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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/07/the-college-that-wants-to-ban-history.html
Students at Western Washington University have reached a turning point in their campus’s hxstory. (For one thing, they’re now spelling it with an ‘x’—more on that later.) Activists are demanding the creation of a new college dedicated to social justice activism, a student committee to police offensive speech, and culturally segregated living arrangements at the school, which is in Bellingham, up in the very northwest corner of the state.
WWU’s student-activist community—the Assembly for Power and Liberation—made their demands public earlier this week. The document begins by noting that the activists crashed a February 12 Board of Trustees meeting in order to demand “accountability for the violence enacted on this campus,” and were subsequently surprised that none of the trustees accepted an invitation to come to an assembly meeting to “take accountability.”
The most substantial of the activists’ demands is a call for a new college that would essentially train students to become social justice activists.
WWU must meet the needs of this new “College of Power and Liberation” by immediately hiring 10 faculty members—subject to the approval of student-activists. Finding the money to do all this is solely the responsibility of WWU’s administration, “whose accountability to students should be expressed through their fervent advocacy for students’ needs at both the local and state levels,” according to the activists, who want an extra $50,000 to throw a kick-off party for the new college. Another $45,000 will go toward paying students to do “de-colonial work on campus”
Activists have also demanded the creation of an Office for Social Transformation, which would employ 15 students—for the purposes of monitoring “racist, anti-black, transphobic, cissexist, misogynistic, ableist, homophobic, Islamophobic, and otherwise oppressive behavior on campus.” These students will be granted powers to discipline faculty members who commit microaggressions. Professors—even tenured professors—can and will be placed under investigation if they are accused of maintaining insufficiently safe spaces within their classrooms.
Students at Western Washington University have reached a turning point in their campus’s hxstory. (For one thing, they’re now spelling it with an ‘x’—more on that later.) Activists are demanding the creation of a new college dedicated to social justice activism, a student committee to police offensive speech, and culturally segregated living arrangements at the school, which is in Bellingham, up in the very northwest corner of the state.
WWU’s student-activist community—the Assembly for Power and Liberation—made their demands public earlier this week. The document begins by noting that the activists crashed a February 12 Board of Trustees meeting in order to demand “accountability for the violence enacted on this campus,” and were subsequently surprised that none of the trustees accepted an invitation to come to an assembly meeting to “take accountability.”
The most substantial of the activists’ demands is a call for a new college that would essentially train students to become social justice activists.
WWU must meet the needs of this new “College of Power and Liberation” by immediately hiring 10 faculty members—subject to the approval of student-activists. Finding the money to do all this is solely the responsibility of WWU’s administration, “whose accountability to students should be expressed through their fervent advocacy for students’ needs at both the local and state levels,” according to the activists, who want an extra $50,000 to throw a kick-off party for the new college. Another $45,000 will go toward paying students to do “de-colonial work on campus”
Activists have also demanded the creation of an Office for Social Transformation, which would employ 15 students—for the purposes of monitoring “racist, anti-black, transphobic, cissexist, misogynistic, ableist, homophobic, Islamophobic, and otherwise oppressive behavior on campus.” These students will be granted powers to discipline faculty members who commit microaggressions. Professors—even tenured professors—can and will be placed under investigation if they are accused of maintaining insufficiently safe spaces within their classrooms.
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