Education

Rich White Kids Protest Other Rich White Kids At Fancypants, $61,730-Per-Year College

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Over 500 students and faculty members at Colby College gathered on campus on Thursday to protest a spat of racist and mocking comments which appeared earlier in the week on Yik Yak, the anonymous social media app.

The Yik Yak comments appeared after a previous protest at the $61,730-per-year, 1,850-student liberal arts bastion in rural Maine.

The 30 or so students involved in the earlier rally were protesting police brutality against black people.

The population of Waterville, the 15,722-person town surrounding the Colby campus, is 1.1 percent black, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In the rest of the United States, beyond Waterville, blacks make up 12.6 percent of the overall population.

On Yik Yak, the critics of the protest had griped that it was disrupting classes. The criticism eventually devolved into some bigotry.

The demonstrators protesting the Yik Yak comments on Thursday wanted to show solidarity with any students who may have felt “unsafe” as a result of comments on a social media app, according a Colby press release.

Colby president David A. Greene showed up at the Thursday event.

“Those who promote bigotry and targeted hatred have no place at Colby,” Greene declared in a speech.

“Our strength is in the goodness of the overwhelming majority of this community who care deeply about social justice and equality,” the president of the school with an endowment — $740 million — slightly larger than the entire annual gross national product of St. Vincent and the Grenadines explained.

“I want to be reminded that when a white police officer unloads his gun in the back of an African American man in North Charleston, South Carolina, or in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that we are all culpable for creating and supporting a society that thrives on inequity and racial injustice,” Greene also said.

Another speaker, associate dean of students Tashia Bradley, expressed her concern that people in the Colby community are very psychologically delicate.

“Some of our students, some of our faculty, and some of our staff members feel vulnerable in ways that people cannot imagine,” Bradley said.

Colby’s $740 million endowment works out to $273,164 per student.

About two-thirds of the undergrads study abroad. Over 100 student clubs include an equestrian club, a Broadway musical club, a water polo club, a surf club and a napping club. The library staff bakes over 1,000 cookies each semester during finals.

On Tuesday, the $61,730-per-year school will cancel classes for a campus-wide teach-in during which students and faculty members will “engage in dialogue” and “seek solutions.”

“Come prepared,” Bradley, the dean, instructed, according to the Colby press release.

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Eric Owens