NC State’s Student Senate has drafted a bill titled the Missouri Solidarity Act to be presented at Wednesday’s meeting.
According to Sen. John Taylor Willis, a freshman studying business and one of the bill’s, the purpose of the bill is to “make a statement that NC State stands in solidarity with these schools and supports them through their current efforts to combat issues of institutionalized racism on their campuses.”
If passed, the bill will state the support of NC State’s student body for Ithaca College, Claremont McKenna College, Smith College and Yale University, along with the University of Missouri.
The University of Missouri has been embroiled in controversy after multiple racist incidents and rising racial fervor received little attention from the administration. System President Tim Wolfe and Chancellor of the University of Missouri R. Bowen Loftin were forced to step down when a graduate student began a hunger strike and the football team refused to play in the school’s next game.
At Ithaca College, students held demonstrations demanding that President Tom Rochon resign after he failed to sufficiently address an incident at a panel discussion in which a black alumna referred to herself having a “savage hunger to succeed,” and Rochon, who is white, and another panelist, who is also white, continually referred to her as a “savage” even after she reminded them her name, according to The New York Times.
After about 200 students staged a walkout to support students in racial disagreements with administrators across the country at Smith College, a women’s college in Massachusetts, administrators called a town hall to allow students a chance to discuss the issues before things got out of hand.
Claremont McKenna College and Yale University faced similar situations regarding insensitive Halloween costumes. At Yale, this issue evolved into a campus-wide discussion on what free speech really means.
A group of about 100 NC State students held an informal rally in Wolf Plaza Thursday to show support for students nationwide who have faced racial aggression in their respective academic settings.
Willis said he and the other sponsors of the bill felt that it was important to extend support to the students of these universities because “a problem on their campuses is a potential problem on ours.”
“In our opinion, the issue at the heart of it all is that indifference regarding issues of racism and diversity is not OK,” Willis said in an email. “Officials within college communities (or any community for that matter) should be held accountable for their responsibility to act in response to racial incidents.”
The bill cites two studies as support: One found that racial microaggressions hinder college students’ academic performances; the other found that people who don’t see themselves as racially bigoted will take actions that contradict that image because of the existence of implicit biases.
Other sponsors of the bill are Sen. Mia Connell, a freshman studying business, Sen. Logan Graham, a freshman studying political science, and Sen. Luke Perrin, a freshman studying political science.
