When the president of the College of William & Mary (W&M) in Williamsburg, Virginia had enough of being told what to do by the local student chapter of Black Lives Matter (BLM), aggressive activists immediately proclaimed his “white supremacy” and “patriarchy,” The College Fix Reports.
They also stated college president W. Taylor Reveley III “should not have his job.” Reveley was sick and tired of BLM — who call themselves “Built on Our Backs” at the college — always insisting and never requesting that their agenda be followed.At a meeting between BLM and the college president, the student activists demanded the following:
– a tenured teaching position devoted to “diversity”;
– a mandatory “social justice” course;
– an Africana Studies department;
– “zero-tolerance” for racism (however that might be defined by BLM);
– increased staffing of the college’s Center for Student Diversity;
– increased recruitment of black students; and
– more black faculty hired and retained.
That was too tall a list for Reveley.
“I don’t deal in demands,” he said. “I don’t make demands of other people. I don’t expect to receive demands from people. I love to get suggestions, recommendations, strong arguments.”
Not willing to negotiate, Erica West of the Center for Student Diversity protested, “This is what being censored looks like. This is what white supremacy looks like. This is what patriarchy looks like. This is what condescension looks like. This is what being told ‘you, your issues and your life don’t matter’ looks like. THIS is why we say #BlackLivesMatter.”
As reported in The Libertarian Republic, it didn’t end there. “Isn’t it sad that the basis of our platform for BLM’s 10 demands is better education, namely required education in Black history?” wrote Damiana Dendy on Facebook.
The former W&M student and former intern at the department of education continued, “It’s sad that we still have to justify ourselves and our collective history, that this College was #BuiltOnOurBacks and we still have to fight for our stories to be heard.”
Dendy ensured that she had accused of Reveley of violating all the tenets of diversity: “He felt the need to validate the humanity of a former African American male colleague of his by prefacing his story with ‘he was handsome, great work, good guy’ and the like, and did not see this as a microaggression,” concluding that “This man [Reveley] should not be President of our College.”
“You can effectively go to William and Mary for 4 years, even 5 years, and never take a course in Africana for example, never take a course that is non-western thought and I feel that [is] very important that that is required,” Dendy said in the course of the meeting with Reveley.
In his defense, Reveley noted that W&M has a chief diversity officer, but the BLM students insisted that only a tenured faculty member would do and that the establishment of vice provost of diversity and inclusion was also a necessity since other Virginia post-secondary institutions have established such an office. At the University of Virginia that office is costing the school $338,800 per annum.
Not getting their way left the BLM students “deeply troubled” because the college had “failed to recognize the urgency of [our] demands” and “does not respect the experiences and concerns of people of color on our campus.”
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