In recent months and years, liberal students have turned to activism to pressure administrators to adopt a slew of left-wing policies.
Last week, at the University of Chicago, a student group demanded that the university spend $1 billion over 20 years on affordable housing in the South Side of Chicago as reparations for slavery.
The demand is the latest example of a student organization attempting to pressure administrators to acquiesce to a series of demands, from the firing of faculty deemed objectionable, racial quotas in university admission and hiring processes, and reparations like those demanded at the University of Chicago, to the cancellation of speaking events by conservative lecturers.
GEORGETOWN LAW STUDENTS DEMAND SPACE TO CRY
Recent pressure campaigns have been conducted at several institutions:
University of Chicago
In an op-ed in the Chicago Maroon, student organization UChicago Against Displacement said they believed that “the South Side is owed reparations” and that the university “exists as a legacy of chattel slavery.”
Such reparations, the group said, should take the form of a “$20 million annual fund for rental assistance and local schools” and “$1 billion over 20 years ($50 million annually) in grant funding for long-term true affordable housing.”
“Clearly, the University has enormously influential power in the South Side. Our school led the effort to bring the [Obama Presidential Center] to the South Side, winning the bid over the University of Illinois at Chicago, Columbia University, and the University of Hawaii,” the group said.
Georgetown University
Law school students at the prestigious Washington, D.C., university held a sit-in protest earlier this month to demand that the school fire constitutional law professor Ilya Shapiro over a tweet criticizing President Joe Biden for promising to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court seat currently held by retiring Justice Stephen Breyer.
In addition to demanding Shapiro’s ouster, the students also requested that the law school furnish a space for them to cry because “we’re at a point where students are coming out of class to go to the bathroom to cry.”
Dean of Students Mitch Bailin sympathetically replied that “it is really hard to walk out of class or a meeting in tears, and you should always have a place on campus where you can go.”
University of Washington
The student government at the University of Washington passed a resolution in early January demanding that the university implement an admission quota of 24% for students from Native American backgrounds and attain that goal over the next eight years.
The student government cited “an increase in harmful and racist actions by faculty towards BIPOC students, specifically towards Alaskan Native/American Indian students” as the justification for the resolution.
In the weeks prior to the passage of the resolution, Stuart Reges, a professor of engineering and computer science at the university, had been embroiled in controversy for including a fake land acknowledgment in his course syllabus.
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“I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington,” the professor wrote, according to the College Fix.
