Student Mob Takes Over Bryn Mawr College and Gets Appeased by Administration
“I kept expecting that, at some point, the administration would take decisive steps to restore order on campus”
A student strike recently occurred here which shut down classes and normal operations. Anyone who opposed the small mob by attending classes was bullied into submission, and the administration cowered to the mob. What a disgrace.
The parent of a non-participating student wrote this for Quillette under a pen name:
A Student Mob Took Over Bryn Mawr. The College Said Thank You
Last week marked the end of a chaotic semester at Bryn Mawr College, a small women’s liberal arts college located outside Philadelphia. During the final weeks, Bryn Mawr students, including my own child, scrambled to pick up the pieces following a student “strike” that exacerbated the serious preexisting disruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. For a period of three weeks, few regular classes were held, activities were suspended, and student life (such as it was) became marked by the same toxic spirit of racism that the strikers claimed to oppose.
Bryn Mawr is affiliated with nearby Haverford College, whose parallel meltdown in November was documented recently by Quillette. These two selective and well-funded schools are part of a so-called Bi-Co arrangement, which allows students to participate in joint classes and activities. Both share a similarly progressive commitment to such causes as diversity, equity, and inclusion. And students at both schools generally are well-steeped in doctrines of intersectionality, “white fragility,” anti-racism, and all the rest.
Yet following the police shooting of Walter Wallace Jr. in Philadelphia, activists at Haverford and Bryn Mawr embraced the dubious claim that their extremely progressive campuses were actually contaminated by a dangerous climate of racism that (quite literally) threatened the survival of black students. In many cases, the ire was directed not only at administrators and non-ideologically-compliant faculty, but also at any student suspected of not supporting the strikers’ apocalyptic rhetoric, dramatic postures, and inflated demands. Anyone who sought to attend class, go to the dining hall, or even turn in schoolwork was denounced as a “scab,” and often faced acts of bullying.
As the parent of a Bryn Mawr student (and the parent of a Bryn Mawr alumna), I found this profoundly unsettling. I kept expecting that, at some point, the administration would take decisive steps to restore order on campus…
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Comments
I feel really sorry for the students who wanted what they planned for and what they paid for. They and their parents may learn from this about the real face of the left. Maybe they won’t go so easily with the flow in the future.
Also the value of the Bryn Mawr degree has surely just gone down.
They all should be expelled, and the administrators who caved should be fired by the college’s board.
The Quillette article was well-written but did not cover the Board’s actions, only the cave-in by the President, Provost and one other administrator. The parent should complain to the accrediting agency that grants Bryn Mawr’s accreditation.