Posted on January 4, 2021

A Student Mob Took Over Bryn Mawr. The College Said Thank You

Minnie Doe, Quillette, December 27, 2020

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Last week marked the end of a chaotic semester at Bryn Mawr College, a small women’s liberal arts college located outside Philadelphia. During the final weeks, Bryn Mawr students, including my own child, scrambled to pick up the pieces following a student “strike” that exacerbated the serious preexisting disruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. For a period of three weeks, few regular classes were held, activities were suspended, and student life (such as it was) became marked by the same toxic spirit of racism that the strikers claimed to oppose.

Bryn Mawr is affiliated with nearby Haverford College, whose parallel meltdown in November was documented recently by Quillette. These two selective and well-funded schools are part of a so-called Bi-Co arrangement, which allows students to participate in joint classes and activities. Both share a similarly progressive commitment to such causes as diversity, equity, and inclusion. And students at both schools generally are well-steeped in doctrines of intersectionality, “white fragility,” anti-racism, and all the rest. Yet following the police shooting of Walter Wallace Jr. in Philadelphia, activists at Haverford and Bryn Mawr embraced the dubious claim that their extremely progressive campuses were actually contaminated by a dangerous climate of racism that (quite literally) threatened the survival of black students. In many cases, the ire was directed not only at administrators and non-ideologically-compliant faculty, but also at any student suspected of not supporting the strikers’ apocalyptic rhetoric, dramatic postures, and inflated demands. Anyone who sought to attend class, go to the dining hall, or even turn in schoolwork was denounced as a “scab,” and often faced acts of bullying.

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The Bryn Mawr student strike, which formally began on October 28th, was led by something called the Bryn Mawr Strike Collective (BMSC), whose grandiosely stated goal was “to dismantle systemic oppression in the Bryn Mawr community,” and end the apparently crippling regime of “institutional racism, silencing, and instances of white supremacy.” Its list of demands was voluminous, and included a new required course on “Blackness and White Privilege,” additional funding for the campus Black Cultural Center, a call for a halt to the college’s (unspecified) acts of “violence against disabled students,” acknowledgement of “the unseen labor of Black women and Black trans/nonbinary people on campus,” as well as grade protection and money for the “work” that strikers were claiming to do to fight racism.

On November 6th, a week later, Bryn Mawr President Kim Cassidy responded with a proposed timeline for consideration and compliance. {snip}

Two days later, President Cassidy attempted to remind everyone that real educational credentials were on the line. {snip}

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Following on numerous reports of abusive behaviour targeting students seeking to return to class, moreover, President Cassidy sent another email (for which, incredibly, she later apologized—but I’m getting ahead of myself) calling for a halt to these tactics:

Whatever the important goals of the strike and the demands, the College cannot countenance shaming, harassment, and intimidation of students or faculty to achieve them. The College cannot and will not tolerate a climate of fear where, amongst other examples, students are afraid to eat in the dining halls for fear of humiliation or for being seen as racist. {snip}

This proved to be the high-water mark for Cassidy. Regardless of her directives, many professors still refused to offer regular classes—some out of real solidarity with the strike organizers, while others simply wanted to avoid being targeted. And some of the professors who did hold classes taught only strike-approved content, i.e., discussions about racism and white supremacy. The strike “teach-ins,” meanwhile, typically consisted of videos with titles such as Histories of Queer Solidarity Against White Supremacy. The strikers, who urged that these materials be accorded academic credit, took careful note of who was consuming this or that media, so as to gauge which students and professors were supporting the strike and which weren’t.

School officials who interacted with students—such as Dean Jennifer Walters, who was pressured into speaking at a November 9th sit-in event when strike organizers spotted her walking her dog—were crudely mocked. By this time, it had become clear that what the strikers wanted wasn’t actual dialogue, but a series of melodramatic vignettes that showcased their claim to moral leadership. This included a November 13th town-hall meeting where they controlled the agenda, while attending anonymously so as to protect their identities.

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By the end of the meeting, Cassidy, along with Provost Tim Harte and Dean Walters, had agreed they would step down if the demands hadn’t been met to the strikers’ satisfaction. In what perhaps stands out as her most craven act, Cassidy also agreed to issue an apology for her (above-quoted) email decrying intimidation and bullying on campus—on the absurd basis that “my words suggested that this is a problem on campus that originates with strike supporters. It was wrong to convey this message and perpetuate a harmful stereotype.”

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On November 21st, parents received an email from Kim Cassidy indicating that the strike was over. Like her counterpart at Haverford, she sought to convince everyone that the ordeal had been a win-win—having forced the entire community to “face our history in new ways, to confront persistent institutional barriers to progress and commit to change.”

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Far from facing consequences for ruining the fall, 2020 semester, strikers have been lavishly praised by the school’s president and continually assured that their grades won’t be impacted. Some professors have even agreed to accept what they call “strike work”—conversations with friends and family about racism, diary entries, time spent watching anti-racism documentaries, and so forth—in lieu of actual course work, even in math and science programs. Additionally, the college has instituted a credit/no-credit policy that will allow all students to choose up to four courses this year that won’t factor into their GPA.

As for the majority of students who came to Bryn Mawr to actually receive an education that goes beyond anti-racist bromides, they’re out of luck. The same goes for parents who ante up $54,000 a year for tuition (and another $20,000 for room and board). Kim Cassidy now presides over what is essentially the world’s most expensive anti-racism YouTube training program. {snip}

What these students have learned—at a Quaker-founded institution no less—is that might makes right, that discussion and debate are for racists, and that the middle-aged elites who run society’s most prestigious institutions will sell them out for their own public-relations convenience, all the while publicly thanking the social-justice shakedown artists who engineered their own humiliation, thus incentivizing more tantrums in the future.

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