Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Dartmouth Students Threaten ‘Physical Action’ If School Doesn't Respond to Over 100 Demands

Dartmouth Students Threaten ‘Physical Action’ If School Doesn't Respond to Over 100 Demands | National Review Online
An unknown number of anonymous Dartmouth students are threatening the Big Green with “physical action” if the administration does not respond to list of over 100 demands issued in an eight-page letter, the College Fix reports.

The students — who label themselves as “Concerned Asian, Black, Latin@[sic], Native, Undocumented, Queer, and Differently-Abled students” — claim that the Ivy League school deploys “systems of oppression,” including “racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and ableism.”

“We believe that dialogue and resistance are both legitimate and necessary ways of disturbing the status quo,” the students wrote in a letter addressed to 13 faculty members and cc’ed in an email to every student at Dartmouth College.

The students’ first demand is for the college to “increase enrollment of Black, Latin@[sic], and Native students to at least 10 percent each.” Ten percent appears to be a magic number for undergraduate quotas, as the Black Student Union at the University of Michigan demanded that same percentage during a Martin Luther King day rally earlier this year. However, the disaffected Dartmouth students think 10 percent is insufficient for post-doctoral studies, and instead demand a minority population equal to 47 percent of that student body. The rationale behind demanding 47 percent went unexplained.

Yet racial quotas were only the beginning of the list of demands. In an effort to treat illegal immigrants as both the same as and different from American students, the activists called on the university to “place all undocumented students in the domestic/U.S.A. applicant pool, not the international admissions pool,” shortly before asking the college to “allow undocumented students to be able to work similarly to international students.”

Because education about “social justice” and “marginalization” are currently insufficient, the letter also demands that each student be required to take multiple classes “that will challenge their understanding of institutionalized justice around issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.”

Gender-neutral housing must be available for all students (it is currently available only to sophomores and older) and gender-neutral facilities must be offered in every single campus building, the students write.

Speech must also be heavily regulated and altered. The anonymous students call for “serious consequences against hate speech/crimes,” the definition of which was undefined. They also seek a ban on the term “Indian” in a student publication and outlawing of the terms “illegal aliens” and “illegal immigrants.”

To top it off, “every Dartmouth student should be taught and made aware that the land they reside on is Abenaki homeland,” and they must be reminded of this at “all major Dartmouth ceremonies.”

The above is merely a sampling of the complete letter, which provides many more gems, such as replacing “women” with “womyn” throughout.

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