The whole premise of the article is to teach people real-world knowledge for the purpose of having careers...has nothing to do with philosophy or indoctrination.......

Ever dawned on you that some professors teach courses where philosophy is a non-issue? Engineering, science, business, technical courses.....they learn to think critical there also...hence why they tend to be liberals...not confined to thinking of days past...........

Engineer and craftsmen are not the same....there are degrees in Architectural Engineering offered at many schools.......

A Latino candidate won’t guarantee the Latino v**e.




By Geraldo L. Cadava


ONE YEAR BEFORE the 1980 general e******n, in November 1979, 10 Republicans competed for their party’s nomination. Most held the usual credentials — congressman, senator, governor — and famous last names, such as Reagan, Bush and Dole. But among them also stood a man from Calabasas named Benjamin “Boxcar Ben” Fernandez, a 53-year-old Mexican American born in1925 in the rail yards of Kansas City, Kan. His parents were undocumented immigrants from Mexico and were so poor they lived in a converted railroad boxcar, where Fernandez was born. Hence his nickname.

As a child, Fernandez worked with his family picking sugar beets in the Midwest. He later became the first Latino Republican ever to run for president of the United States. (Marco Rubio is late to the party.) Fernandez was unknown nationally, but he was well regarded by the Republican establishment as a leader of grass-roots campaigns to organize Latinos in California, a fundraiser for Richard Nixon’s 1972 ree******n campaign and a founder of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly.

He was the most famous Latino conservative of his generation and paved the way for Latino conservatives today.

Boxcar Ben had the kind of up-by-the-bootstraps history that appealed to many Americans, making him an attractive p**********l candidate. He was an agricultural worker and served in World War II. He enrolled in the University of Redlands and received an undergraduate degree in economics, paying for his education with his GI benefits. He worked for General Electric in New York while earning an MBA from NYU, and eventually returned to California to found the National Economic Development Assn., a nonprofit that lent money to would-be Latino business owners when other lenders would not. He also helped establish several banks in Southern California.

The narrative that Fernandez told of his rise from poverty fit the worldview of many conservatives, including Latinos. His wealth was the result of hard work and individual initiative. When a friend told Fernandez that the Republican Party was for rich people, he responded, “Sign me up! I’ve had enough of poverty.” He cited his “own rise from poverty as an example of what the free enterprise system can do for any hardworking American.”

For Fernandez, the rhetoric of free enterprise also related to his vision for U.S.-Latin American relations. As a candidate in a period when l*****t governments were on the rise in many Latin American nations, Fernandez said, “It is apparent to the whole world that the United States is surrounded by a positive c*******t movement across our soft underbelly.” The only solution, he believed, was to root out c*******m and install capitalist democracies, often through financial and military backing of opposition groups in the countries taken over by l*****ts.

Boxcar Ben’s positions on the economy and U.S. interventions in Latin America put him at odds with many Latinos. They wanted to succeed as well, of course, but they thought the government should play an important role in their upward mobility, helping to prevent discrimination against them, securing a fair wage and acceptable working conditions, and otherwise protecting their civil rights. And while many saw America as a refuge from the civil wars that afflicted their Latin American homelands, they also saw the role of the U.S. in these civil wars as imperialist and self-interested. They believed that U.S. support for right-wing strongmen was at least partially responsible for the violence they had fled.

Despite his differences with other Latinos, Fernandez claimed that his base would be the millions of Latinos who lived in the United States, and he developed an e*******l strategy with them in mind. Puerto Ricans could v**e in primary but not general e******ns as residents of an American territory. Fernandez therefore poured most of his resources into winning Puerto Rico’s 14 delegates, who cast their b****ts before primary v**ers in Iowa and New Hampshire. As a fellow Spanish speaker, Fernandez predicted that he would win Puerto Rico “by a landslide.” Victory there would put him on the map nationally.

As it turned out, he finished fourth in Puerto Rico. George H.W. Bush came in first, winning 60% of the Republican primary v**e.

If he had to do it again, Fernandez said, he would have followed the more traditional path of seeking support in Iowa and New Hampshire. In March 1980, down but not out, Fernandez ruminated about his lack of support among Latinos. “It’s been a crushing experience for the campaign, our not being able to fire up the [Latino] community,” he said. “Frankly, I thought the Hispanic community would be getting really excited right about now, but they haven’t.”

When Fernandez announced his candidacy in November 1978, he proclaimed, “I fully expect to be the next president of the United States.” Eighteen months later he returned to his home in Calabasas Park, just in time to v**e for himself in the California primary. He was $150,000 in debt, and he had the support of exactly zero delegates at the Republican National Convention. The Los Angeles Times stated that “political observers” knew that the Fernandez campaign was “hopeless” from the start, and called the v**e he cast for himself a “quixotic gesture.” But Fernandez said it was the high point of his campaign.

Fernandez conceded defeat later that month, a few weeks before the Republican National Convention in Detroit. By that point, fellow Californian Ronald Reagan was the clear winner.

Boxcar Ben offers important historical lessons for the Rubio campaign. The Republican establishment is so bullish on Rubio in part because he’s Latino, a key demographic group. Boxcar Ben, however, demonstrates that Latino candidates can’t count on Latino support, especially if their policies conflict with what most Latinos believe.

Rubio claims to embody something new in American politics. His campaign slogan is “A New American Century,” and to Americans fed up with politics in general, he has said, “Now is the time to try a new approach” — presumably his. Rubio proposes to slash taxes, cut entitlement programs and offer a government credit to low-wage workers that would absolve corporations from paying their employees a minimum wage.

These proposals don’t represent a new kind of conservatism. They’re the same ones Latino conservatives — like all conservatives

— have advocated since the days of Boxcar Ben.

GERALDO L. CADAVA is an associate professor of history and Latina/Latino studies at

Northwestern University.

For Clinton, it’s his personal touch. For Sanders and O’Malley, it’s his underdog luck.




BY EVAN HALPER AND NOAH BIERMAN


Picture

CHARLIE NEIBERGALL AP

CLINTON makes sure all who show interest will get a handwritten note.


Picture

SCOTT OLSON Getty Images

HILLARY CLINTON’S CAMPAIGN “came in and they made friends and they recruited,” says Walt Pregler, the Dubuque County Democratic chairman. “And ... they did it person-to-person and door-to-door.”


DES MOINES — While Democrats in eastern Iowa’s Dubuque County dined on three kinds of chili at their “Soup-er Tuesday”-themed meeting last week, Hillary Clinton’s paid field agents were in the kitchen scrubbing dishes.

The campaign machine that foundered in the 2008 race against Barack Obama has spent seven months mastering the grunt work needed to ingratiate itself to Iowans. It has sat down for coffee with 6,000 Iowa party activists. It makes sure every v**er who shows interest gets a personalized, handwritten note. It organizes group yoga.

“They came in and they made friends and they recruited,” said Walt Pregler, the 81-year-old Dubuque County Democratic chairman. “And instead of trying to do it all over the telephone, they did it person-to-person and door-to-door.”

