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White Nationalists, Coming To Your Local College Campus

White Nationalists, Coming To Your Local College Campus

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

In early 2017, Donald Trump took to his medium of choice to simultaneously defend alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and admonish those who had protested his appearance at a California campus.

“If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view – NO FEDERAL FUNDS?” Trump wrote in a pre-dawn tweet nearly a year ago to the day.

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s threat was empty, since presidents can’t single-handedly cut off federal loans to educational institutions. But more important than the substance of his tweet was its subtext: in the fray between the racist alt-right and its opponents, the president was stating his unequivocal support for the racists. Months later, Trump would restate his position when he referred to a group of white nationalists and neo-Nazis as “very fine people.”

There have always been racists in this country—the U.S. was founded on and prospered from genocide and slavery—but this president’s open support has given extremists a bold new confidence. Trump might be happy to know that the white supremacists he publicly sympathizes with have stepped up their recruitment efforts on campuses all around America.

Over the course of a year, there has been an exponential increase in incidents of “white supremacist propaganda—flyers, stickers, banners, and posters—appearing on college and university campuses,” according to a new study from the Anti-Defamation League. Researchers note that during the fall semester of 2016, there were 41 reports of these incidents on campuses around the country. One year later, that figure increased by more than 3.5 times to 147 incidents. Since September 2016, the ADL has tracked 346 examples of white racist propaganda on “216 college campuses, from Ivy League schools to local community colleges.” In 2018 alone, there have already been 15 reports.

The ADL stresses that these incidents have happened throughout the U.S., “in 44 states and the District of Columbia.” White supremacist organization American Vanguard papered the UT Austin campus in early 2016, putting up flyers urging students to “imagine a Muslim-free America.” At Central Michigan University last Valentine’s Day, students received an anti-Semitic card featuring an image of Adolf Hitler and the words “my love 4 u burns like 6,000 jews.” Posters were found on both the George Washington University and University of Maryland campuses exhorting white students to “report any and all illegal aliens” because “America is a white nation.” Those incidents, based on ADL’s count, are just the teeniest fraction of what’s happening on schools from coast to coast.

The groups spreading hate at American colleges belong to the longstanding tradition of U.S. white terrorist groups using paraphernalia both to make their presence known to potential new members and to intimidate people of color and other targeted groups. Jonathan A. Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, highlighted these goals last March as he spoke about the rise in white racist college recruitment efforts in the New York Times.

“Flyers allow them to not only recruit but get public attention. It’s not only part of the way they can identify sympathizers but terrorize marginalized communities,” Greenblatt stated. “Social media allows them to go to very targeted audiences in specific ways. Flyers starting to show up saying that any one of these organizations is here and present will not only raise eyebrows but I think really heighten concerns among organizations of students and that’s what they want.”

With the ascent of Trump, who revealed his own racist attitudes as both a candidate and president, alt-right activists have made colleges a centerpiece of their recruitment strategies. Figures such as Richard Spencer (one of the giggling neo-Nazis seig heiling in this video) have rushed to college campuses under the guise of defending free speech. Putting colleges on the defensive for not showing the proper enthusiasm while letting fascists take the lectern is a neat trick, and it’s worked incredibly well. Many universities have bowed to alt-right pressure and allowed figures like Yiannopoulos, who planned to publicly announce the names of undocumented UC Berkeley students, to appear (the talk was later canceled). The result is that students are left to raise their voices against the speakers, and protests can erupt beyond expectations. Never mind the hundreds of thousands of dollars schools have had to shell out for the costs of hosting these vainglorious extremists and quelling the scenes they provoke.

Numerous white racists have been vocal about their goal of increasing the number of students in their ranks. “We will not rest until alt-right ideas are represented on campuses nationwide,” read a 2017 tweet from the founder of white supremacist group Identity Evropa, Nathan Damigo, whose Italian surname would have kept him out of any “white” power group in the early part of the last century.

“People in college are at this point in their lives where they are actually open to alternative perspectives, for better and for worse,” Richard Spencer told Mother Jones in 2016. “I think you do need to get them while they are young. I think rewiring the neurons of someone over 50 is effectively impossible.”

“It’s striking a blow directly at the heart of our foes,” Matthew Heimbach, a vocal white supremacist who physically attacked a black girl at a Trump rally in 2016, told the Washington Post. “It lets them know that there are people that are radically opposed to them, that aren’t afraid of them, that will challenge them. It shakes their thought that they’ve got the campus environment locked down and lets them know that people who oppose them go to their school or are a part of their local community.”

