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Hamilton College students protest too many “white, upper class, able-bodied males” at campus pub

Hamilton College students protest too many “white, upper class, able-bodied males” at campus pub

“makes women, alongside other LGBTQIA+ and POC members of our community feel inferior, unwelcomed, and outnumbered”

When I first saw this story, I thought maybe it was a hoax, or at least parody. But apparently it’s for real, or at least the campus newspaper The Spectator treats it as being real.

It’s about my alma mater, Hamilton College, which has seen its share of social justice activism in recent years reflecting a generational faculty shift to the left.  Hamilton is a textbook example of how a relatively small group of left-wing faculty activists can take over an institution, as detailed in our 2012 post, Western Civilization driven off campus at Hamilton College.

While Hamilton is not as bad as some liberal arts schools, identity-politics and intersectional quasi-religious fervor has resulted in absurd results, such as segregated diversity training in 2013, as detailed in these posts:

Hamilton also fell victim to the victimhood narratives of recent years, in which students issues lengthy and absurd “demands” on the college, Inflation: Hamilton College students issue 83 Demands.

The result of this identity-politics activism has been to turn students against each other, as one student noted in 2015, “As a white, heterosexual girl, I risk a lot by publicly expressing my opinions on this matter”.

Most of the turmoil at Hamilton took place under a prior president, Joan Hinde Stewart. In July 2016, Hamilton installed a new president, former Cornell Law School professor and then Dean of the University of Minnesota Law School, David Wippman.

So it will be curious to see how Wippman handles this controversy, in which a student group was formed to protest too many white males eating at the campus “Little Pub.” As with most of such protests, the Little Pub controversy is just a proxy for a larger fight.

The Hamilton College Spectator reports, “PUB POWER” group aims to address perceived white upper-class hegemony:

This week, between 11:30 AM and 1 PM, regular patrons of The Little Pub (a time commonly known as “Pub Lunch”) might have noticed an unfamiliar dynamic. Such a divergence from the Pub’s expected lunchtime normalcy is the result of a Facebook group called “PUB POWER”; the group has set a goal of disrupting the typical demographic makeup of the space.

According to the group’s description, PUB POWER aims to “have as many women possible attend pub lunch in order to dismantle [the] hegemony and reclaim the space as open to all.” They add, “Historically, white, upper class, able-bodied males have dominated and claimed many ‘public spaces’ as their own. Here, at Hamilton College, the Little Pub Lunch serves as a prime example of a space occupied solely by men.”

Although the group acknowledges that any detrimental actions or tendencies of the white, upper class, and able-bodied men who tend to frequent Pub Lunch may be “unintentional”, the group asserts that their dominance over the space “makes women, alongside other LGBTQIA+ and POC members of our community feel inferior, unwelcomed, and outnumbered.”

According to screenshots obtained by The Spectator, the Facebook group appears to have an active following. Posts encouraging members to “smash the patriarchy” achieved upwards of 20 reactions, while group organizers, Irina Rojas ’18 and Ysabel Coss ’18, used the forum to share galvanizing messages of support after a “strong” first day turnout.

Ashley Huntington ’20, an active member of PUB POWER, says that the Facebook group currently has 489 members and that it is “gaining momentum” and “the word is spreading” to women around campus. She hopes that turnout continues to improve in the latter half of the week.

https://www.facebook.com/hcspectator/photos/a.10152413366015003.1073741825.111149035002/10155358237200003/?type=3&theater&ifg=1

The Spectator goes on to note that the protest group idea started after several Hamilton students attended the National Women’s Studies Association conference last November:

Huntington traces the origins of the group back to the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in Baltimore, Maryland that seven Women and Gender Studies majors attended in November. Listening to a panel of women speak on the topic of feminist activism, Huntington says that she “immediately thought about the mostly all-men turnout during Pub Lunch.”

In the past, Huntington says that she and her friends had entered the Pub intending to have lunch, only to “immediately turn around and go eat somewhere else.” She calls this a reaction to the “spatial phenomena” where “women do not feel welcome in the space, along with people of color and LGBTQIA+ members.”

Leili Aliyari ’20, another group member, echoes many of Huntington’s sentiments. To her, the purpose of the group is “restoring balance to the campus community and turning the Pub from a space solely dominated by mostly white male athletes, where women and people of color felt intimidated, to a space that is open to all members of this campus.” In her experience attending Pub Lunch this week, she said that turnout was “fantastic” and that “even though I felt a bit anxious before walking in, I saw a lot of women there which was empowering.”

Having read that Spectator report, I still was suspicious this was all a hoax, but this seems to be real, as evidenced by this editorial by the Editor-in-Chief Charles Dunst, calling the Pub Power movement to task:

As readers can clearly delineate from the front page of this week’s Spectator, notions of victimhood abound on this campus, even going as far as to infiltrate spaces, such as the Little Pub, which most students would consider to be mundane, apolitical, and in no way “problematic.” Yet, according to the group known as “PUB POWER”, the Pub’s lunch crowd is reflective of white, upper class, able-bodied male hegemony. My note here is not to apply a normative ruling on the protest itself, but instead to comment on and critique inconsistencies and broad applications of victimhood with which I take issue. While I am prepared for the promised-influx of irate, accusatory emails from dissenting students and faculty alike, the co-opting of my identity by a separate movement in the pursuit of aims I do not necessarily support is fundamentally misguided and worth addressing.