Clinton’s rivals are hopeful that this all-important state that holds the first nominating contest in the 2016 Democratic primary will do what it often has in the past: deliver an upset victory to an insurgent. But the Clinton operation is stubbornly holding the line, according to interviews with dozens of strategists, county chairs and rank-and-file Democrats from across Iowa.

Its durability will be tested over the next two months in this quirky caucus state, where even the best-laid plans can fall apart on caucus night, in part because it takes hours to participate and turnout varies wildly every four years.

Clinton’s main threat, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), is seeking to use Iowa’s system to his advantage much the way Obama did, by inspiring masses of v**ers who would not usually caucus.

“If they choose to engage, they can make a difference,” said Tom Henderson, chair of the Polk County Democrats in Des Moines, home to about a sixth of the state’s registered Democrats.

Clinton, for all her organizational strength, has yet to sew up Iowa. Other wild cards, like the surprisingly robust operation of dark-horse candidate Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor, could complicate Clinton’s efforts to send an early signal in the Democratic primaries that she is unstoppable. There is also lack of passion among many who favor her.

“We probably will go with Hillary, although that would not be our choice if we could find someone else we could support,” said Jo Anne Pinkerton, a retiree who was shopping at an antique store with her husband in Newton, 30 miles east of Des Moines.

Yet Clinton is showing surprising resilience even in ultra-liberal pockets here where Sanders would seem to have an advantage.

At Grinnell College, Sanders surrogate Cornel West, a scholar and civil-rights activist, captivated a large crowd Nov. 14 with what can only be described as an unorthodox campaign speech that took aim at w***e s*******y, “milquetoast” neoliberalism and capitalist theory. Like a postmodern jazz orator, he combined academic jargon like “counter-hegemonic” and “dialectical interplay” with references to the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan, leading into a climax that dubbed the Sanders campaign “a love train.”

Even as they nodded and clapped along with West, students and faculty at the event said the campus, which Clinton visited earlier in the month, is evenly divided between her and Sanders.

A day later, at Simpson College, Sanders enthralled an audience packed into a small theater with a lecture that bounced from incarceration rates to political corruption to the virtues of free tuition. But his rustiness with retail politics crept in when he confused the name of the school with another one he had visited a day earlier.

Clinton does not always excite crowds, but she never forgets where she is.

The day after the second Democratic debate in Des Moines last weekend, Clinton spoke for half an hour to Democratic activists at a dirt-floor agricultural center in Ames. Though the speech was held at Iowa State University, many of those who paid $25 to eat pulled-pork sandwiches, or $10 for bleacher seats, were senior citizens.

Before speaking, Clinton and her husband, Bill, met backstage with13 local activists, including Jan Bauer, who has led the Story County Democrats for two decades. Bauer was part of Obama’s army in 2008, a decision she reached after three or four personal calls from then-Sen. Obama. This time it was Clinton supporters who reached her early and often, including a personal call Clinton made to Bauer shortly after her April entry into the race.

“Madam Secretary, really?” she recalled saying to Clinton. “This is an amazing surprise.”

Bauer signed on. And when Clinton rose to speak in Ames, she recognized Bauer from the dais.

But Clinton, who has been surrounded by the Secret Service since the 1990s, does not meet one-on-one with as many Iowans as typical p**********l candidates. O’Malley, who is polling in the low single digits and faces the steepest odds to win the nomination, has sought to take advantage of that opening by paying relentless attention to local officials. He celebrated the Jasper County Democratic chair’s 24th birthday with a special event announcing his endorsement. And Henderson, the powerful chair of the Polk County Democrats, signed on with O’Malley this month.

Henderson said he’s met with O’Malley at least 10 times, including three dinners and a breakfast. Many of O’Malley’s supporters acknowledge they do not expect him to become president, but they want to see him get more attention.

This e******n is a do-over for the Clinton campaign, with a team that has dissected mistakes from eight years ago and is steadfast in correcting them. In the meetings with the 6,000 activists in the state — from party chairs on down — the campaign has taken their advice on policy, organizing and rhetoric, giving the Iowans a sense of ownership in Clinton’s campaign.

“If they were willing to sit down and talk with us, we talked,” said Kane Miller, the campaign’s organizing director in Polk County.

Most of what Miller’s troop of volunteers is doing, meanwhile, is penmanship. Every potential Clinton v**er reached by the campaign gets a handwritten note from a neighbor, nudging them to fill out a “commit to caucus” card. To make sure v**ers return their cards, the campaign sends volunteers to pick them up at the homes of v**ers.

“There’s no shortcuts in the Iowa caucus,” said Miller. “You can’t just come in late and throw a lot of hot sauce and hope it works.”

The Sanders campaign says it will get there soon enough. It has 72 paid staffers in 17 offices throughout the state, including a sprawling headquarters — with a giant Sanders head painted on the map of Iowa inside — beside a supermarket in a Des Moines strip mall. They say they have a list of 4,000 Iowans who have volunteered at least once for them.

“We think we’re on pace,” said Tad Devine, a senior strategist for Sanders, who recalled his experience working for the eventual Democratic nominee in 2004. “I worked for John Kerry. We were sixth. … That was our horse-race number in Iowa at this time.”

Devine said Sanders is already polling strong in Iowa despite his campaign being months behind Clinton in airing television commercials there and having a fully operational campaign.

“We’re building a base of support which can be a base of victory,” he said. evan.halper@latimes.com noah.bierman@latimes.com

Music and a show of politics

Bands unfurl banner protesting r****m during a night of strong performances.


BY CAROLINA A. MIRANDA


Picture

CHRIS PIZZELLO Invision/Associated Press

MEMBERS OF Los Tigres del Norte and Maná hold a banner reading “Latinos United, Don’t V**e for R****ts” during performance at the Latin Grammys.


An hour and a half into the 16th annual Latin Grammy Awards, the ceremony was moving at a good clip. There were power ballads. There was smoke. There was cumbia and reggaeton. And there was Ricky Martin shaking his hips on “La Mordidita.”

Then Mexican rockers Maná took the stage with norteño legends Los Tigres del Norte. They sang the rousing immigrant anthem “Somos Más Americanos” (We Are More American), first recorded by Los Tigres in 2001, and covered by Maná on its recent album, “Cama Incendiada” (Burning Bed), which won the night’s Latin Grammy for pop/rock album.

“They already shouted at me a thousand times to go back to my country / Because I don’t belong here,” go the lyrics. “But I want to remind the gringo / I didn’t cross the border / The border crossed me.”

In choosing to play that particular song at Thursday’s media-saturated Latin Grammy Awards, which airs nationally to an audience of roughly 10 million people on the Univision Network, these two iconic Mexican bands from both sides of the border (Los Tigres live in California and a number of them are U.S. citizens) were deliberately pushing back against the negative portrayal of Mexican and other immigrants in the media — in particular, statements by conservative p**********l candidate Donald Trump that labeled Mexicans criminals and “rapists.”

