About 40 University of Michigan students gathered for a protest outside of UM President Mark Schlissel’s house early this morning … essentially to bemoan the fact that he doesn’t thwart any and all instances of hate on campus.
The catalyst for this confab was two hateful emails sent out to engineering and computer science students using a professor’s email account.
The messages targeted black and Jewish students.
According to The Michigan Daily, students and faculty — citing past “hate” incidents in addition to the recent email flap — chanted “action, not emails!” until President Schlissel came out to talk to them.
“The most important thing you can do right now is stand together and call out this bullshit,” he told the crowd.
But apparently this wasn’t quite sufficient:
“Do you think that provokes the next terrible set of emails?” Schlissel said. “Do you think that means the bad guys won?”
Organizer Keanu Richardson, an Engineering senior, planned the demonstration outside Schlissel’s house to convey students “weren’t going to take it anymore,” but are also willing to work with officials on addressing the needs of students of color. …
However, protesters stated their desire for more collective action that could hold the University accountable as a whole rather than individualized plans within each college at the University and their dissatisfaction with their experiences.
“We want actual action,” another protester said in response to Schlissel’s remarks. “My parents were here 30 years ago fighting for the same things…and (now) I didn’t want my sister to come here because of the shit I deal with here.”
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At several points during the interaction between Schlissel and the crowd, he stated he sympathized with the protesters but could never understand the experiences that people of color face regarding racism. …
Richardson responded to Schlissel’s repeated question of “what can I do?” with a charge to listen to the students directly affected by racism.
“I would draw a parallelism with white guilt,” he said. “In an attempt to save a people or culture, you forget to include those people in on the conversation. We the students are here to ask him to include us … we know he’s doing something, but we just need to see what it is.”
Like Schlissel hasn’t always done this before when such ridiculous hate incidents transpire? And indeed — the school has rolled out one of the most comprehensive diversity plans (a $125 million commitment) of any American university, established “in part a [as] response to student activism.”
How exactly can Schlissel and other university officials prevent each and every attention-seeking Tom, Dick, and Harriet from doing something foolish and/or abhorrent?
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