The contemporary campus cult of intersectionality asserts that oppression and discrimination results from an individual’s various social identities and that those with certain combinations of identities are more likely to be oppressed than others. While there is no doubt that a disabled black woman is likely to experience more oppression than an able-bodied white male, elite college students continue to apply the concept of intersectionality to their own activism in a way which derides the individual agency of the historically-oppressed peoples they aim to represent. PUB POWER is guilty on this charge….

There is no assertion that the white men of the Pub are in anyway homophobic or racist. Instead, it is apparently implied that white men, due to the intersectional hierarchy of victimhood, are, by default, oppressors. Their mere presence, despite the lack of any actions indicating bias, is, for the activists, apparently enough to trigger fears of inferiority, exclusion, and, ultimately, oppression….

The PUB POWER controversy at Hamilton is a microcosm of how identity politics are destroying campus life. Dunst got it right, campus intersectionality and identity activism is “cheap, tokenistic, and lazy.”

Getting back to President Wippman. How will he react to this protest movement? How would he react if a student group formed to protest too many non-white females eating at The Little Pub? Therein lies the problem on campuses, racism and sexism are tolerated when it comes from social justice warriors.

Maybe it’s all a hoax. Or a parody. Maybe we’ll all wake up and find out identity-politics and intersectional activism on campuses was just a bad dream.

[Featured Image: Statue of Alexander Hamilton, via Hamilton College website]

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Comments

Herein lies the core of the matter: The left BELIEVES that being non-white-male renders you INFERIOR.

It is the same rationale behind affirmative action policies. DemoKKKrats changed the white robe and hood for other means more adequate for the times, but they are still the same.

    notamemberofanyorganizedpolicital in reply to Exiliado. | February 17, 2018 at 11:56 am

    Well said.

    I’m starting to believe the Democrat-Party run colleges
    are the most racist places in the universe. (That includes private and
    public colleges.)

    Wow! Do we need fiction writers anymore? Fiction writes can’t out do the evil things the Leftists and Snowflakes are doing.

    Maybe I should have said science-fiction…….

    They don’t really believe it.

    They just utilize it to usurp power they are not otherwise qualified to obtain.

    Frauds AND incompetents.

    Arminius in reply to Exiliado. | February 17, 2018 at 3:17 pm

    “Herein lies the core of the matter: The left BELIEVES that being non-white-male renders you INFERIOR…”

    Considering how much they talk about it, and how they fly into a panic when discovering that English literature courses are in English, and Western Civilization courses are about Western Civilization, they’ve convinced me they’re right. If people insist they are inferior I have no choice but to take them at their word. They better than anyone else know what they are talking about.

    “makes women, alongside other LGBTQIA+ and POC members of our community feel inferior, unwelcomed, and outnumbered”

    Only an inferior person could write that sentence. Every other word is just wrong. I especially like how they lump women in with OTHER members of the LGBT and POC crowd.

    Which freaking letter are women?

    And I have news for the LGBT crew. Given that collectively you make up maybe 2% of the population you are outnumbered. Same goes for the POC types. You’re called minorities for a reason.

    ConradCA in reply to Exiliado. | February 18, 2018 at 9:24 am

    Oops: “being non-white-male renders you INFERIOR”

    Don’t you mean white-male?

      Mannie in reply to ConradCA. | February 18, 2018 at 12:53 pm

      No. They feel inferior, because they were brought up by Democrat identity politics to believe they are inferior. All this * Power shouting is wailing against their own self perceived inferiority.

      Exiliado in reply to ConradCA. | February 18, 2018 at 3:00 pm

      What makes you think I meant something different than what I wrote?

I would with hold judgement on this story just in case. If the story proves to be fact and this school is selling some very expensive trash to its students…then parents should be in revolt.

Funny. Every single one of those students is more than happy to attend a college/university founded, built, funded and endowed by upper class, white able-bodied males. And that includes the historically black colleges

“In the past, Huntington says that she and her friends had entered the Pub intending to have lunch, only to “immediately turn around and go eat somewhere else.”

That was her choice, the men in the pub had nothing to do with that, and they probably didn’t even notice.

“She calls this a reaction to the “spatial phenomena” where “women do not feel welcome in the space, along with people of color and LGBTQIA+ members.”

Did someone, some MALE, walk up to her and tell her that her group wasn’t welcome in The Pub?

    notamemberofanyorganizedpolicital in reply to herm2416. | February 17, 2018 at 12:00 pm

    Well isn’t that nice of Huntington to know what everyone else is thinking….
    …..and to literally take the others voice away from them – by speaking for them.

    profshadow in reply to herm2416. | February 18, 2018 at 8:24 am

    Seems to me I remember some lady named Rosa Parks who stepped up when she sat down instead of running away.