But the bands took things one step further: At the end of their song, which had the audience on its feet, they unfurled a banner that read, “Latinos Unidos No V**en Por R****tas,” or “Latinos United, Don’t V**e for R****ts.” The audience exploded in applause. At that very moment, both bands announced a v***r r**********n initiative on their respective social media feeds, injecting a strong dose of politics into a show that had been enjoyable, if generally devoid of hot topics.

“For those of us who can v**e, often we take it for granted,” Tigres lead singer Jorge Hernandez told The Times via telephone soon after the bands came off stage. “So we are here to say, ‘If you can do it, think of those in need.’ ”

It’s the not first time immigration politics have interrupted the awards. Last year, the show started 20 minutes late when Univision delayed the broadcast in order to show a speech on immigration policy by President Obama.

Had it not been for the political sign-hoisting, the show might have been better remembered as a night in which reggaeton came to rival pop as the bread and butter of the Latin Grammys — at least on stage, if not in the actual awards. (Most reggaeton musicians are still confined to various “urban” music categories, with pop and other musical styles dominating the prestigious areas like album of the year and record of the year.)

The show opened with a strong performance by Colombian reggaetonero J Balvin — who is inescapable on many Spanish-language radio stations — singing his hit song “Ginza,” a number about dancing reggaeton. He also played a duet with electronica group Major Lazer and MØ. (Balvin later won the trophy for urban song.)

This was followed by other reggaeton acts, either alone or as parts of medleys with other musicians: the Puerto Rican star Wisin jammed with Ricky Martin on their single “Que Se Sienta El Deseo” (Feel the Desire) and Nicky Jam sang his smash break-up single “El Perdón” (Forgiveness) — for which he took home the award for urban performance.

In an emotional speech, Jam thanked his parents and used his time to say a word about the situation in France. “I dedicate this to the people of Paris for what happened,” he said. “May god bless you.”

Jam also closed the telecast in a duet with Colombian vallenato singer Silvestre Dangond, with their song “Materialista,” a number rich in African drums.

Indeed, this was a night in which Colombian musicians dominated the stage — with Balvin opening the show and Dangond closing it out. In between, the jazz pop Colombian swing band Monsieur Periné took home the award for best new artist and hip-hop/reggaeton act ChocQuibTown performed with a Cuban dance troupe and took home the award for tropical fusion album for “El Mismo” (The Same One).

More significantly, the Colombian electronica duo Bomba Estéreo, which was nominated in two categories but didn’t win any awards, gave a thumping rendition of their exhilarating dance single “Fiesta” — with a guest appearance by Will Smith. It was the first time the actor and onetime rapper had taken to the musical stage in a decade. (He had previously appeared in the remix of the song.)

In fact, before the Latin Grammy Awards aired, the big talk of the show had been about Smith’s appearance. But coming minutes after Los Tigres and Maná held up their “Don’t V**e for R****ts” sign on stage, Smith’s performance took a backseat to politics on social media, which exploded with talk about v****g and immigration.

The night’s big award winner was a Mexican artist

— but an unlikely one. This past spring, indie singer-songwriter Natalia Lafourcade released “Hasta La Raíz” (To the Root), a critically acclaimed album that has been popular in Mexico but has received a more muted response abroad. She nonetheless took home five trophies, including record of the year, song of the year and alternative music album. She also performed a stirring rendition of the album’s title song.

Mexican indie balladeer Leonel García, who had gone into the awards ceremony with six nominations

— for his own album “Amor Futuro,” (Future Love), as well as for song writing on Lafourcade’s record — took home two Latin Grammys for his work on “Hasta La Raíz.”

Dominican merengue star Juan Luis Guerra, who also performed, took home three trophies for his album “Todo Tiene Su Hora” (Everything Has Its Time), which won the coveted album of the year.

Overall, it was a vastly improved show from years past. Mexican regional acts weren’t buried at the end of the show as they were last year — a good thing because Mexican regional music is hugely popular. In fact, one of the best performances of the night came early on when the long-running Banda El Recodo played “Mi Vicio Más Grande” (My Biggest Vice) then segued into an irresistible duet with reggaetonero Wisin for their song “Las Fresas” — about uppity rich girls. It’s the sort of tune that makes it difficult to sit still.

There were other excellent acts: former Shakira back-up singer Raquel Sofía wowed with her scratchy lovelorn girl anthem “Te Amo I***ta” (I Love You, I***t), and Espinoza Paz engaged the audience with “Perdi La Pose” (I Lost the Post), a Mexican ranchera that brought a good dose of Latin American melancholy to the otherwise upbeat show.

Likewise, the career tribute to legendary Brazilian romance balladeer Roberto Carlos, the Latin Recording Academy’s Person of the Year, had everyone in the audience singing along to classics such as “Yo Te Propongo” (I Propose to You). The audience was so into it, I was surprised not to see any ladies undergarments launched onto the stage.

Where the academy and Univision blew it was airing the broadcast on tape delay on the West Coast, a decision that boggles the mind. Los Angeles is the No. 1 Latino market in the U.S. In the era of social media, it’s difficult to comprehend why the show’s organizers would choose to fracture their audience in this way.

By the time the West Coast sat down to watch the show, images of Los Tigres and Maná holding up their sign were already all over social media, as were GIFs of the Smith/Bomba Estéreo performance. In a time when few television programs are actual national events, it’s mystifying why the Latin Grammys would choose to turn a show that could bring a nation together into just a piece of everyday programming.

Too bad the programmers think it’s 1995 instead of 2015. carolina.miranda

@latimes.com

RONALD BROWNSTEIN


THE FIRST reverberations from the Paris attacks into the U.S. p**********l campaign have focused on how to confront Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. But the terrorism is also pouring gasoline on the arguments already blazing over America’s identity in a time of rapid demographic change.

Even before Paris heightened fears of homegrown or imported terrorists, the 2016 e******n campaign had raised a series of issues that explosively mix national security with America’s changing racial and ethnic composition.

I*****l i*********n, the debate over policing practices sparked by the Black L***s M****r movement and now the uproar over admitting Syrian refugees have all divided the political parties along consistent lines. On each front, Democrats argue that inclusion and sensitivity to minority concerns will advance America’s values and interests. The GOP is warning that these Democratic priorities threaten public order and safety, and are raising those alarms in language that many w****s may hear as promises to push their concerns to the fore.

These three issues — i*****l i*********n, policing and Syrian refugees — raise distinct policy questions. But each connects through the same high-voltage current. On all of them, the conservative case implicitly presents a dynamic in which more diversity means less security. That contrasts starkly with Democrats, from President Obama down, who defend more diversity as a source of national strength.

Led by Donald Trump, many GOP p**********l candidates have argued that i*****l i*********n threatens Americans with street crime and terrorist infiltration. Though the Democratic p**********l contenders have all endorsed citizenship for undocumented immigrants, most Republican candidates are promising crackdowns, ranging from mass deportation to punishing (mostly Democratic-run) cities that don’t fully comply with federal immigration enforcement.

