Foreign Students Flock to Canada – Leave US

With the threat of being accosted on any street corner or being assaulted by a Chumph racist bigot while minding their own business…Can you blame them?

Trump’s biggest fans? Canadian universities

Canadian universities are seeing a surge in applications from overseas students, with the country’s liberal, migrant-friendly image appearing to be an important attraction.

Students who might once have headed for the United States now seem to be reconsidering and seeing Canada as a North American alternative.

The University of Toronto, one of Canada’s top-ranked universities, has seen interest rising sharply, including a 57% increase in applications from India.

This interest has converted into acceptances, says the university – with an overall 20% increase in overseas students accepting places for the autumn.

Wilfrid Laurier University says it has had a 32% increase in overseas students and McMaster University has seen an annual rise of 33%.

This is a valuable market, with overseas students bringing in tuition fees and local spending power. A study last week suggested that overseas students were worth $36bn (£28bn) per year to the US economy.

Tolerant image

But Canadian universities are seizing an opportunity from the Trump administration in the US and the Brexit vote in the UK to present themselves as a more outward-looking alternative.

There are more than 350,000 overseas students already in Canada, with research from the Canadian Bureau for International Education suggesting that the image of a “tolerant and non-discriminatory society” is a major attraction.

Perception is a powerful force in this market and Canadian universities are contrasting their warmer welcome to international students with the tough messages on immigration being transmitted by the Trump administration.

The University of Montreal has set up its own travel fund for its international students who would once have attended conferences in the US, but now face difficulties getting into the country.

An Iranian student who says he spent two hours being “interrogated” at a US airport was among those who would be funded to go to conferences elsewhere.

International cities

Professor Ted Sargent, responsible for the University of Toronto’s international outreach, says the response of overseas students to such changes in the US has been to “go back to first principles”.

“Events in the US and the UK have reverberated around the world,” he says. “It makes people go back and think again.”

Canada can offer top-ranked universities, he says, but the country is also sending a “message about being open to the world”.

Prof Sargent says that half of the population of Toronto is non-Canadian born and that Canada’s strategy has been to “attract the brightest and the best” from around the world.

A spokeswoman for the University of Montreal says: “Of course, it is also difficult to ignore what is going on south of our border.

“The US political climate might indeed be one reason why more students are choosing to come to Montreal and Canada generally.”

The idea of an “open and welcoming city” has a strong appeal to students coming to Montreal, she says.

“They can have a North American study experience here, in a safe environment.”

Best student city

This year saw Montreal getting top place in the QS Best Student Cities rankings, replacing Paris which had been in first place for the four previous years.

Among the measures were Montreal’s access to employers, safety, pollution, desirability for student life and sense of tolerance.

Another advantage for this part of Canada is that it can offer courses in both English and French.

There is also a rising stream of US students heading to Canada.

Apart from any political considerations, those heading over the border will also be attracted by tuition fees, which can be cheaper for US students than studying at home, even at overseas student rates.

But the US university system remains a powerful magnet for overseas students, with numbers rising to more than a million students last year, with almost 330,000 from China alone.

This annual increase, up by about 7% in 2016, was valued as being worth another £3bn to the US economy.

 

Columbia Professor – Safer For Black Kids to Use Drugs Than Interact With Police

I think the Professor’s point here is that the common narrative utilized by Police of the “Drug crazed” perpetrator is just so much bullshit. In fact, many of the people the Police have violent interactions with suffer from Mental Illness, not crack overdose.

In the recent Keith Scott Murder by Cop, the Police tried to justify their actions with the victim smoking a blunt. Well…I went to college in the late sixties, and remember walking into more than one concert at an indoor pavilion where you could just about get a contact high from the thousands of folks lighting up. I certainly don’t recall white folks going crazy at the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young Concert, or the more diverse crowd at a WAR concert whipping out their guns and shooting at each other. Indeed, about the only thing that happened in those days smoking a joint was to get paranoid, get the munchies, and giggle a lot.

Smoking a joint ain’t Armed Bank Robbery.

Police are trained in this country to take absolute control of a situation (except when dealing with white folks). Unfortunately the  folks who train these Cops don’t do much to train them to de-escalate a situation…Or where use of force is appropriate. If your Police force is slamming people to the ground and locking them up for Jaywalking, or any of the thousands of minor Civil Violations typically handled by a ticket…

You have a PROBLEM. And that is exactly the problem we have in this country between Police and minorities. For every one of these Murders by Cop, there are tens of thousands of interactions by minorities  with Police which go off the rails in substantive ways.