ADL head Greenblatt notes that we find ourselves in a “political environment where white supremacists have felt more welcome than any time in recent memory.” He suggests colleges find ways to highlight the fact that racist propaganda is a fringe view that has no rightful place on campus or in society at large.

“While campuses must respect and protect free speech, administrators must also address the need to counter hate groups’ messages and show these bigoted beliefs belong in the darkest shadows,” Greenblatt said in a statement, “not in our bright halls of learning.”

Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.

College Students Find New Power In Campus Protests

College Students Find New Power In Campus Protests

By Thomas Curwen, Jason Song and Larry Gordon, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

If the University of Missouri was the spark, then the fire didn’t take long to spread.

Since the resignation of its president and chancellor Nov. 10, protesters have organized at more than 100 colleges and universities nationwide. Social media sites have lighted up with voices of dissent, and what began as a grievance has evolved into a movement.

Inspired by the marches in Ferguson, Mo., and Black Lives Matter, students are taking to social media to question the institutions they once approached for answers.

Calling for racial and social reforms on their campuses, they are borrowing tactics of the past — hunger strikes, sit-ins and lists of demands — and have found a collective voice to address their frustrations, hurt and rage.

Their actions seem to have hit the mark.

Last week, the dean of students at Claremont McKenna College left the university after students protested her comments to a Latina student with the offer to work for those who “don’t fit our CMC mold.”

Tuesday night, Jonathan Veitch, the president of Occidental College, said he and other administrators were open to considering a list of 14 reforms, including the creation of a black studies major and more diversity training, that student protesters had drawn up.

Students at the University of Southern California have similarly proposed a campuswide action plan, which includes the appointment of a top administrator to promote diversity, equity and inclusion.

Nationwide, complaints of racism and microaggression are feeding Facebook pages and websites at Harvard, Brown, Columbia and Willamette universities, as well as at Oberlin, Dartmouth and Swarthmore colleges.

Protesters at Ithaca College staged a walkout to demand the president’s resignation, and Peter Salovey, president of Yale University, announced a number of steps, including the appointment of a deputy dean of diversity, to work toward “a better, more diverse, and more inclusive Yale.”

For decades, students have helped drive social change in America, if not the world. Campuses, said University of California President Janet Napolitano, have “historically been places where social issues in the United States are raised and where many voices are heard.”

Over the decades, student protests have shifted attitudes in the country on civil rights and the Vietnam War, nuclear proliferation and apartheid, and some of today’s actions are borrowing from tactics of the past.

Although some of the strategies may seem familiar, it is the speed and the urgency of today’s protests that are different.

“What is unique about these issues is how social media has changed the way protests take place on college campuses,” said Tyrone Howard, associate dean of equity, diversity and inclusion at the University of California, Los Angeles. “A protest goes viral in no time flat. With Instagram and Twitter, you’re in an immediate news cycle. This was not how it was 20 or 30 years ago.”

Howard also believes that the effectiveness of the actions at the University of Missouri has encouraged students on other campuses to raise their voices.

“A president stepping down is a huge step,” he said. “Students elsewhere have to wonder, ‘Wow, if that can happen there, why can’t we bring out our issues to the forefront as well?'”

Shaun R. Harper, executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education, agrees. The resignation of two top Missouri administrators, Harper said, showed students and athletes around the country that they have power they may not have realized before.

The protests show “we’re all together and we have the power to make the change we deserve,” said Lindsay Opoku-Acheampong, a senior studying biology at Occidental.

“It’s affirming,” said Dalin Celamy, also a senior at the college. “It lets us know we’re not crazy; it’s happening to people who are just like you all over the country.”

Celamy, along with other students, not only watched the unfolding protests across the country, but also looked to earlier protests, including an occupation of an administrative building at Occidental in 1968.

Echoes of the 1960s in today’s actions are clear, said Robert Cohen, a history professor at New York University and author of “Freedom’s Orator,” a biography of Mario Savio, who led the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s.

“The tactical dynamism of these nonviolent protests and the public criticism of them are in important ways reminiscent of the 1960s,” Cohen said. “Today’s protests, like those in the ’60s, are memorable because they have been effective in pushing for change and sparking dialogue as well as polarization.”