On crime, the Democratic candidates have praised the Black L***s M****r movement’s demands that police reform their interactions with African Americans. Led by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, more Republicans (echoed recently by FBI Director James Comey) are contending that those demands undermine law enforcement and unleash crime. Conservative writer Matthew Continetti recently proposed that Republicans should argue that Hillary Clinton “would release convicted felons into your neighborhood even as she takes away your Second Amendment right to self-defense.”

Now, the Republican contenders all reject Obama’s plans to admit Syrian refugees, as a cascade of GOP governors (joined by one Democrat, in New Hampshire) have pledged to resist resettlement in their states and the House v**ed Thursday to set unreachable standards for refugee screening. Trump, characteristically, moved the furthest, suggesting America may need to consider shutting down some mosques and monitor Muslims. All the Democratic contenders still support resettlement.

This gulf is polarizing a series of complex choices that demand subtle judgments. It’s dangerous and demagogic to sweepingly portray undocumented immigrants, challenges to police tactics or Syrian refugees as security threats. But it’s also misguided to reflexively exclude security concerns from these debates. Although studies suggest that undocumented immigrants actually commit fewer crimes than the public overall, some cities have erred by too broadly prohibiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

Similarly, while the need is unmistakable for changes in policing practices, even many Democratic mayors are searching for ways to balance heightened scrutiny of law enforcers with effective crime prevention. Humanitarian groups correctly noted this week that refugees already face more rigorous screening than other immigrants; still, it’s reasonable to demand that Syrian refugees face the toughest achievable vetting.

These converging disputes over immigration, police reform and refugees echo the racially tinged partisan collisions over crime that flared from the 1960s until Bill Clinton’s presidency. On issues from the death penalty to prison furloughs, Republicans at the time tarred Democrats as sublimating public safety to the interests of lawbreakers — while often picturing those lawbreakers as nonwhite men.

Shifts in both public attitudes and America’s demographic balance have left Democrats better positioned today than before to contest these arguments in the political arena. But these renewed confrontations threaten to widen racial divides at a time when many older, blue-collar, rural and religiously devout w****s are expressing unease with America’s t***sformation into a kaleidoscope society, without any dominant group.

The coalition of young people, minorities and socially liberal w****s that has repeatedly delivered the p**********l popular v**e to Democrats since 1992 is one that celebrates the nation’s growing diversity as “integral to our ascendant values,” Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg argues in his new book, “America Ascendant.” In an interview, Greenberg said he doubts that the attacks in Paris will prompt this “new American majority … to rethink the fundamental embrace of a diverse country and tolerance.” But he expects the renewed focus on terrorism to further inflame the groups already most resistant to the changes and “give force to those arguments in the Republican Party.”

With Democrats defending diversity and Republicans stressing security, the 2016 e******n seems certain to generate biting partisan arguments on the issues where the two considerations converge. And that will make it ominously tougher to find the balanced approaches necessary to both protect and respect all of America’s communities.

RONALD BROWNSTEIN is a senior writer at the National Journal. rbrownstein@national journal.com

THE RECENT PROTESTS by college students across the country are mostly about racial insensitivity and charges of discrimination and mistreatment on campuses today. But there also are complaints about what students see as symbolic vestiges of a r****t past. Some of these objections are more valid than others, but even the worthy ones raise difficult questions for institutions that revere tradition but also have obligations to the current generation of students.

On Wednesday, Princeton University announced it would no longer refer to the heads of its residential colleges as “masters,” a term inspired by the ancient universities in England. Dean of the College Jill Dolan said the title “heads of college” better captures “the spirit of their work and their contributions to campus residential life.”

Maybe so, but the name change also was a response to a concern, also voiced at Yale, that the term “master” is racially offensive because it could be associated with s***ery. Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber seemed to allude to that fanciful theory when he said that the word “master” had “discomfited some students, faculty and the heads of college themselves.” Never mind that the title of master of a college has no more to do with a s***e master than it does with a master chef. (It is more similar to master’s degrees, which presumably Princeton will continue to confer.)

Much less frivolous are demands that colleges rename buildings or programs identified with historical figures who supported s***ery or segregation. At Yale, some students want the university to find a new name for Calhoun College, named after the 19th century politician John C. Calhoun, a Yale graduate, U.S. senator, vice president

— and one of the nation’s fiercest defenders of s***ery. At Princeton, a group known as the Black Justice League has called for the name of Woodrow Wilson, the 28th president of the U.S., to be stripped from a residential college and the Wilson School of Public Policy and International Affairs.

It’s certainly understandable that African American students would feel uncomfortable residing in a college named for Calhoun, who is best known for championing the s***eholding Southern states. Wilson is a more complicated case. Historians say he harbored r****t views, and note that as president he resegregated the federal workforce. Yet his legacy is much larger and includes his role on the world stage. A former president of Princeton, he is also a more significant figure in that university’s history than Calhoun was in Yale’s.

We can see why African American — and other — students object to honoring historical figures who held noxious views about race. Yet the sad reality is that the United States has a long history of r****m and many of its founders were s***eholders. There is no easy answer to the question of whether or when the names of r****t historical figures should be removed from buildings or monuments. In some situations, an attempt to eliminate offense can amount to rewriting history. Better in those cases to acknowledge the history and learn from it. In other cases, the names should go.

Clinton draws lines on Islamic State

The candidate details differences between her views and those of Obama and Republican hopefuls.




BY DAVID LAUTER AND EVAN HALPER


Picture

SPENCER PLATT Getty Images

IN A POLICY SPEECH in New York, Hillary Clinton outlined her approach to defeating Islamic State. “To be successful, airstrikes will have to be combined with ground forces,” she said.


WASHINGTON — The U.S. needs to “intensify and broaden” its effort against Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq, including sending more ground forces, Hillary Clinton said Thursday in a speech that set out clear differences with the Obama administration as well as the Republican p**********l field.

“A more effective air campaign is necessary, but not sufficient,” Clinton said. “We should be honest that to be successful, airstrikes will have to be combined with ground forces” to take back the territory that Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has conquered in Syria and Iraq.

Clinton’s speech laid out a significantly more active approach toward combating Islamic State than President Obama has been willing to accept, a view she shied away from last weekend during the latest Democratic candidates’ debate.

Clinton, the former secretary of State, repeated her call for creating “no-fly” zones in northern Syria, which Obama has rejected; sharply criticized Turkey and Saudi Arabia, U.S. allies that have been on-again, off-again partners in the effort against Islamic State; and said the U.S. should make clear to the Iraqi government that Washington will arm Sunni Arab m*****as and Kurdish forces in Iraq with or without Baghdad’s cooperation.

She also warned that the encryption technology firms such as Apple have embraced for mobile phones and other devices may be interfering with the government’s ability to prevent terrorist attacks.

“We need Silicon Valley not to view government as its adversary,” she said, but to work with the government “to develop solutions that will both keep us safe and protect our privacy.”