So the breakdown in trust between the Police and the community comes to this – fear of calling the Police to handle an issue. You as a citizen don’t know whether you are going to get that “Good Cop”, who is helpful, deescalates the situation, and handles things appropriate to the severity of the situation – or the “Bad Cop” who rushes in with guns drawn because you have a dispute with your neighbor over his dog coming into your yard.

Ivy League professor: ‘I would much rather my own children interact with drugs than with the police’

Carl L. Hart was surprised when a student in one of his classes at Columbia University wrote an essay for The Washington Post about the effect of having him speak frankly about his past and the importance of having non-white faculty members.

Hart took the opportunity to respond with his thoughts on race and higher education, in the midst of the national debate over police violence. 

For the past few years, like academic semesters, the killing of black people by the police has been on a regular schedule.

The explanation script, always controlled by the police, is familiar and tired. The deceased person’s reputation is dragged through the mud. He had a gun or she was under the influence of some drug; therefore, deadly force was necessary.

Video footage almost always contradicts this official account. But it doesn’t seem to matter because the police are rarely held accountable in such cases.

As a result, there is community outrage that sometimes reaches the level of unrest. Authorities call for calm and peace — rather than justice — and then we are forced to have the same national conversation about race and diversity that we have had for more than 50 years. The only thing that changes is the names of the pundits paraded before the public.

As a professor, a black professor, I often think about the impact that this has on my students, especially the black students. What messages does it send to them? I suspect, with horror, it sends the same ones that I received when in their seats some 30 years ago: “Your life is worthless compared with a white person’s. They are superior to you by the mere fact that they are white in a white-controlled world.”

Faced with this wretched reality, every Monday and Wednesday morning, I stand before my Columbia University students honored to have the opportunity to present information that challenges society’s views about black people as well as the perceptions held about drugs, their effects and their role in crime.

I speak candidly about my past and who I am. In fact, “High Price,” my science memoir, is one of the required readings for the course. In it, I detail my imperfections and past drug use and sales. I also lay out a blueprint for how one can succeed as a scientist and academic in a world that despises one’s people.

I explain how for more than 25 years, I have studied the interactions between the brain, drugs and behavior, trying to understand how drugs influence the function of brain cells, how this and other social factors influence human behavior, and how the reverberations of morality regarding drug use are expressed in social policy.

And, as a part of my research, I have given thousands of doses of drugs, including crack cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine, to people. By the way, I have never seen a research participant become violent or aggressive while under the influence of any drug (at doses typically used recreationally), as police narratives frequently claim.

My research has taught me many important lessons, but perhaps none more important than this — drug effects, like semesters, are predictable; police interactions with black people are not. In encounters with police, too often the black person ends up dead. That is why I would much rather my own children interact with drugs than with the police.

I am certain that my white colleagues, when faced with an emergency situation, wouldn’t think twice about calling the police. This, however, may not be the case for their black and Latino students. These students may be faced with the dilemma of not calling for police assistance even when they are in need of help for fear that the police will make the situation worse, and may even kill them or their loved one.

We need our universities to comprise historically excluded faculty to represent these and other perspectives. For this reason, I served on Columbia’s Task Force on Diversity in Science and Engineering, working to increase the number of diverse faculty in the sciences.

Initially, I was excited to participate because I thought the goal was to increase the number of faculty from those groups historically excluded from the academy as a result of discrimination.

It turns out that the term “diversity” can be anything from black faculty to military veterans. Well, I am both, but have yet to be subjected to discrimination because I’m a veteran.

I now cringe whenever subjected to meetings or speeches about the importance of having a diverse campus community. I’m even more appalled when I hear some vacuous university administrator touting their school’s diversity accomplishments. Of the nearly 4,000 faculty members at Columbia, only about 4 percent are black. Yet, we have been honored for our diversity achievements.

When compared with similar institutions, our low number of black faculty looks impressive. But when you consider that black people make up 25 percent of the population of New York City, where Columbia is located, 4 percent seems meager. I recognize that New York City might not be the most appropriate comparison, but neither are other exclusive universities whose numbers of black faculty are abysmally low.

Teaching university students affords me the opportunity to demonstrate to young adults that they don’t have to be perfect to make contributions to their country.

This responsibility also requires me to impress upon my students that they must obtain the necessary critical-thinking skills to be informed and that they should be courageous, especially in the face of injustice.

