A College of William and Mary student said that “labeling all members of fraternities as rapists is justified” after vandals spray painted “rapist” on frats at the school in November.
Aditya Mohan made the remark in a column for The Flat Hat, one of the school’s papers. He also argued that the community should “destroy [fraternities].”
“It is all of our responsibilities to stand in solidarity with victims, trans people, poor people, women, people of color and others hurt by fraternities and destroy the structures that harm them,” wrote the student, who added that frats are “a network built to further nepotism and favoritism in employment, politics and civil society.”
Mohan says there are issues with both erasing and keeping the vandalism on the frat building. He says erasing it could censor survivors, but leaving it could trigger those survivors.
Now campus activists say that one in five women are sexually assaulted during their time on campus. But the study cited only accounted for students at two universities, received a low response rate, counted drunken-sex as assault, and didn’t actually ask the students polled outright whether they experienced rape or sexual assault. The Bureau of Justice, meanwhile, reports that fewer than one percent of college students are sexually assaulted.
Students have targeted frats both verbally and physically across the country. A University of Virginia frat had its house vandalized and windows smashed with bricks after Rolling Stone magazine libelously published a story about a gang rape that never in fact occurred there. Antifa marched on frats at the University of Minnesota with a sign stating “kill rapists” and shouted “f*** the frats.” Vandals at the University of Texas at Austin wrote “kill frat boys,” “racist” and “rapist” on frat houses, and Antifa published an open letter ordering people to “make their lives hell.” A few days later, student Kendrex White stabbed four students — killing one — allegedly searching specifically for frat and sorority members.
If you’re a young millennial or old zoomer — that’s Generation Z — SpongeBob SquarePants probably brings to mind days of childhood bliss, a time unmuddied by politics. But that’s not the case for University of Washington professor Holly Barker, who recently published a nearly 10,000-word study called “Unsettling SpongeBob and the Legacies of Violence on Bikini Bottom,” reported Campus Reform.
Now, if you remember, SpongeBob takes place in Bikini Bottom, and Holly’s upset that this is apparently a reference to Bikini Atoll, a Marshall Islands coral reef used by America during the Cold War for nuclear testing. Indigenous people were moved during the testing and radiation ultimately rendered it uninhabitable.
Holly complains about SpongeBob’s supposed “privilege” of “not caring about the detonation of nuclear bombs,” saying “the detonations do not cause concern for the characters, as they did for the Bikinians, nor do they compromise SpongeBob’s frequent activities, like visiting hamburger joints or the beach with friends.”
Yeah, uh, that would be because it’s a kids show.
But here’s the thing: Holly isn’t just mad that the show doesn’t hit children on the head with the full historical context of a place from which it takes half its name and I’m not sure what else. She calls the characters living in this setting an “occupation,” terms it “symbolic violence,” and says “SpongeBob’s presence on Bikini Bottom continues the violent and racist expulsion of Indigenous peoples from their lands (and in this case their cosmos) that enables U.S. hegemonic powers to extend their military and colonial interests in the postwar era.”
A protester tried to shut down a Northeastern Illinois University event featuring former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, according to Campus Reform.
“You’re a Nazi!” “No, you’re a Nazi!” That’s pretty much how the discourse has devolved. And then when force is used to address a disruption, as it should be, they complain about it being a bit uncomfortable. But what’s really funny is that Sean Spicer wasn’t the only somewhat controversial speaker at Northeastern Illinois.
That’s right — Donna Brazile was also there. You remember Donna, the Democratic National Committee chairwoman who shared debate questions with Hillary Clinton? And yet Donna wasn’t the one getting protested and cussed out.
Also in recent campus news, the head of Freedom University, a school which apparently operates out of an undisclosed location in Georgia, gave a speech at St. Olaf College in Minnseota. Director Laura Soltis said nation states “should not exist” and called citizenship “completely arbitrary.”
Remember Jeff Klinzman? You know, the Iowa professor who responded to a tweet from Donald Trump calling Antifa out for attacking people with baseball bats by saying “yeah, I know who I’d clock with a bat” and who outright told ABC9 “I am Antifa”? He parted ways with the school in late August, but is now planning on suing Kirkland Community College and is still taking a paycheck, reported Campus Reform.
Klinzman had some other pretty disturbing stuff on social media, liking several Antifa-related Facebook pages and quoting a poem reading “kill them all, and bury them deep in the ground, before millions more are tortured to death” when talking about Evangelical Christians who, according to him, “fill [him] with rage, and a desire to exact revenge.”
Now, it’s weird because Kirkland Community College said it made a “decision to remove Mr. Klinzman from the classroom,” citing safety concerns, but then said “We have spoken with Mr. Klinzman this afternoon about this matter and have accepted his resignation.”
And this little incongruity here — how did someone who was removed from the classroom also resign? – is part of the professor’s planned lawsuit against the school. Klinzman said that he believes his First Amendment rights were violated and that the college communicated to him that he could resign or it would fire him. An email from the college showed that Klinzman did, in fact, resign, but he did so on the condition that he still earns his full salary of $3,624 for the 16-week semester.