In the aftermath of last week’s attacks in Paris, which French authorities say were planned by Islamic State, the question of how to combat the group has become central to the p**********l campaign.

Jeb Bush, the onetime Republican front-runner, laid out his policy on Wednesday in a speech in South Carolina that resembled Clinton’s on several key points — including the call for an expanded U.S. presence on the ground in Syria — although with fewer specifics.

Clinton’s chief rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, also spoke about Islamic State during a speech Thursday that mainly discussed his ideas about democratic socialism.

Sanders said the U.S. should help “create an organization like NATO to confront the security threats of the 21st century.”

The U.S. should work with its allies to defeat Islamic State, he said. But, he added, “wealthy and powerful Muslim nations in the region can no longer sit on the sidelines and expect the United States to do their work for them.”

In her speech, Clinton made clear that an expanded ground force does not mean a full-scale U.S. combat mission. “That is just not the smart move to make here,” she said, adding that “if we have learned anything from 15 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s that local people and nations have to secure their own communities.”

But, she added, the U.S. needs to “be prepared to deploy more” special operations forces than Obama has authorized and give U.S. troops currently in Iraq more leeway to embed with Iraqi units engaged in combat.

As recently as Monday, Obama rejected the idea of creating a no-fly zone over northern Syria. Clinton, however, said that creating that kind of safe area would be a “strategic opportunity” that would reduce the refugee crisis in Europe by giving a haven to Syrians fleeing the country’s civil war. It would also give the U.S. more “leverage” in negotiations with Russia, Turkey and other nations aimed at ending Syria’s civil war, now in its fifth year.

Clinton also said she believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin may be prepared to cooperate more with the U.S. effort against Islamic State, which has taken responsibility for blowing up a Russian airliner over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula last month. And she held out what appeared to be an incentive for Russian involvement, saying that the U.S. needs to “prioritize” the fight against the Islamic State over the effort to remove from power Syrian President Bashar Assad, a Russian ally.

“There is not going to be a successful military effort at this point to overturn Assad,” Clinton said. “So our efforts should be focused on ISIS,” which she described as the “common enemy.”

The Obama administration has been skeptical of Russia’s willingness to help in the effort against Islamic State and has worried that a public acknowledgment that Assad might remain in power, even for a t***sitional period, would alienate Sunni Arab allies such as Saudi Arabia, which sees Assad as a client of Iran.

Clinton, however, seemed less concerned with placating the Saudis and Gulf Arab states. “Once and for all, the Saudis, the Qataris and others need to stop their citizens from directly funding extremist organizations” as well as “schools and mosques around the world” that have become centers of recruitment for extremist militant groups, she said.

“Our efforts will only succeed if the Arabs and Turks step up in a much bigger way,” she said. “This is their fight, and they need to act like it.”

In a statement, the Republican National Committee labeled Clinton the “architect of the failed Obama foreign policy that has presided over a steep increase in radical Islamic terrorism.”

“Rather than putting forward a new plan to defeat ISIS, Hillary Clinton offered soaring platitudes and largely doubled down on the existing Obama strategy,” the statement said.

Clinton offered her own riposte, criticizing Republicans who have called for blocking Syrian refugees from entering the U.S. or allowing in only Christian refugees.

“We cannot allow terrorists to intimidate us into abandoning our values,” she said. “Turning away orphans, applying a religious test, discriminating against Muslims, slamming the door on every Syrian refugee, that is just not who we are. We are better than that,” she said.

Referring to a common refrain among Republicans on the campaign trail, Clinton said the “obsession in some quarters with a ‘clash of civilizations’ or repeating the specific words ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ … gives these criminals, these murderers more standing than they deserve.

“Islam is not our adversary.” david.lauter@latimes.com evan.halper@latimes.com

The Republican p**********l hopeful calls for leadership and more troops to fight Islamic State.


BY DAVID LAUTER


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MIC SMITH Associated Press

“WE MUST restore our place as the leader and indispensable power of the free world,” Jeb Bush said at the Citadel military college in South Carolina, calling for expanding the active-duty Army and Marine Corps.


WASHINGTON — The U.S. “will need to increase our presence on the ground” in the Middle East to combat Islamic State, Jeb Bush said Wednesday, crossing a line that several of his rivals for the Republican p**********l nomination have so far sidestepped.

In a speech that his campaign billed as a major address on military policy, the onetime Republican frontrunner did not specify how many troops he would send or whether he would have them engage in direct combat against Islamic State.

“The bulk of these ground troops will need to come from local forces that we have built workable relationships with,” said Bush, the former governor of Florida.

But the U.S. “should not delay in leading a global coalition to take out ISIS with overwhelming force,” he said, using an acronym for Islamic State.

“While air power is essential, it alone cannot bring the results we seek,” he added.

The Obama administration has dispatched several thousand U.S. troops to Iraq to train Iraqi forces and help direct airstrikes. And late last month, the administration announced it would send special operations forces to Syria.

But President Obama has resisted a direct combat role for U.S. troops. Iraqi and Syrian forces need to take primary responsibility for recapturing territory that Islamic State has seized in those two countries, he has said.

How much Bush’s plan would differ from the administration’s in practice is unclear because the candidate has not specified what sort of force he has in mind.

“The scope ... should be in line with what our military generals, not politicians, recommend will be necessary,” he said in his speech, delivered at the Citadel military college in South Carolina.

Though his plan lacked details, Bush clearly set up a contrast in language with Obama.

“Radical Islamic terrorists have declared war on the Western world,” he said. “Their aim is our total destruction. We can’t withdraw from this threat or negotiate with it. We have but one choice: to defeat it.”

Bush did agree with Obama on one key point, regarding Syrian President Bashar Assad.

“To take out ISIS, we must end Assad’s brutal war against his own people and create a political solution that allows for a stable Syria,” he said. Obama said Monday that a political settlement in Syria was a necessary step toward defeating Islamic State.

Ending the Syrian civil war, now in its fifth year, has stymied diplomats from the U.S. and other nations.

Russia and Iran back Assad and say the U.S. and its European allies should join forces with the Syrian leader to defeat Islamic State. On the other side, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other predominantly Sunni Arab countries say Assad must leave power, and they have made the fight against him a higher priority than efforts against Islamic State, which is a Sunni Muslim militant group.

In keeping with the overall Republican critique of Obama as being too passive in the face of international crises, Bush called for a more active U.S. role.

“We don’t need to be the world’s policeman, but we must restore our place as the leader and indispensable power of the free world,” he said, calling for expanding the size of the active-duty Army and Marine Corps and for accelerating the Pentagon’s purchase of new ships and planes.

He also said he would restore the National Security Agency’s controversial program, begun by the administration of his brother, George W. Bush, after the Sept. 11 attacks, to stockpile information about telephone calls made in the United States.