If only more of our university and national leaders did the same, I might not have to look out into the sea of predominantly white faces and hold back tears as I think about the fact that Ramarley Graham and Michael Brown would have begun their junior and senior years, respectively, this semester.

 

Georgetown University Atones for Slave Sale

In the early 1800’s Georgetown College which is a Jesuit School ran into financial difficulties. To make up for the financial shortfall, the College sold off all their slaves, who had built the college.

Some of the descendants of those slaves who were sold off by the church, have tracked their ancestry back to that sale.

James Henry Hicks’ family, Rachael Hicks and her two sons Beverly Hicks (l) and Nance Hicks. Descendants of slaves sold by the University to slaveholders in Louisiana.

Georgetown University to give slave descendants priority in admission

Georgetown University will give preference in admissions to the descendants of slaves owned by the Maryland Jesuits as part of its effort to atone for profiting from the sale of enslaved people.

Georgetown president John DeGioia told news outlets that the university in Washington, D.C., will implement the admissions preferences.

He says Georgetown will need to identify and reach out to descendants of slaves and recruit them to the university.

On Thursday morning, a university committee released a report that also called on its leaders to offer a formal apology for the university’s participation in the slave trade.

The chair of the Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation, David Collins, S.J., says he hopes the university can take full responsibility for its slave benefactors. “As we join the Georgetown community we must understand that part of our history is this history of slaveholding and the slave trade,” he said. “And that opens our eyes to broader social issues that are still unhealed in our nation.

“History matters up to the present and into the future.”

In 1789, when the original Georgetown College was founded, Jesuit-owned and -operated plantations in Maryland (which helped fund the new institution) were worked with slave labor. Profits from the plantations were foreseen as a means to fund the new school.

In 1838, two priests who served as president of the university orchestrated the sale of 272 people to pay off the school’s debts. The slaves were sent from Maryland to plantations in Louisiana. The school received $115,000 in the sale, the equivalent of about $3.3 million today.

In response to the committee’s recommendations, President DeGioia today announced several steps that would be taken, including:

• Offering an apology for the university’s historical relationship with slavery;
• Renaming university buildings in honor of Isaac (an enslaved person mentioned in the documents of the 1838 sale) and Anne Marie Becraft (a free woman of color who founded a school for black girls, and later joined the Oblate Sisters of Providence in Baltimore);
• Establishing a public memorial to the enslaved;
• Creating a research institute on the legacy of slavery; and
• Engaging with descendants of enslaved people once owned by the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus, and offering them the same consideration given members of the Georgetown community in the admissions process.

Richard Cellini, an alumnus of Georgetown who has researched the slave sale, told “CBS This Morning” in July he estimates there are between 10,000 and 15,000 descendants of the 272 slaves sold living today.

This picture from the Virginia side of the Potomac River shows Georgetown University atop the hill left-center in 1861

 

You Too Can Attend Trump University!

Clinton new anti-Chump ad…

 

Trump University – “Straight up Fraud”

The New York Attorney General is going after the Drumph with both guns blazing. So far, the cases have been Civil, both in California and New York. With the strong statements by the NY AG, that may change over to criminal. Calling out the Judge in California was pure childish petulance.

What may indeed happen here, is that other Trump scams may also come under the legal microscope. Hid Vitamin supplement, and water business seem likely targets. If Trump wins the election, he may be the first President to start office…

From jail.

‘This is straight up fraud’: New York’s attorney general shreds Trump University on ‘Morning Joe’

The Trump campaign is doing its best to spin the embarrassing revelations that came out this week about Trump University, but New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman isn’t having any of it. Appearing on Morning Joe on Thursday, Schneiderman tore through any questions about whether Trump University was a legitimate enterprise or not by forcefully making the case that it was “straight up fraud.”

“It’s like selling people something you say is a Mercedes and it turns out to be a Volkswagen,” Schneiderman said. “And even if some people say, ‘Well actually, I kind of like the Volkswagen,’ it’s still fraud because it’s not a Mercedes. This was not a university.”

Schneiderman then went into detail about how Trump blatantly lied about Trump University in marketing videos aimed at prospective students.

“Trump’s role was really a the pitchman,” he said. “And we’ve got his videotapes, and we’ve got his sworn testimony which undercuts every statement in the videotapes. He said, ‘My hand-picked experts will teach you my personal secrets.’ He and the president of the university have already testified under oath he never met the instructors, they weren’t hand-picked. They weren’t experts — some of them came out of fast food and retail. And he had nothing to do with the supposed secrets that were taught because he had nothing to do with the curriculum.”

