title: TRINITY COLLEGE TAKES MAJOR HIT With Donors After Reinstating Professor Who Sided With Sanders Supporter That Opened Fire On Republicans: “White People Should ‘F***ing Die”
text: Four days after James T. Hodgkinson opened fire on a group of Republican congressmen at a baseball field in Alexandria, Virginia, Trinity Professor Johnny Eric Williams sided with anonymous blogger  Son of Baldwin,  who proposed that black emergency personnel should let wounded white people die rather than lend assistance. Baldwin posted his opinions under the hashtag, #LetThemFuckingDie.Professor Williams linked Son of Baldwin s statement, adopted the hashtag as his own, and posted some additional denunciations of white Americans for  their destructive mythology of whiteness and their white supremacy system.  Referring to all  self-identified  whites,  he wrote,  The time is now to confront these inhuman assholes and end this now. When Campus Reform broke the story on June 20, it rapidly spread through the media. Trinity College put Professor Williams on leave, beginning June 26.But after Trinity Dean and Vice President Tom Cresswell reviewed Williams  statements, he returned with a 31-page report that found his Facebook posts were  extramural utterances  protected by Trinity College s policy of academic freedom. Trinity College President Joanne Berger-Sweeney endorsed Dean Cresswell s findings, and added that she doesn t  condone the hashtag  which  offend[s] me personally  and  contradicts our fundamental institutional values.  Nevertheless, Williams has been reinstated in good standing.Trinity reached the decision because, like many other colleges, it has failed to draw meaningful lines between valid and invalid claims on academic freedom. That failure plunges colleges ever deeper into the mire of ethnic chauvinism, categorical hatreds, anti-intellectual diatribe, mind-deadening vulgarity, and psychopathology. Worse, we are getting used to this mire and finding it harder to defend essential distinctions. If we are at the point where #LetThemFuckingDie is upheld as a wholesome exercise in  extra-mural  academic speech, we are in serious trouble.   The FederalistThe hate-filled anti-white professor s disgusting Facebook comments didn t come without a price. Trinity College has reported to have lost 16 students and $200,000 in donations as a result of sociology professor Johnny Eric Williams.Washington Times   Trinity College President Joanne Berger-Sweeney sent a letter to school community members on Monday that detailed financial losses attributable to a Mr. Williams  racial tirade. He attracted national media attention after calling white people  inhuman a-holes  who need to  die  just days after a gunman critically wounded Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise and targeted other Republican lawmakers for assassination. We can and will recover from the financial cost of this incident; the work before us now is to heal as a community,  Ms. Berger-Sweeney wrote, the Hartford Courant reported Tuesday. The official said that she was  disappointed  in the wake of decisions by angry donors and former students, but offered respect  and hope that those individuals ultimately will see that there continue to be many good reasons to invest in Trinity. If you see [white people] drowning. If you see them in a burning building. If they are bleeding out in an emergency room. If the ground is crumbling beneath them. If they are in a park and they turn their weapons on each other: do nothing,  a June 16 article by  Son of Baldwin  says.  Let. Them. F-ing. Die. And smile a bit when you do,  an article shared on the professor s Facebook page on June 18 said.Mr. Williams was placed on leave after the scandal broke, but a report issued July 14 reinstated him and paved the way for a January 2018 return to the classroom.The Federalist   Trinity s dilemma is in large part a matter of a double standard, created to coddle black radicals on campus. The prevailing view among colleges and universities is that robust declarations of racial resentment by African-American professors or students should be considered within the bounds of academic freedom. This allowance is a one-way street. Similarly abusive language from a white or Asian professor would almost certainly be met with severe sanctions.Trinity s decision is but one incident of many in which college officials granted a pass to  hate speech  by radical professors. In 2015, Boston University Professor Saida Grundy received a slap on the wrist after tweeting:  Why is America so reluctant to identify white college males as a population problem?  Earlier this year, Texas A&M Professor Tommy Curry quietly skirted dismissal after an interview emerged in which he said  look, in order to be equal, in order to be liberated, some white people may have to die.  Students too get a pass.Gordon Barnes, editor-in-chief of The Advocate, the CUNY graduate student newspaper, published an editorial in fall 2014  In Support of Violence.  Barnes declared,  The time for peace has passed; indeed it never existed in this country.  He specifically called for violence against the police:  Violence directed towards state representatives is not only warranted, it is necessary.  CUNY apparently thought nothing amiss in Barnes  extra-mural utterances. To the contrary, in 2017 the CUNY Graduate Center featured Barnes for a  Ph.D. Snapshot  to advertise its history program.Remarks by a faculty member or a graduate student advocating violence against racial groups might well be reasonable grounds for strong sanctions, including possible dismissal. But this hasn t happened because colleges and universities have appointed so many faculty members who present themselves as authentic voices of black rage. It is plainly difficult to call someone to account for doing exactly what he was hired to do. Rage-filled black professors are not going to lose their positions for expressing rage.This situation grew out of decades in which colleges went out of their way to appoint black faculty members who held separatist views and who affected angry attitudes as a badge of authenticity. The initial impetus for such appointments came from liberal white professors who argued that recruiting in this vein would help the colleges retain black students, many of whom couldn t seem to come to grips with the traditional curriculum and the mostly white faculty that taught it.We saw this reflected in the Faculty Minutes of Bowdoin College, when we were researching the study that became  What Does Bowdoin Teach?  Faced with the skepticism of his colleagues, Professor Daniel Levine pushed for the immediate creation of Afro-American Studies in 1969. Bowdoin had no one qualified to teach the program. Levin responded by insisting, over and over,  It must be so!  He got his way. Bowdoin dived head first into creating a program grounded in angry politics, rather than scholarship.