    These twits could have gotten lunch and sat down. Their fraudulent attempt, including the fraud against their own common sense, I’d say, is clear to any rational being.

    Of course, that “rational being” thing….yeah….m’kay….

    katiejane in reply to herm2416. | February 21, 2018 at 12:54 pm

    Would they be more comfortable if the PUB extended a curtain across the room and created a “special” dining area for the spatially challenged? I suppose they could reserve a portion of the room based on females versus males in the school. Of course if the revenue goes down because sometimes males are bigger eaters the PUB will make sure the white males suffer the consequences not the special “women, alongside other LGBTQIA+ and POC members of our community”

Of course no one knows how President Wippman will react until he reacts. That said, lets face facts. Becoming the president of a liberal arts college in the contemporary setting is suggestive that he’s well read that all-time best seller, “Profiles in Putty.”

These people are worse than cultists on steroids.

Why would not a female not consider this to be a target rich environment?

Key words: “…perceived white upper-class hegemony” (paper’s headline) and “…do not feel welcome….” (article quote)

This is what happens when SJW activists are allowed to remove any sense of logic, morality, reason, or any other tenet of Western Civilization.

It has been in the works for decades; we are now reaping what we sowed back in the 1960’s, 1970’s, 1980’s, and 1990’s.

“Sow the wind; reap the whirlwind.” Hosea 8:7

(BTW, to anyone educated after 1972 – especially SJW types – this is how you reference a Biblical book, chapter, and verse – another reason this is happening today…our schools are not EDUCATING our young children, they’re INDOCTRINATING them.)

Maybe they should try getting more tigers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R87ttgSSnDI

I would like The Spectator to write a follow up on the spectrum of students who study at the library to see if some group/ethnicity occupies the library chairs unfairly.

Diversity, progressive.

Rainbowface and a potato sack should put their minds at ease.

Women… equal in rights and complementary in Nature.

LGBTQIA+… the transgender spectrum. #TooManyLabels

At some point, once the the left’s long march through the institutions is complete, the pendulum swings the other way and we take them back, right?

It’s absurd enough to lament mere co-existence with another race or gender, it’s quite another level of evil to protest it.

The endgame is revealed: the progressive fascists do not want these people to exist.

Omega Mu taking on Alpha Beta again?

So what’s the problem? A bunch of young, white heterosexual guys habitually have lunch at a pub. A group of young, mostly white, heterosexual girls decide to protest, by having lots more young white, heterosexual girls (and maybe a few of their gay friends or POCs) have lunch at the same pub at the same time. Sounds to me like quite a few of the guys will want to discuss the situation at length with the girls, continued at their dorms… Instant mixer!

    SDN in reply to ray. | February 18, 2018 at 12:14 am

    That’s not how it will work. Instead, they will show up, sit at as many tables as possible, and buy little or nothing. If the owner attempts to clear space for actual customers, the oppression will be the owner’s fault, and he will be sued.

It seems like private colleges and universities are far more radical than state schools (except for California).

I suggest that all patrons of The Little Pub practice LAUGH HOUR. It will begin when these people enter to disrupt peoples enjoyment of the pub and will cease when they are laughed out of the pub.

e pluribus unum | February 17, 2018 at 2:49 pm

Thoughts of inferiority in your mind were put there by YOU. Everyone else is too busy with their own lives to make the effort to insert inferiority thoughts into your brain. Stop being so self-centered, Lefties.

If you don’ like that pub, go to another where you feel comfortable. You are not being forced to patronize a place you don’t like.

“…According to the group’s description, PUB POWER aims to “have as many women possible attend pub lunch in order to dismantle [the] hegemony and reclaim the space as open to all.” They add, ‘Historically, white, upper class, able-bodied males have dominated and claimed many ‘public spaces’ as their own. Here, at Hamilton College, the Little Pub Lunch serves as a prime example of a space occupied solely by men.’”

Ladies, this historically white middle class able-bodied male does hereby invite you to “dismantle [my] hegemony” and “reclaim the space” at lunch anytime.

Hopefully you’ll then consider “reclaiming the space” later over drinks and then possibly in the hot tub.

Seriously, as a historically white middle class able-bodied male I can’t imagine anything that would have upset me less as a college student than more women.

    Mannie in reply to Arminius. | February 18, 2018 at 12:59 pm

    Great! Do it. The Pub will make money. Or the white, upper class, able-bodied males will get disgusted by the Lefturd shenanigans, and go drink elsewhere. The SJWs won’t bring in much business, and the pub will close.

This is the sort of problem which was traditionally addressed with a classic Food Fight.

so why don’t the people who feel uncomfortable find another place to drink?

I thought minorities were a minority? So there are more of us non minorities. Every time I see one of these stories it reinforces my belief that I do not want one penny of my taxes being wasted in our failing education system.

So, boycott the campus pub, and let it go out of business. Take over an off-campus pub and keep all the N***rs out.

/s

legacyrepublican | February 18, 2018 at 9:09 pm

So, what ever happened to “Coexist?”

I’m sorry. I must have read it wrong. It actually says “Co-exit,” I bet.