 

UNC Folds on “Bathroom Law”

Facing losing over $1 billion in Federal Research Grants…UNC President reverses course.

University Of North Carolina Won’t Enforce Anti-Trans Bathroom Bill

The UNC system president wrote in a court filing that she had “no intent” to enforce the new law.

The University of North Carolina system will not enforce a state law that mandates people use the bathroom that corresponds to the sex on their birth certificate, UNC System President Margaret Spellings told a federal court Friday.

“I have no intent to exercise my authority to promulgate any guidelines or regulations that require transgender students to use the restrooms consistent with their biological sex,” Spellings wrote in an affidavit filed as part of a motion to halt civil legal proceedings against the university system, The Associated Press reported.

Spellings has avoided giving her personal opinion on House Bill 2, also known as the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, which passed in March.

And though she sent out a memo in April advising campuses to follow the law, her memo hinted that she had no clue how to actually enforce it. UNC lawyers suggested the same thing in a court filing, writing that the system has not “changed any of its policies or practices regarding transgender students or employees” and that HB2 doesn’t provide any guidance on enforcement.

Multiple plaintiffs are taking the UNC system to court in response to HB2, saying it’s discriminatory. The law states that when it comes to multiple-occupancy bathrooms in government buildings or public schools and colleges, everyone must use the restroom corresponding with the sex indicated on their birth certificate. In other words, a person who was assigned female at birth and now identifies as a man would still have to use the women’s bathroom.

The law also removed legal anti-discrimination protection for LGBTQ people.

The UNC system is asking the court to postpone the civil case, pending the outcome of a separate case in Virginia involving a teen suing a county school board over a policy barring him from using the boys’ bathroom.

 

Donald Trump and that “Mexican” Judge

Usually a good idea to pick your fights. A 150 lb guy should probably stay away from smacking 300 lb NFL Linemen – don’t car if your name is Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee – guys who use railroad boxcars as free weights are folks to avoid physical confrontation with. The proverbial 300 lb Lineman in the Courts system is the Judge. Arguing a legal point is one thing – going after the Judge because of his race or ethnicity, as Trump has…

Can lead to painful consequences.

Wee-weenie types like Trump try and hide their male inadequacies with aggression. In the Drumph’s case that means lots of lawyers and litigation, because heaven forbid that 150 lb guy shows up on his doorstep. Trump’s shady, fraudulent business deals are now coming to light. Taking a swing at the Judge was a really dumb move.

An no, Chicken Drumph – there is no precedent for recusing a Judge due to race.

Judge acknowledges Donald Trump’s attacks, unseals files in Trump U suit

A federal judge blasted by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump Friday has taken note of the fact that Trump isn’t happy with the way the judge is handling lawsuits over alleged fraud by the Trump University real estate seminar program.

Just hours after Trump used a campaign speech at a San Diego convention center to unleash a remarkable verbal fusillade against U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the judge — who also happens to be based in the same Southern California city — acknowledged in a much more measured fashion the criticism Trump has aimed at the court.

“Defendant became the front-runner for the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential race, and has placed the integrity of these court proceedings at issue,” Curiel said in an order unsealing a series of internal Trump University documents that Trump’s lawyers asked be kept from the public.

The judge’s order didn’t make reference to Trump’s 12-minute tirade Friday afternoon in which the all-but-certain Republican nominee called Curiel a “hater” and again invoked his Latino heritage. However, the judge cited a series of news stories from earlier in the campaign, including an NBC story which noted Trump called Curiel “extremely unfair” and an Associated Press story titled, “Trump: Judge’s ethnicity matters in Trump University suit.”

“I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump, a hater. He’s a hater. His name is Gonzalo Curiel … I think Judge Curiel should be ashamed of himself,” Trump said at Friday’s rally, echoing many of the same points he made in speeches a few months ago. “I’m telling you, this court system, judges in this court system, federal court, they ought to look into Judge Curiel. Because what Judge Curiel is doing is a total disgrace, OK?”

Curiel said in his order Friday that Trump’s presidential campaign and his criticism of the court were reasons to overrule his objections to the release of so-called “Playbooks” describing Trump University’s operations. The judge also noted that one version was published by POLITICO in March. “The entire 2010 Playbook has been posted online by Politico,” Curiel wrote.