Under legislation passed by Congress this year, the NSA is scheduled to stop its bulk collection of such phone data after Nov. 29. david.lauter@latimes.com Twitter: @DavidLauter

TELEVISION REVIEW



MARY McNAMARA TELEVISION CRITIC


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NATI HARNIK Associated Press

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON chats with moderator John Dickerson before CBS News’ Democratic p**********l primary debate in Des Moines on Saturday.


Initially solemn, typically wonkish and monotonously polite to the moderators and one another, the three Democratic p**********l candidates still managed to provide a few surprising moments Saturday night during their second debate.

Hillary Rodham Clinton complimented George W. Bush and accused Bernie Sanders of impugning her integrity.

Martin O’Malley called Clinton “Annie Oakley” on gun control and “weak tea” on big banks.

Sanders founded yet another T-shirt line by announcing that “Wall Street’s business model is fraud,” CBS used Twitter in a way that did not look like old-media floundering, and Dwight D. Eisenhower continued his 2016 Greatest Hits Tour.

A week after Donald Trump praised Ike for deporting more than a million Mexicans, Sanders offered him as a model of high tax rates for the rich: “I’m not much of a socialist compared to Eisenhower,” he said.

Most important, however, was the moment that did not occur: Though they were resolute in their condemnation of Islamic State, none of the candidates went inflammatory or ballistic.

Taking place just a day after more than 120 people were k**led in terrorist attacks in Paris, the debate, which was held in Des Moines and aired on CBS, opened without the now-usual campaign trail/reality-show pomp and pageantry. Instead, moderator John Dickerson, host of “Face the Nation,” solemnly reminded viewers that open debate was “a symbol of freedom.”

Then, after a moment of silence, he began asking newly added questions about the U.S. response to Islamic State and unrest in the Middle East.

But those hoping for burning rhetoric, sweeping resolutions or even clear plans were probably disappointed.

While many of the Republican p**********l candidates have made strong statements in wake of Friday’s horrific attacks — Trump suggested that an armed French citizenry would have prevented the tragedy, Sen. Ted Cruz called for significant air power, and many if not all wanted to close the U.S. to Syrian refugees — the Democratic nominees chose to tread more carefully.

So carefully that it was difficult to know what any of them would do in similar circumstance should one of them become president.

Indeed, during the opening minutes of their second debate, Sanders, Clinton and O’Malley were more explicit in their arguments about what the terrorists should be called — extreme jihadists rather than Islamic extremists — than they were about their visions of an American response.

To be fair, Dickerson, for reasons of his own, never asked the obvious question

— “What do you think the U.S. should do next?” Instead, he called on each of the candidates to critique President Obama’s and Clinton’s handling of terrorism in general and Islamic State in particular. This put Clinton immediately on the defensive and Sanders and O’Malley in the unenviable position of criticizing their party’s president one day after a horrifying international crisis.

O’Malley called for more “human intelligence,” and Sanders blamed the rise of terrorism on the Iraq war, which, he pointed out, Clinton had v**ed for. Clinton quickly reminded everyone that many acts of terrorism, including 9/11, had preceded the war, which she once again admitted was a mistake, and unity returned to the conversation.

Early minutes were spent agreeing that the Middle East is complicated, the world is dangerous and the enemy is not Islam, a distinction Clinton thanked George W. Bush for making in the days after 9/11.

Indeed, until the first commercial break and beyond, the candidates spent so much time openly agreeing with one another with minor caveats that they seemed to have forgotten that they were political rivals. That changed when the questions returned to the economy and everyone seemed to feel on firmer ground.

As the front-runner, Clinton got the toughest questions and the brunt of the criticism, onstage and off. At one point, Sanders criticized Clinton’s reliance on “Wall Street donors” and all that implies. Clinton defended her impugned integrity in a strange and scattershot way by announcing that 60% of her donors were women and that she had stood by Wall Street, and the rest of New York, during and after 9/11.

If Dickerson, who was otherwise strong on calling out contradictions and non-answers, let her get away with evoking 9/11 in a discussion of campaign donations, Twitter didn’t. A few minutes later, co-moderator Nancy Cordes, CBS News congressional correspondent, asked Clinton to respond to one negative response, marking the first use of Twitter as a real-time participant of a debate.

But even with a few mild barbs — O’Malley derided Clinton as having been “Annie Oakley” before changing her stance on gun control, and Sanders dismissed one of O’Malley’s references to his work as governor of Maryland by saying, “Baltimore is not now one of the safest cities in America” — the tenor of the remarks leaned more toward conversation than debate.

So much so that Clinton felt comfortable enough to laud the similarities she shared with her rivals. “We have our differences,” she said. “But they pale compared with what’s happening on the Republican side.

“All of us support funding Planned Parenthood. All of us believe c*****e c****e is real. All of us want equal pay for equal work. They don’t believe in any of that. So let’s focus on what this e******n is really going to be about.”

Not surprisingly, neither Sanders nor O’Malley disagreed. mary.mcnamara

@latimes.com

Architects design skyscrapers....not craftsmen...hence the pay differential..duh...........

Plenty of gentrifiers are black, and white neighborhoods are changing, too.




By Kay S. Hymowitz


LIKEALLmajor economic and demographic shifts, gentrification has upended familiar ways of life. It has also led to dubious, racially tinged theories. In left-leaning blog posts and articles, changes wrought in places like Harlem or Inglewood are routinely described as “ethnic cleansing” or “racial cleansing,” or, more prosaically, “white people stealing stuff.” In a widely discussed 2014 rant, Spike Lee said white newcomers to the once-black neighborhood of Fort Greene in Brooklyn had “Christopher Columbus syndrome.”

Lower the rhetorical heat, and you get the point. In the mid-20th century, poor Southern b****s migrated into Northern and Midwestern cities. A combination of black preference and white discrimination helped create mostly African American neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, Bronzeville in Chicago and Columbia Heights in Washington, D.C., where, despite many urban ills, residents forged a local culture about which they felt considerable p***e. Now, seemingly out of nowhere, a heavily white college-educated population has started checking out apartments in these areas. During the first decade of the new millennium, a number of gentrifying cities with large black populations, including Chicago and New Orleans, lost more than 10% of their black residents.

But as shocking as a whiter Bed-Stuy may be, gentrification is best understood through the lens of class, not race. For starters, plenty of gentrifiers are black. The black educated middle class, some of whom had left for the suburbs when inner cities were collapsing, are now driving up rents for longtime residents in gentrifying areas of New York, Washington and L.A., just as their white counterparts are.

Also undermining the racial theory of gentrification is the disappearance of numerous white working-class neighborhoods. In a recent study, Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson found that Chicago neighborhoods with a substantial white working-class population were more likely to gentrify than areas that were more than 40% black. Remember, too, that gentrifiers have been considering many hardscrabble neighborhoods, like DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) in Brooklyn, that never had sizable black populations.

Another major current of gentrification suspicion blames its dislocations on an insatiably greedy 1%. “How Oligarchs Destroyed a Major American City,” announces a Salon headline — about Houston, of all places. “[A]t every point,” explains Gavin Mueller, a writer at the left-wing “Jacobin,” gentrification “has been a takeover planned by large business interests who fund their projects with tax abatements.... A powerful capitalist class of bankers, real-estate developers, and investors is driving gentrification, using a mixture of huge loans (to which only they have access) and government funding to push land values higher.”