Although the targets of these protests are the blatant and subtle forms of racism and inequity that affect the students’ lives, the message of the protests resonates with the recent incidents of intolerance and racial inequity on the streets of America.

There is a reason for this, Howard said.

Campuses are microcosms of society, he said, and are often comparable in terms of representation and opportunity. “So there is a similar fight for more representation, acceptance and inclusion.”

The dynamic can create a complicated and sensitive social order for students of color to negotiate.

“Latino and African American students are often under the belief if they leave their community and go to colleges, that it will be better,” Howard said. “They believe it will be an upgrade over the challenges that they saw in underserved and understaffed schools. But if the colleges and universities are the same as those schools, then there is disappointment and frustration.”
In addition, Howard said, when these students leave their community to go to a university, they often feel conflicted.

“So when injustice comes up,” he said, “they are quick to respond because it is what they saw in their community. On some level, it is their chance to let their parents and peers know that they have not forgotten the struggle in the community.”

On campuses and off, Harper, of the University of Pennsylvania center, finds a rising sense of impatience among African Americans about social change. “As a black person, I think black people are just fed up. It’s time out for ignoring these issues,” he said.

While protests in the 1960s helped create specific safeguards for universities today, such as Title IX, guaranteeing equal access for all students to any educational program or activity receiving federal financial assistance, a gap has widened over the years between students and administrators over perceptions of bias.

Institutions often valued for their support of free speech find themselves wrestling with the prospect of limiting free speech, but to focus on what is or isn’t politically correct avoids the more important issue, Cohen said: whether campuses are diverse enough or how to reduce racism.

Occidental student Raihana Haynes-Venerable has heard criticism that modern students are too sensitive, but she argues that subtle forms of discrimination still have a profound effect.
She pointed to women making less than men and fewer minorities getting jobs as examples.

“This is the new form of racism,” she said.

Photo: Students at Occidental College in Los Angeles spend their second day occupying the Walter G. Coons Administrative Center in protest over the administration’s handling of complaints about lack of diversity and discrimination on November 17, 2015. Occidental College students joined with the Black Student Alliance to protest a lack of diversity and said they will occupy the building until Friday, Nov. 20. (Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

How A Little-Known Education Office Has Forced Far-Reaching Changes To Campus Sex Assault Probes

How A Little-Known Education Office Has Forced Far-Reaching Changes To Campus Sex Assault Probes

By David G. Savage and Timothy M. Phelps, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — For the last four years, a little-known civil rights office in the U.S. Department of Education has forced far-reaching changes in how the nation’s colleges and universities police, prosecute and punish sexual assaults on campus.

With a strong mandate from President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, the office’s lawyers have redefined campus sexual assault as a federal civil rights issue, changed the standard by which allegations must be judged and publicized the names of a growing number of schools under investigation for allegedly failing to respond properly to complaints of sexual misconduct.

“This is the first administration to call sexual violence a civil rights issue,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, a former ACLU lawyer in Los Angeles who, as assistant secretary of Education, heads the Office for Civil Rights and has brought the style of an aggressive litigator to the once-staid education post.

“We don’t treat rape and sexual assault as seriously as we should,” she said, citing surveys that found 1 in 5 women say they were victims of sexual assault or unwanted sexual contact in college. There is “a need to push the country forward.”

Members of Congress and activists who fight unwanted sexual incidents on campus have praised the effort. College administrators grudgingly admit that the ratcheting up of pressure has changed a status quo in which some schools allowed perpetrators to go unpunished while failing to provide safety or support for victims.

But what some faculty, administrators and judges call an unyielding and one-sided approach by the government has provoked a backlash. Two weeks ago, a judge in San Diego rebuked the University of California campus there for trampling the rights of an accused student.

“Some schools see OCR as a bully with enforcement powers,” said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president at the American Council on Education, the lobby group for higher education.

“Universities are desperately trying to do the right thing, but these cases can be really difficult to resolve fairly. Often, you have two conflicting stories, no evidence, no witnesses, and it’s all combined with substance abuse.”

University officials, many of whom will speak about the subject only on condition of anonymity, complain of heavy-handed pressure from Washington and a growing bureaucracy.

Janet Napolitano, president of the University of California and a former prosecutor and secretary of homeland security, warned in an article in the Yale Law & Policy Review published online this month that “a cottage industry is being created” on campuses dedicated to handling tasks that fall outside the expertise of colleges and universities.