It’s unclear whether the judge knew of Trump’s latest volley of attacks when the judge issued the order Friday afternoon, but it seems possible. Curiously, the Republican candidate laid into the judge at about the same time the judge was holding a hearing less than a mile away on a motion by the Washington Post seeking unsealing of the Trump University-related files. The judge’s order was released a couple hours after the hearing.

Trump suggested Friday, as he has before, that he might move to recuse Curiel from the suits. However, the real estate mogul’s lawyers have never brought such a motion.

 

 

 

272 Slaves Were Sold To Keep Georgetown University Afloat in 1838

The Catholic Church held slaves in America (and perhaps elsewhere), and when the premiere Catholic College in the Americas got into financial trouble, the Jesuits organized the sale of 272 slaves to raise money to keep the School afloat. The Church also operated several plantations in southern Maryland to fund the School which used slave labor.

272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?

The human cargo was loaded on ships at a bustling wharf in the nation’s capital, destined for the plantations of the Deep South. Some slaves pleaded for rosaries as they were rounded up, praying for deliverance.

But on this day, in the fall of 1838, no one was spared: not the 2-month-old baby and her mother, not the field hands, not the shoemaker and not Cornelius Hawkins, who was about 13 years old when he was forced onboard.

Their panic and desperation would be mostly forgotten for more than a century. But this was no ordinary slave sale. The enslaved African-Americans had belonged to the nation’s most prominent Jesuit priests. And they were sold, along with scores of others, to help secure the future of the premier Catholic institution of higher learning at the time, known today asGeorgetown University.

Now, with racial protests roiling college campuses, an unusual collection of Georgetown professors, students, alumni and genealogists is trying to find out what happened to those 272 men, women and children. And they are confronting a particularly wrenching question: What, if anything, is owed to the descendants of slaves who were sold to help ensure the college’s survival?

More than a dozen universities — including Brown, Columbia, Harvard and the University of Virginia — have publicly recognized their ties to slavery and the slave trade. But the 1838 slave sale organized by the Jesuits, who founded and ran Georgetown, stands out for its sheer size, historians say.

At Georgetown, slavery and scholarship were inextricably linked. The college relied on Jesuit plantations in Maryland to help finance its operations, university officials say. (Slaves were often donated by prosperous parishioners.) And the 1838 sale — worth about $3.3 million in today’s dollars — was organized by two of Georgetown’s early presidents, both Jesuit priests.

Some of that money helped to pay off the debts of the struggling college.

“The university itself owes its existence to this history,” said Adam Rothman, a historian at Georgetown and a member of a university working group that is studying ways for the institution to acknowledge and try to make amends for its tangled roots in slavery.

Although the working group was established in August, it was student demonstrations at Georgetown in the fall that helped to galvanize alumni and gave new urgency to the administration’s efforts.

The students organized a protest and a sit-in, using the hashtag #GU272 for the slaves who were sold. In November, the university agreed to remove the names of the Rev. Thomas F. Mulledy and the Rev. William McSherry, the college presidents involved in the sale, from two campus buildings.

An alumnus, following the protest from afar, wondered if more needed to be done.

That alumnus, Richard J. Cellini, the chief executive of a technology company and a practicing Catholic, was troubled that neither the Jesuits nor university officials had tried to trace the lives of the enslaved African-Americans or compensate their progeny.

Mr. Cellini is an unlikely racial crusader. A white man, he admitted that he had never spent much time thinking about slavery or African-American history.

But he said he could not stop thinking about the slaves, whose names had been in Georgetown’s archives for decades…

Broken Promises

There are no surviving images of Cornelius, no letters or journals that offer a look into his last hours on a Jesuit plantation in Maryland.

He was not yet five feet tall when he sailed onboard the Katharine Jackson, one of several vessels that carried the slaves to the port of New Orleans.

Photo

The ship manifest of the Katharine Jackson, available in full at the Georgetown Slavery archive, listed the name, sex, age and height of each slave transported to New Orleans in the fall of 1838. It showed that the cargo included dozens of children, among them infants as young as 2 months old…

.Read The Rest Here…

 

Southern U’s Cover of Adele’s Hello

Men…Try and ignore the eye candy on this one…The Southern University Band is cooking!

The Human Jukebox, performed a passionate rendition of “Hello” at the Bayou Classic Battle of the Bands on the Friday after Thanksgiving. With Southern – it is all about the music, and Grambling is no slouch either..

Here is the full competition –

 

Black Contribution to Gun Threats on Campus

As MLK said, Hate fosters Hate…

University Of Chicago Shooting Threat A Response To Laquan McDonald Video

Jabari R. Dean, 21, of Chicago, threatened to kill 16 white male students or staff at the school.

