Chaos reigns at Syracuse University after multiple race-related incidents on-campus

Isn’t it ironic that much of the societal turmoil occurs on mostly-liberal college and university campuses? In another demonstration of the liberal academic monolith gone awry, college student activists and protesters have wreaked havoc at Syracuse University, located in northern New York.

According to media reports, there have been at least sixteen race-related incidents on Syracuse University’s campus, which involved graffiti of a swastika, the alleged sharing of a white supremacist manifesto at the university library, and graffiti that disparaged black, Native Americans, and Asians.

Elements of the student body went into a panic, demanding justice and conducted a sit-in demonstration. The university’s Department of Public Safety said it is investigating the incidents, but no suspects have been arrested.

In academic lingo, these instances are called “bias incidents,” which we at Accuracy in Academia have covered previously. Bias incidents are any instances in which someone reports an event or something that offends them, whether it is a comment, graffiti or vandalism, or a PowerPoint slide, which makes it difficult to investigate and prosecute.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) had the state police’s Hate Crime Task Force and state’s Division of Human Rights investigate the incidents and condemn the inflammatory language.

Students gathered for a sit-in protest and demanded that university chancellor Kent Syverud acquiesce to their list of demands, which included the expulsion of any student involved in hate crimes, a revision of the university’s anti-harassment policy, and mandatory diversity training for new staff and faculty members. Also included in their demands was the option for same-race roommate selection on housing applications, which one could say that it would reverse society’s progress and gains from the desegregation movement and civil rights movement in the 1960s. If Syverud did not comply with their demands, the protesters said they would protest and demand his resignation within a weeks’ time.

Their demands were similar to past protests across the United States at colleges and universities, and it is not an outlier. More and more, student protesters are emboldened to enforce administrations to comply or face more protests.

Related Topics