A few cheeky tweets took down the chairman of the board of trustees at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. Self-styled student activists started an online shame campaign last week, which led insurance executive and Ursinus alumnus Michael Marcon to quit the board chairmanship on Thursday—”in order for true healing and true growth to take root,” per Marcon’s statement to students and faculty.
The Philadelphia Inquirer chose to print Marcon’s greatest hits, at the risk of retraumatizing the Ursinus community:
As the tweets circulated and outrage spread earlier this week, another trustee left the board in protest. One student told the Inquirer Marcon “clearly needs to go through some sort of diversity rehab.”
Before submitting his resignation, Marcon first tried to smooth things over. He sent aggrieved faculty and students an apologetic email that some interpreted as a partial defense of his Twitter habits. According to the Inquirer, “Marcon also wrote that he believes in, ‘a free and lively exchange of ideas and that we should always challenge ourselves to understand different perspectives or just appreciate the banal observations of everyday life.'”
Find fifteen more of Marcon’s tweets and retweets archived here alongside stony-faced commentary by a student with apparently nothing better to do. The offending tweets all predate his brief chairmanship, which began on July 1. Among his “horrifying” missives, are a link to a Ben Carson speech, a Bernie Sanders meme, a smattering of original thoughts—ordinary, if obnoxious, gripes about air travel and modern life.
Marcon’s tweets have horrified these students and, a day after his departure, their subsequent healing period has only just begun. Okay, so who wants to tell them about talk radio?
