A small group of students at UC Berkeley recently protested a midterm exam. They accused the professor of not checking his privilege and seemed angry at other students for not siding with them.
They were clearly trying to tie the situation to race and immigration but the whole thing was so ridiculous that no one was taking them seriously.
Ian Miles Cheong reported at the Daily Caller:
UC Berkeley Students Protest Exam, Accuse Peers And Professor Of Supporting White SupremacyUC Berkeley students attempted to shut down their midterm exam, with claims that it would have a negative impact on their physical and mental health. The students, who were captured on video, demanded a “take-home essay with significant time to prepare” and accused their uncooperative professor of not checking his privilege.“This is a campus that is truly related throughout Latin America to the notion of free speech, said professor Harley Shaiken to the class, eliciting laughter and derision from the protesters.Dismissive of the professor, the activists claimed that their “well-beings are being put on the line because of the emotional, mental, and physical stress that this university is compounding with what is already going on in [their] everyday lives.”One protester shouted: “Have you ever checked ‘unlisted’ or ‘undocumented immigrant’? I don’t think so!”Shaiken, who has written about workers’ rights in Mexico, is an expert in labor issues and earned the Outstanding Teaching Award at the University of California, San Diego in 1991. Despite his expertise in the subject, the students called him unfit to lecture them on the subject because he is white.“Are you trying to silence us right now? Is that what you’re trying to do?” said a protester responding to a student who jokingly asked if it was a filibuster.
Conor Beck of the Washington Free Beacon has more:
“I don’t know why you’re still, like, sitting down, y’all. I don’t understand. I really don’t understand. Y’all can take your f—ing test, but people are dying out there,” another protestor said before then accusing students of supporting white supremacy.Professor Shaiken offered to continue the conversation outside, but the protesters refused and said were going to the Department of Ethnic Studies to complain, an action Shaiken said they were “more than welcome to do.”
Watch the video:
Here’s a longer version:
Tom Knighton of PJ Media puts this in perspective:
In short, a white professor wants them to take their midterms in the same manner as practically every other professor in the nation wants, and thus he’s wrong because he’s “white.”Frankly, Shaiken was right to refuse their demands.If these students are taking a class on labor issues in the U.S. and Mexico, it means this probably isn’t their first college class. By now they know that midterms are the norm in many classes throughout the college. They know how this works.Instead, they’re trying to bully him because he’s a white man teaching on a somewhat ethnic topic. They’re demanding he “check his privilege” because they expect the white man to capitulate to their insane demands, and the fact that he won’t is taken as proof of his racism.
There’s not much I could add to that. It’s spot on.
Featured image source.
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