Diversity & Rent-a-cops: Nixon is the one

A professor of African-American Studies recently made an intriguing assertion indicating that Richard Nixon was the father of campus diversity offices and rent-a-cops. “After the police and National Guard killed student protesters at Jackson State and Kent State in 1970, President Richard Nixon convened the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest,” Roderick Ferguson of the University of Illinois at Chicago told John Wilson in an interview which appeared on the academe blog maintained by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). “The commission issued a report entitled ‘The Report of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest.’”

“Despite the fact that the police and National Guard killed protesters unjustifiably, the report was designed to frame student activists (rather than the extraordinary use of police powers) as the problem. Nixon’s report exhorted college and university administrations to get in control of student activism through the development of diversity offices and campus security.”

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