Federal authorities said an online threat that led the University of Chicago to cancel classes Monday targeted whites and was motivated by the police shooting of a black teenager, video of which was released last week and sparked protests.

Jabari R. Dean, 21, of Chicago, threatened to kill 16 white male students or staff at the school on Chicago’s South Side, according to the criminal complaint.

Dean, who is black, was arrested Monday morning. He did not enter a plea later in the day on a charge of transmitting a threat in interstate commerce in court. Dean is a freshman studying electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and wore a red sweat shirt emblazoned with the name of that school at the hearing.

The threat was posted Saturday, just days after the city released a video of Officer Jason Van Dyke, who is white, shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was black, 16 times.

Van Dyke is charged with first-degree murder, and his bond was set for $1.5 million on Monday. That means Van Dyke needs to pay $150,000 to be released, and Van Dyke’s attorney said he was hopeful his client could be released in the “very near future.”

Authorities said Dean posted online from a phone that he would “execute approximately … 16 white male students and or staff, which is the same number of time (sic) McDonald was killed” and “will die killing any number of white policemen that I can in the process.”

The criminal complaint, released by the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago, said someone tipped the FBI on Sunday to a threat that was posted on a social media website. The FBI was unable to find the threat online, and was provided a screenshot by the person who reported the threat.

That led them to Dean, who admitted to FBI agents that he posted the threat and took it down shortly after posting it, the complaint said. Despite the threat mentioning three guns, a prosecutor said Monday that Dean did not appear to pose a threat. The complaint did not say whether Dean possessed any weapons.

The University of Chicago, where President Barack Obama taught law, first alerted students and staff Sunday night about a threat that mentioned the quad, a popular gathering place, and 10 a.m. Monday.

The University of Chicago statement urged faculty, students and non-essential staff to stay away from the Hyde Park campus through midnight Monday and told students in college housing to stay indoors. The cancellations of classes and activities affected more than 30,000 people, though the University of Chicago Medical Center was open to patients.

Not sure what Mr Dean thought he was accomplishing in threatening an attack on 16 innocent fellow students. Seems to me his anger and targets (not to mention violent response) are misplaced – anger at the innocent symptom of the problem instead of it’s cause and support structure.

Hate also makes you stupid.

 

“White Student Union” Attacks Black Student Union at U of Illinois

Proving once again, racism isn’t just in the imagination of black students…

‘White Student Union’ challenges Black Lives Matter at University of Illinois

A Facebook page ostensibly created for an audience at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign called “Illini White Students Union” has drawn fire after it characterized the national Black Lives Matter movement as “terrorism.”

Created Wednesday after a protest sympathetic to Black Lives Matter, the page declared itself “for white students of University of Illinois to be able to form a community and discuss our own issues as well as be able to organize against the terrorism we have been facing from Black Lives Matter activists on campus,” as the Daily Illini reported.

The page did not last long in its original incarnation, but was taken down after three hours. It has since been revived here.

“We recognize the right to free speech, and we encourage you to exercise that right when you see examples of racism, discrimination or intimidation on our campus,” Interim Chancellor Barbara Wilson, who called the page “extremely disturbing,” wrote in a message Thursday to the student body.

In an anonymous message to the News-Gazette, the page’s administrator discussed Black Lives Matter.

“We feel they disrupt student daily life and activity far too much,” the message read, saying that movement “marginalizes” white students. “… We are in the United States and not Africa and we don’t desire to have an African flag on campus.”

The current page is bare bones — just a few links to news stories about the controversy with an image of a statue on campus. The “about” section dedicated the page to “White Pride and a safe place for White students,” according to the News-Gazette, though that page appeared to have changed.

A recent post was a clip from the 1998 film “American History X,” in which Edward Norton plays a white supremacist. In the clip, billed as “revelant to all Ferguson news,” Norton’s character denounces the 1992 riots in Los Angeles.

“It’s a bunch of people grabbing any excuse they can find to go and loot a store, nothing more,” Norton says. “… Lincoln freed the slaves what, like, 130 years ago. How long does it take you to get your act together?”

While this was certainly eyebrow-raising, the original page was even more provocative.

