On Monday, students at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York, who referred to themselves as “students of color,” staged a large sit-in and presented the university with a laundry list of demands, one of which was for a “tenure review” of a professor whose op-ed in The New York Times offended them because of his supposed “anti-Blackness, anti-LGBTQ+, and anti-woman bigotry.”
Professor Samuel Abrams had published an op-ed in The New York Times last October 16 in which he wrote that he had received an email from a senior staff member in the Office of Diversity and Campus Engagement at Sarah Lawrence soliciting ideas from the Sarah Lawrence community for a conference titled “Our Liberation Summit.”
Abrams wrote, “The conference would touch on such progressive topics as liberation spaces on campus, Black Lives Matter and justice for women as well as for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and allied people.”
Abrams then noted the politically one-sided nature of the conference, writing, “As a conservative-leaning professor who has long promoted a diversity of viewpoints among my (very liberal) faculty colleagues and in my classes, I was taken aback by the college’s sponsorship of such a politically lopsided event. The email also piqued my interest in what sorts of other nonacademic events were being organized by the school’s administrative staff members.”
He added, “I soon learned that the Office of Student Affairs, which oversees a wide array of issues including student diversity and residence life, was organizing many overtly progressive events — programs with names like ‘Stay Healthy, Stay Woke,’ ‘Microaggressions’ and ‘Understanding White Privilege’ — without offering any programming that offered a meaningful ideological alternative. These events were conducted outside the classroom, in the students’ social and recreational spaces.”
Abrams cited a “nationally representative sample of roughly 900 ‘student-facing’ administrators” and found “liberal staff members outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one.
Only 6 percent of campus administrators identified as conservative to some degree, while 71 percent classified themselves as liberal or very liberal.”
He commented, “It’s no wonder so much of the nonacademic programming on college campuses is politically one-sided”
“It appears that a fairly liberal student body is being taught by a very liberal professoriate — and socialized by an incredibly liberal group of administrators.”
Abrams concluded, “This warped ideological distribution among college administrators should give our students and their families pause. To students who are in their first semester at school, I urge you not to accept unthinkingly what your campus administrators are telling you. Their ideological imbalance, coupled with their agenda-setting power, threatens the free and open exchange of ideas, which is precisely what we need to protect in higher education in these politically polarized times.”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/03/sarah-lawrence-college-students-of-color-protesters-issue-9-pages-of-demands-target-conservative-professor/
