The president of one of America’s ritziest liberal arts colleges is blaming Donald Trump for the various race protests which cropped up on campuses across the country during the fall semester.
“There are lots of things going on in the world around them and it may sound like they’re focusing on this one little thing,” Pomona College president David Oxtoby told The Huffington Post on Monday. “Well, the reason they’re focusing on this little thing is that they can’t do anything about Donald Trump.”
Oxtoby suggested that America’s on-campus race protesters are angry because Trump has refused to restrain his language and attitudes in the face of the students’ radical race-centered politics, notes Campus Reform.
“Donald Trump is going to do what he does,” Oxtoby told HuffPo, “and the students will have no effect on that. And the students are saying ‘How can I have an effect?’ So the national situation is affecting what happens, and people don’t always make those connections.”
Student protesters at Pomona presented Oxtoby with an ultimatum full of race-based demands in November. Among the demands, notes Campus Reform, were mandatory diversity quotas and an acknowledgement that the school has institutional race problems.
Oxtoby described the demands as “a cry for help” and said he enthusiastically negotiated with the protesters.
“Being engaged in the issues of the day is what we want our students to be doing and I want to be a model in that,” he told The Huffington Post.
The total cost of tuition, fees and room and board for a single year at Pomona is $62,930. That’s about 220 percent of the American per capita income of $28,155.
Student perks at on fancypants Pomona’s 140-acre, meticulously landscaped campus in sunny Southern California include dining halls with pizza stations and plenty of vegan fare, free surfboards and over 250 clubs.
Pomona is one of the Claremont Colleges — a consortium of five undergraduate schools located close to one another.
Pomona’s total endowment is just over $2.1 billion (a bit more than the entire annual gross-domestic product of Bhutan).
In November, minority students at Claremont McKenna College, another of the five Claremont Colleges, forced the resignation of a dean because they felt she wasn’t creating a sufficient number of “safe spaces” on campus. (RELATED: Another Campus Official Forced Out By Racial Protests)
In October, the student senate at Pitzer College, a third Claremont school, flatly rejected a student’s proposal to establish a campus yachting club due to concerns that the name of the yacht club is offensive and “exclusive” — and “luxurious” and “classist,” and fails to support “queer and trans people of color.” (RELATED: Student Council At $63,880-Per-Year Private College Rejects Proposed Yacht Club As Too ‘Exclusive’)
Oxtoby is a theoretical chemist by training with degrees from Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley.
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