The College Fix

Bowdoin College’s punishment of students who dressed up as pilgrims and American Indians at an off-campus pre-Thanksgiving soiree – calling it “cultural appropriation” – did not sit well with a civil rights group.

In an email shared with The College Fix, Michael Meyers, executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, wrote to Bowdoin Dean of Students Tim Foster:

One is supposed to know, in advance, according to your missives, that off-campus parties that would offend your sensibilities and/ or those of some phantom, typical or actual Bowdoin grievant — especially around Thanksgiving time, and who dress in inappropriate, culturally insensitive costumes — would violate the standards and conduct code of Bowdoin. To that assertion, and expectation, I must say—from the perspective of civil rights, due process, and free speech and association, that your position is absurd—and your threat to punish “offensive” students outrageous and idiotic.

Meyers, who is black, said he was mistreated as a student by his own college for “being disrespectful of black students’ demands for group identity and black separatism”:

I suppose if I mocked such separatism on the Bowdoin campus — as I criticized my fellow black students (whom the college had backed) as inauthentic — as race hustlers — Bowdoin officials —possibly even you — would bring me up on charges of cultural insensitivity. I might even be threatened with “discipline” for having an off-campus party at which my friends dressed up as Black Panthers or as African chiefs, and who put atop our heads handkerchiefs or head dress or crowns or otherwise dressed in African garb such as dashikis – to make the point that blacks who paraded around as black Mau Maus were being ridiculous in their emulating so-called black African culture.

Meyers notes that the “very observation of Thanksgiving as an occasion” is offensive to some:

Who gave you the right to be the arbiter of good taste? To censor ideas? Who gave you the right to punish differences of viewpoint? Who appointed you as the arbiter of acceptable and unacceptable dress at an off-campus party, to which you weren’t either a participant or an invitee?

Meyers asks Bowdoin for some basic answers:

Was there a complaint about the off-campus party brought to any entity at Bowdoin against any student there? Or are you the complainant? Is it fair or proper procedure for the college’s dean of students to prefer charges against “offensive” students even as he [you] condemns the accused and predetermines their discipline? What kind of due process other than a kangaroo procedure is that? You have defined the nature of the offense, and you have already decreed the students guilty of offending and breaking the code of conduct.

Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter

IMAGE: Mecha Northwestern/Facebook