“Rather than pushing institutions to become surrogates for the criminal justice system,” she said, policymakers should ask if “more work should be done to improve that system’s handling and prosecution of sexual assault cases.”

Under pressure from the Office for Civil Rights, campuses are rushing to set up a parallel legal system to investigate and rule upon murky encounters that often involve inebriated students. They must decide within 60 days whether it is “more likely than not” that an alleged perpetrator was guilty. And they make those decisions without many of the legal protections associated with a criminal trial.

The new procedures vary from school to school, but according to Harvard Law School professor Janet Halley and other critics, many do not allow the accused to know details of accusations against them, to question accusers, or to have lawyers participate in hearings. Many also allow only limited appeals of rulings by a campus administrator or outside expert.

The punishments can be an expulsion and a permanent notation on a student’s transcript, potentially life-altering penalties.

Critics call those moves dangerous procedural short circuits that have resulted in serious injustice.

“It’s tragic what the federal government has done,” said Elizabeth Bartholet, a civil rights activist and professor at Harvard Law School. “They are creating a backlash against the very cause they are fighting for.”

Bartholet and 27 other members of the Harvard law faculty objected publicly in October to a new university policy on sexual harassment and violence, adopted in the face of an investigation by the Office for Civil Rights.

But Lhamon’s tough approach has won strong support, driven by accounts of mistreatment from assault survivors such as Dana Bolger, who graduated from Amherst College last year and co-founded a group to advocate for victims.

“On my campus alone, students who experienced sexual or dating violence were discouraged from reporting, denied counseling and academic accommodations, and pressured to take time off,” Bolger said last month at a Senate committee hearing. “When I reported abuse to my school, I was told I should drop out, go home and take care of myself, and return when my rapist graduated.”

Lhamon and her colleagues say campuses need to quickly investigate complaints of sexual violence and reach a “prompt and equitable resolution,” regardless of whether a crime has been reported to police. A student should not have to attend class or live in a college dormitory with a person who assaulted him or her during the often-lengthy period that a criminal investigation would take, they say.

Law professors at several universities have objected to the department’s insistence that campus officials judge sexual-assault complaints based on the “preponderance of the evidence,” a legal standard that’s much easier to meet than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” employed in criminal cases.

Critics say that in many cases, particularly those in which both parties were drunk and there were no other witnesses, schools are being pressured to reach a conclusion where it is impossible to know the truth with any certainty.

“When the case is ambiguous, when the memories are clouded by alcohol consumption or time, we shouldn’t be punishing people,” said Halley, a self-described feminist once responsible for investigating such accusations at Stanford University.

“I’m afraid that’s what we are doing, we are over-correcting,” Halley said. “The procedures that are being adopted are taking us back to pre-Magna Carta, pre-due-process procedures.”

The Education Department’s authority to push for big changes in the way colleges and universities handle sexual assaults stems from Title IX of the federal education law, an act best known for spurring a revolution in women’s sports. The law says that colleges and universities that receive federal money — as nearly all of them do — cannot discriminate “on the basis of sex.”

In 2011, the civil rights office sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to college officials telling them that “acts of sexual violence” are sex discrimination “prohibited by Title IX.”

The number of colleges and universities under investigation for their handling of sexual assault complaints has grown steadily, reaching 129 as of this month, double the number from last year.

They include many of California’s most prominent universities, including UCLA, USC, UC Berkeley, UC Davis and Stanford. Chapman University in Orange County was recently added to the list. Also on the list are Harvard, Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago and many top state universities.

Education Department officials can threaten these universities with the loss of billions of dollars in federal funds, a powerful, although rarely used, weapon.

“All the universities are being stampeded to go along. They’re afraid. There is a lot of money on the line, and they fear being investigated,” said University of Pennsylvania law professor Stephanos Bibas. He was one of 16 Penn law professors who signed a letter criticizing the civil rights office for having exerted “improper pressure upon universities to adopt procedures that do not afford fundamental fairness.”

Lhamon, however, told the Senate panel that “voluntary compliance” is working.

“Our enforcement has consistently resulted in institutions agreeing to take the steps necessary to come into compliance,” she said, “and ensure that students can learn in safe, nondiscriminatory environments.”

Photo: UCLA, whose library is pictured, is one of the many schools that are under investigation for how they handled sexual assault claims by students. CampusGrotto via Flickr