detect or deal with serious problems. On the contrary, the exact wrong lessons about using mob tactics to extract satisfaction for “grievances” are being taught.
Steven Hayward recalls a better solution to campus activism at PowerLine, recalling how acting president Sam Hayakawa dealt with protests at San Francisco State University in 1969:
Hayakawa quickly showed that he was made of sterner stuff than his witless predecessors in the president’s chair. He drew nationwide publicity when he climbed onto a sound truck from which protestors were shouting obscenities through a microphone, knocked a protestor to the ground who stood in his way (Hayakawa weighed only 145 pounds), and ripped out the wiring of the sound equipment, which the protestors were unable to repair.
On another occasion Hayakawa brought a bullhorn to the protest, and shouted back at demonstrators. He also did not hesitate to call in police in large numbers to arrest protestors who disrupted classes.
“In a democratic society,” Hayakawa said in justifying his recourse to the police, “the police are there for the protection of our liberties. It is in a totalitarian society that police take away our liberties.”
He took activists at their word that their demands were “non-negotiable,” and refused to negotiate.
A star was born, and he would serve as a complement to Reagan’s tough approach to campus troubles. Like Reagan, he referred to campus protestors as a “gang of goons and neo-Nazis,” and criticized the hypocrisy of campus liberals who expressed sympathy for the extremism of black radicals.
Hayakawa attacked “the intellectually slovenly habit, now popular among whites as well as blacks, of denouncing as racist those who oppose or are critical of any Negro tactic or demand. We have a standing obligation to the 17,500 or more students—white, black, yellow, red and brown—who are not on strike and have every right to expect continuation of their education.”
The grim truth of campus totalitarianism is that fascism is fun. It’s exhilarating to be part of an angry mob, and social media makes it easier than ever. There’s a huge rush to crushing enemies, silencing dissent, and winning tangible victories against established order. If these tactics keep working, we’ll get more of them, and the students trying to get a real education will be left to wonder why no one has any consideration left over for them.
