Tag: universities

Demands mount for racial quotas at elite US universities

Calls have been made at several elite American universities to implement racial quotas in response to the mass, multi-racial protests over the police murder of George Floyd.

An open letter to Stanford University’s president and provost, published June 19 in the Stanford Daily, demanded that by December 2021, 20 percent of all students, postdoctoral researchers, staff and faculty at the university be African American. The letter was signed by a group of professional and student organizations led by the Stanford Black Postdoc Association.

A similar open letter from current and former students at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs demanded that 25 percent of the school’s professors be black by 2022. (The letter also called for the removal of Woodrow Wilson from the school’s name, a demand to which Princeton has agreed and about which the World Socialist Web Site has previously written.)

Meanwhile, the University of California Regents, overseeing one of the top public university systems in the world, has voted to reinstate affirmative action. The decision, which will affect all public higher education in California, will ultimately be decided by a state referendum in November.

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Police Say Texas A&M Student Who Found Racist Notes On His Car Put Them There

A student at Texas A&M University who reported that racist notes had been left on his car windshield is responsible for the act, police say. 

KBTX-TV reported that in June, Texas A&M senior Isaih Martin alerted the university police when he allegedly discovered handwritten messages reading “All lives matter” and “You don’t belong here,” along with a third listing the N-word, on his vehicle, which he had parked at an apartment complex on the school’s property.

Martin posted a photo of the notes to a Twitter account that has since been made private. According to KBTX, the university responded to his post, asking him to report the incident. 

“For them to tell me I don’t belong here, when I have earned my spot like everybody else here, and am working to get a degree like everyone else is, that was just kind of hurtful because if anything I deserve to be here just as much as anybody else,” Martin commented at the time. 

“Acts of racism are irreconcilable with the values we uphold here at Texas A&M University. Those who promote hate, discrimination and disrespect are not welcomed at this institution. We are tired of bigoted members of our community marring the experiences of students of color,” Texas A&M President Michael K. Young said in a statement following the incident. 

He also announced that the university would offer a $1,200 reward to anyone who could provide information to identify the person responsible for the act. 

“Let me be clear: Incidents like the one yesterday have no place at Texas A&M. Anyone who believes that hate is acceptable is not wanted at Texas A&M.” 

Texas A&M police reported Thursday that, based on surveillance video footage, Martin likely placed the notes on his car himself. Footage taken from nearby cameras shows that passers-by may have come close to Martin’s car, but were only near the vehicle for a few seconds. 

The police report, obtained by KBTX, reads that Martin was seen moving around his vehicle, with two different “white specks” held in the area of his chest. The footage also showed him “stepping back and onto the sidewalk in front of his vehicle, most likely taking photos and videos. He then approaches his vehicle again on the passenger side and remains there for a few moments. He is then seen walking around the front of his vehicle. Martin then enters the driver’s door and drives away a few moments later. The total time spent at his vehicle is 1 minute, 15 seconds.”

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How Non-Existent Cancel Culture Works at Princeton and Elsewhere

Last week in Quillette, a Princeton Classics professor, Joshua T. Katz, published an article criticizing a letter signed by some of his institution’s professors “to block the mechanisms that have allowed systemic racism to work, visibly and invisibly, in Princeton’s operations.” The faculty letter insisted that “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America” and that it was “rampant” even at progressive institutions such as the school formerly known as the College of New Jersey. The letter articulated a long list of demands regarding the recruitment and retention of people of color as faculty members and students and even called for the creation of

a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty, following a protocol for grievance and appeal to be spelled out in Rules and Procedures of the Faculty. Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the same set of rules and procedures.

In the Quillette article, Katz agreed with some of the letter’s action items but said that the above “scares me more than anything else: For colleagues to police one another’s research and publications in this way would be outrageous.” On its face, the call to investigate and discipline research and publications of other faculty is a complete refutation of academic freedom.

But of course, “cancel culture” doesn’t exist, right? So there’s no problem here, only the disenfranchised faculty of an Ivy League institution finally getting to join a conversation from which they’d been excluded. As Nesrine Malik puts it in The Guardian, “what is really unfolding here is a cohort of established influencers grappling with the fact they are losing control over how their work is received.”

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