A nugget of t***h is hidden in what one could call the Occupy Theory of gentrification, though it needs to be set in historical context. For a long time, the problem for cities was that “large business interests” had no interest in building there. With populations declining, who would buy (or rent) what they had to sell? To encourage investment, city governments courted businesses with tax abatements and loan guarantees. Some developers signed on, though they couldn’t have known for certain that the educated class was readying itself for an invasion. Now gentrifying cities are rolling in affluent customers. The windfalls for speculators, investors and builders have understandably caused some grumbling from rent-challenged taxpayers, chafing over their contributions to those perhaps redundant abatements.

The Occupy Theory misses the dilemma that city halls face: Where are they supposed to put all those programmers and designers knocking at their gates? Things are so bad in San Francisco that one young entrepreneur is charging $1,000-a-month rents for shipping containers stored in warehouses, retrofitted into tiny apartments.

The demand for high-end housing has set the stage for some dodgy landlord dealings. A recent oral history of gentrification in New York, “The Edge Becomes the Center,” by D. W. Gibson, profiles a number of unscrupulous and even illegal dealings by landlords and their attorneys. One chapter concerns a Hasidic businessman whose r****t machinations confirm Spike Lee’s worst fantasies. He tries to buy out black tenants in all the Brooklyn buildings he invests in since, he insists, white people don’t want to live with b****s. “Every black person has a price,” he says. “The average price for a black person here in Bed-Stuy is $30,000. Up over there in East New York, it’s $10,000.”

How many bad actors are out there? Judging from the anecdotes in Gibson’s book and from tenant-advocacy groups, you’d conclude “a lot.” Researchers, however, haven’t found forced displacement of tenants and owners to be nearly as widespread as these stories suggest. In a study of several New York City neighborhoods from 1986 to 1995, Columbia University urban-planning professor Lance Freeman found a displacement rate only 0.5 % higher in gentrifying New York City neighborhoods than in areas that remained low-income.

A 2010 paper from New York University’s Furman Center actually found less turnover and more renter satisfaction among poor households in “gaining” or gentrifying neighborhoods in U.S. metropolitan areas during the 1990s than in stagnant areas. The most pessimistic picture comes from a University of Toronto study, and even that one fails to qualify as dystopian. The authors calculate an average of 10,000 displacements a year among renters in New York City from 1991 to 2002. Most of the displaced blamed costs. A small number did become homeless.

The findings are troubling, but keep in mind that those10,000 represent less than 10% of intracity moves among renters. The urban poor have always moved more than the affluent, in large measure because they’re searching for better opportunities. Economist Joe Cortright, who studies mobility and urban development, observes that “far more of the long-suffering poor move out of high-poverty neighborhoods that stay poor than move away from high-poverty neighborhoods that see a significant reduction in poverty.”

Shifty landlords, suspect tax abatements and zoning changes are all worthy subjects of policy debate, but no policy can change the crucial fact that gentrifying cities are far better off than their cheap-rent counterparts. Cities like Detroit, Cleveland and Dayton, Ohio, that have struggled unsuccessfully to attract a large professional and creative middle class would like nothing better than to see such people beating a path to their forlorn neighborhoods. True, those places have lower rates of ine******y than glamour-pusses like Los Angeles and New York. But they also have higher levels of concentrated poverty. Middle-class residents bring investment and safety, support local businesses and pay taxes that, if government behaves itself, can go to upgrading infrastructure and improving city services for everyone.

Regardless of what we think about it, the conditions that drive gentrification and urban ine******y, displacement and neighborhood turnover are not likely to ease up. The United States produces about 1.6 million new college graduates yearly, up from 840,000 in 1970 and 1 million in 1990. Many of those 1.6 million will want to U-Haul their dorm gear to locations with the best job opportunities, which means cities such as New York, Washington, Seattle and Los Angeles. That means more demand for housing and offices, more competition for space and — if development continues to be resisted as it is in so many places — ever-higher rents.

KAY S. HYMOWITZ is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. This essay was excerpted from the 25th anniversary issue of Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.

Research backs students’ view that microaggressions matter




SANDY BANKS


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BRIAN DAVIDSON Getty Images

STUDENTS CELEBRATE the resignation of University of Missouri President Timothy M. Wolfe; he stepped down amid criticism of his handling of racial issues.


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MEL MELCON Los Angeles Times

RINI SAMPATH, right, president of USC’s student body, drew national attention to the microaggression issue after she was the target of a racial slur.


When I attended college in the ’70s, microaggression wasn’t a thing.

Back then at Ohio State, we were always protesting something

— racial discrimination, sexism, the Vietnam War — and there were plenty of ways to offend.

I learned to overlook lame comments from professors amazed that I could hold my own with white classmates. I willed myself not to be hurt when I took a seat in class and the white girl next to me rolled her eyes and moved across the room.

We absorbed the inane and retaliated only against the most grievous insults — not with administrative muscle but with our brothers: brawny black guys who relished kicking butt.

I suppose things are better now; there are forums and committees and official sanctions for everything from inappropriate Halloween costumes to ugly name-calling, condemned these days as “h**e speech.”

Minority students don’t feel the need to be invisible or pretend they don’t hear slurs directed their way, as my friends and I often did.

They’re fighting back and going beyond obvious t***sgressions to challenge slights and snubs — even the puny and inadvertent — that challenge their sense of belonging.

“People are going to dismiss us … because they say it’s political correctness gone too far,” USC student body President Rini Sam-path told Times reporters this week for a story on the rising profile of microaggression.

Sampath drew national attention to the issue in September after someone loudly insulted her Indian heritage in a frat house catcall. Every day, she said, “students walk into a room and someone makes fun of their accent or [they get] kicked out of parties, and we have to take those things seriously.”

::

Over the last decade, researchers indeed have begun to take those things seriously.

More than 5,000 studies suggest that even minor slights can take a toll on students’ performance and mental health. And that doesn’t apply just to minorities.

Take James Vaughn, a self-described “50+ year old white, politically independent v**er who leans fiscally conservative” and lives in Orange County.

He emailed me a few months ago and shared a perspective I hadn’t heard before.

He too was a college student in the ’70s, and spent a semester studying in Nairobi, Kenya — one of three w***e A******ns among hundreds of black African students.

He still remembers the sting of petty snubs:

“Clerks ignoring me to help black customers first. Cafeteria workers consistently giving more food to the [black] students behind and in front of me in line. People stopping their conversations to silently look at me while I passed by, as if questioning why I was there. Refusing to share a sidewalk as we passed each other, so that I had to step off into the mud.”

When Vaughn mustered the nerve to complain to a university dean about “a security guard at the computer lab who ALWAYS demanded to see my student ID even though I knew her by name and was in and out of the lab several times a day,” the guard simply shrugged and told the dean “They all look alike to me.”