“Feel free to send in pictures you take of any black protestors on the quad so we know who anti-whites are,” one message read, as FOX 55 reported….Read the Rest Here…

 

 

Jay Leno Comments on Mizzou

The student protest at Mizzou has moved some folks, and changed some minds. Here, Jay Leno lays out the fact that the students indeed had cause for their actions…

Jay Leno tells Bill Maher: Mizzou protesters were right — school president was ‘clueless’

Real Time host Bill Maher battled panelists Jay Leno, Michael Steele and Dylan Ratigan on Friday when he complained about the recent anti-racism protests at Yale University and the University of Missouri.

Maher recounted the discussion at Yale that was touched off by a university email advising students not to use Halloween costumes based on cultural appropriation or stereotypes, which led to a faculty member, Erika Christakis, questioning whether the school was stifling students’ right to be “a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive.”

That, in turn, led to hundreds of students signing an open letter criticizing Christakis.

“Who raised these little monsters?” Maher said of the letter. Leno countered by saying that the pendulum in public discourse had swung in the other direction from the days when virtually any sort of slur would go unchecked.

“You could call a government operation ‘Wetback,’ and no one said anything about it,” the former Tonight Show host said. “Now the pendulum swung back, so now the other side gets a taste of what it’s like. Will it come back to the center? I believe it will.”

“That’s spreading — it’s not just Yale,” Maher insisted.

The host also expressed sympathy with protesters at Missouri, but questioned whether prompting the resignation of president Tim Wolfe was beneficial to their cause.

“Do we purge even clueless people from their job now?” he asked. “Is that where we are with the battle against racism?”

“I say yes,” Leno responded. “You know why? Because if you’re president of the university, you shouldn’t be clueless. When I saw the faces of those African-American young kids when they had won, they looked like Julian Bond in 1965. They looked like all the black students that protested when I was in college that did the sit-ins that didn’t think they would get whatever it was [that they wanted]. It’s just a different version of that. I applaud them. They looked like they won something. One of those people could be a senator.”

Ratigan concurred with Leno, saying that the protests were forcing conversations about racism “to permeate deeper into the system.”

“You have all this structural racism that we all know about and we talk about it, but it doesn’t get talked about as much as it should and it doesn’t get dealt with,” he said.

Maher then scoffed at the protesters’ efforts to set up a “media-free zone” at one point.

“They characterize themselves as the protesters in Tiananmen Square, but sometimes they look like the Chinese Army,” Maher protested. “Their right to never be offended does not supersede the First Amendment.”

“However irrational the response may be, the irrational response pales in comparison to the structural racism that still exists,” Ratigan shot back.

Steele also argued that the conditions that spurred the protests had not just developed over hours or days, but at least several months.

“This even goes back beyond a few months — it goes back over a period of time that these students have had to live in this environment where they’ve had to deal with this by themselves,” he said. “And after a while, enough’s enough. And cluelessness is no longer an excuse.”

 

Mizzou President Resigns Under Pressure from Students and Staff

Results!

University of Missouri president resigns over criticism of his handling of racial incidents

The president of the University of Missouri resigned Monday amid escalating protests over racist incidents on campus and how he had responded to students’ concerns.

Tim Wolfe announced Monday morning at a special meeting called by the Board of Curators, the university system’s governing body, that he would step down immediately.

Tensions were high on campus Monday — with a student on a hunger strike, others camped out in solidarity, faculty members canceling classes and members of the football team threatening to boycott the rest of the season. In the morning, the MU undergraduate student government association formally called for the removal of the university’s president….Read the Rest Here…

 

 

Faculty and Staff to Join Mizzou Black Students Walkout

Unable/unwilling to take a stand, the University President is now facing not only action by the students and athletes – but the Athletic and coaching staff…And now the Faculty and support staff. There is an ongoing pattern of on-campus incidents which have brought things to a boil.

Mizzou Football Team’s Revolt Against President Grows

Joining student activists, the team refuses to play until Timothy Wolfe steps down after a tepid response to attacks on blacks. Now faculty are set to join them.

There was no football practice at the University of Missouri on Sunday, but the school’s training grounds were far from empty.

Mizzou’s black players had announced a strike the day before—joining scores of student activists demanding the ouster of university president Timothy Wolfe over his alleged failure to stem a wave of racism at the predominantly white school. Of the 35,000 students at Mizzou, 77 percent are white and 7 percent are black, school stats show, while 58 of the football team’s 84 scholarship football players are black.

Instead of putting on helmets, the team posed for a group photo, arm in arm, inside an athletics facility.

“The Mizzou Family stands as one,” head coach Gary Pinkel tweeted Sunday, just after the squad’s strike made national news. “We are united. We are behind our players.”