Vaughn tried to slough it off.

“It would sound childish to say that other people were getting more food than me in the cafeteria,” he said. “But these little things built up and created some resentment.”

They also taught him what being the “other” felt like — and how even insignificant social slights can conspire to disenfranchise an outsider.

“If I was so frustrated after just six weeks of this, how would I feel after months, years and generations of this?” he said.

“When a line is so obviously crossed and nothing is done or it doesn’t seem to be treated seriously, then I completely understand the outbursts of anger.”

::

Vaughn understands why some people consider the concept of microaggression a mere contrivance of the thin-skinned.

“White America doesn’t have the experience of the buildup of subtle r****m, so they don’t know why something that to them seems small is really actually a big deal,” he said.

It isn’t the act itself, but the accumulation over time that creates frustration, anger and a sense of helplessness.

And it’s not just about race or g****r or ethnicity or sexual orientation. It’s about being continually reminded that you’re different, assigned to the outskirts of what’s considered mainstream.

When I read the comment that led to the resignation of the Claremont Mc-Kenna Dean Mary Spell-man, a single word caught my eye: Spellman had emailed a Latina student and promised to work with those who “don’t fit our CMC mold.”

Our mold. Something that belongs to us. Some place that sees you as misfit or intruder.

That phrase doesn’t make Spellman a r****t; it does reflect a mindset that’s apt to alienate young people trying to find their footing in that world.

So how do we get through this gridlock of reproach and recrimination?

I asked Vaughn, who works as a consultant for a nonprofit that helps members of Congress better relate to and understand their constituents. If he can do that, surely he can help mediate this.

But he sees challenges on both sides.

He can imagine the unease of minority students, trying to forthrightly address an unintended slight at the moment it occurs “without coming across as thin-skinned, strident or making a mountain out of a molehill.”

And he understands the angst of well-meaning w****s, mentally rehearsing and parsing their words, afraid they’ll say something that inadvertently offends.

“This is such a minefield for white people,” Vaughn said. “If we could have honest conversations it would help.

“I see the anger and the protests, which I can now feel empathy for. But honestly, I don’t have a clue as to what I am supposed to do about it.” sandy.banks@latimes.com Twitter: @SandyBanksLAT

Death threats keep many black students away as the university faces more fallout.




BY MATT PEARCE


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JUSTIN L. STEWART Columbia Missourian

PARTS OF the University of Missouri were eerily empty after anonymous death threats were made against black students. A student at another university was arrested on suspicion of posting several of the threats.


COLUMBIA, Mo. — On the desolate Arts & Sciences mall, 18-year-old freshman Kyra Guerrero sat alone Wednesday, sipping a cup of coffee.

The University of Missouri’s normally bustling sidewalks were eerily empty. The black activists’ tent city on a nearby quad was gone, removed overnight.

Many students refused to come to campus Wednesday, kept away by death threats made against black students a night earlier. But Guerrero — staging her own kind of protest — refused to stay home.

It angered her “that someone was going to stop me from attending Spanish!” said Guerrero, who is multiracial. “I like Spanish.”

Two days after a turbulent semester of racial protests culminated with stunning resignation announcements from the University of Missouri system president and the campus chancellor, raw emotions, fear and racial tension continued to fracture the campus.

On Monday, student protests gave way to celebration after the resignations. But the mood swiftly turned to resentment when activists and journalists scuffled at a protest. By Tuesday night the mood turned fearful when a series of threats made on the anonymous social media platform Yik Yak sent the campus into a spiral of uncertainty and distrust.

“It’s been very fragile,” Guerrero said.

Black students sheltered with friends off campus. One of the more chilling threats had warned: “I’m going to stand my ground tomorrow and shoot every black person I see.”

By Wednesday morning a white 19-year-old Missouri University of Science & Technology student, H****r Park, was arrested at his campus almost 100 miles away in Rolla on suspicion of posting several of the death threats. He was being held without bond.

“I really want to know — does he have any ill will toward black people? Or was he just talking in anger?” asked Earl Dunn, a 22-year-old senior studying finance, as he sat in the university’s empty student center. “I guess he felt safe talking anonymously on Yik Yak, but in this day and age, is anything really anonymous?”

But the fear had already taken hold on campus, and other incidents stirred alarm.

One black student said on Twitter that she’d been intimidated by men in a truck. Others reported that a white man was shouting and cursing in an angry, unhinged speech in the speaker’s circle by the library.

Students — including student body president Payton Head — posted several “confirmed” reports that the Ku Klux Klan was on campus, which turned out to be false, according to the campus police department.

Since the resignations of system President Tim Wolfe and university Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin, black activists have increasingly withdrawn from the public square. The tent city erected by the Concerned Student 1950 movement was gone Wednesday —although about 100 demonstrators marched from the black culture center to the student center.

But powerful messages continued to be shared on Twitter, where activists used the #BlackOnCampus hashtag to describe their own experiences.

Jonathan Butler, who recently ended a seven-day hunger strike seeking Wolfe’s removal, wrote Wednesday that he had been told that “talking about race and r****m is being ‘oversensitive.’ ”

In opposing comments on Yik Yak, others aired their own frustrations.

“Wolfe resigned! R****m is dead!! No one will ever do anything offensive at Mizzou ever again!!!!” one user wrote sarcastically, drawing 277 “upv**es” of approval.

“It [ticks] me off how the media is reporting on this like Loftin and Wolfe were huge r****ts and all of the students wanted them gone,” another user wrote, gaining 170 upv**es. “False.”

“The fact that Yik Yak has been so crazy popular over the last couple days just goes to show that these protests have created an environment where people are afraid to voice their opinions publicly,” one local user wrote Tuesday night, accumulating 50 replies in two hours.

The fallout continued for two staff members who were recorded trying to physically remove student journalists from the activists’ tent encampment. University Greek Life Director Janna Basler was placed on administrative leave Wednesday, and communications professor Melissa Click resigned from a role in the journalism school.

Another faculty member, nutrition and exercise professor Dale E. Brigham, wrote to his students Tuesday night saying he would not let the death threats deter him from holding class and giving an exam.

“If you don’t feel safe coming to class, don’t come to class,” Brigham wrote in an email to his students. “I will be there, and there will be an exam administered in our class.... If you give in to bullies, they win. The only way bullies are defeated is by standing up to them.”

But a message intended to be inspirational was angrily posted to Twitter by a student. There, users concerned about the threats accused Brigham of being indifferent to the dangers posed to black students.

On Wednesday, Brigham apologized, announcing that he canceled the test — and was also stepping aside.

“It’s a small town; very few people are used to that sort of attention,” said one of his students, Ben Cairns, 25, who said that although Brigham’s email may have been poorly written, he meant well.

Dunn, the finance student — who has never taken one of Brigham’s classes but says the professor’s reputation is sterling — said he didn’t know whether there were many safe forums on campus to talk about race. matt.pearce@latimes.com