Faculty staff announced a few hours later that they would also stage a walk out in support of the football team.

Mizzou players have vowed not to play until Wolfe, who has been the school’s president since 2012, is removed…

The gambit comes amid months of simmering racial tensions at the Columbia, Missouri, campus. Minority students say they’ve been targeted with continuing slurs and harassment—and that the response from the predominantly white university has been tepid.

Last month, a swastika scribbled in human feces was found in the restroom of Gateway Hall, a dorm offering gender-neutral suites and bathrooms that is supposed to be a “‘gateway’ for the future of inclusive living,’” the Residence Halls Association president said….

The school’s racial strife made national headlines in September, when student body president Payton Head’s response to a racist attack went viral.

“Last night as I walking through campus, some guys riding on the back of a pickup truck decided that it would be okay to continuously scream NIGGER at me,” Head wrote on Sept. 12. “I really just want to know why my simple existence is such a threat to society. For those of you who wonder why I’m always talking about the importance of inclusion and respect, it’s because I’ve experienced moments like this multiple times at THIS university, making me not feel included here.

“Many of you are so privileged that you’ll never know what it feels like to be a hijab-wearing Muslim woman and be called a terrorist or a towel head,” Head continued. “You don’t have to think about being transgender and worrying about finding a restroom where you can go and not be targeted for violence…

“If you see violence like this and don’t say anything, you, yes YOU, are a part of the problem,” he said.

The shocking, hateful episodes on campus didn’t end there.

On Oct. 5, an inebriated white male student allegedly mounted the stage of a Legion of Black Collegians homecoming royalty court rehearsal and began spouting the N-word. The student was “moved from campus,” the Columbia Tribune reported.

Black student activists also say they faced harassment on Oct. 10, when they peacefully blocked the homecoming parade. They surrounded Wolfe’s car, but he refused to speak with them. Instead, the protesters claim, Wolfe’s vehicle hit one of their members.

Last week Friday, two female students said a drunken white man hurled a racial slur at them on a campus walkway. As a group of “four young Caucasian men” passed the women, one shouted, “You’re a n—-r!”

“We walk around this campus knowing that on any given day, there will be another racial issue,” sophomore Alexis Ditaway tweeted of the incident. “We go to classes with our white peers knowing that not only will they never understand our struggles, but many of them will refuse to try. We go to a university where the only place many of us feel comfortable is in a Black Studies class.”…

 

 

 

Trouble at Mizzou – Black Football Player Strike Over Racist Attacks

This is ridiculous in this day and age. More disturbing is the School Administration’s failure to act.

Black Mizzou players say they’ll strike until president Tim Wolfe resigns

A group of black players on the Missouri football team says it will stop participating in football activities until university system president Tim Wolfe resigns.

The announcement came via Twitter on Saturday night in a post by Missouri’sLegion of Black Collegians. It comes after several recent racial incidents on Missouri’s campus, and with Wolfe under fire for how he has handled them.

The tweet included a photograph of 32 black men, including starting running back Russell Hansbrough.

“The athletes of color on the University of Missouri football team truly believe ‘Injustice Anywhere is a threat to Justice Everywhere,'” the tweet read. “We will no longer participate in any football related activities until President Tim Wolfe resigns or is removed due to his negligence toward marginalized students’ experiences. WE ARE UNITED!!!!!”

Racial tension has been brewing at Missouri’s campus in Columbia since September, when Payton Head, the Missouri Students Association president and an African-American, said he was racially abused while walking. Students protested when it took nearly a week for the university chancellor to address the incident.

Then in October, a student yelled the N-word at members of the Legion of Black Collegians in a campus plaza while they were rehearsing for a play. And later that month, someone smeared a swastika with their own feces on a bathroom wall in a new residence hall.

The university downplayed the incident, and more backlash toward administrators ensued — with Wolfe enduring the most. Wolfe met with Butler and student groups on Friday to discuss the university’s handling of racial harassment cases.

Jonathan Butler, a Missouri grad student, began a hunger strike against Wolfe on Monday, saying Wolfe has failed to respond to student concerns. A change.org petition to remove Wolfe from office has over 2,000 supporters.

Now, the Tigers football team is involved.

According to the Columbia Daily Tribune, 42 of the 64 players on Missouri’s current depth chart are African-American. Several took to social media on Saturday night to address the protest, with one, cornerback John Gibson, saying: “(The decision) has nothing to do with our coaches. Our coaches are 100% behind us. Including the white ones.”