Protests against campus racism are spreading across the country, but Purdue University President and former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels wants his students to know everything is just fine at Purdue.
On Wednesday night, writer Roxane Gay tweeted an email the president sent to the Purdue community that patted the school on the back for being “a proud contrast to the environments that appear to prevail at places like Missouri and Yale.”
What on earth is a university president doing, sending this email? pic.twitter.com/8cXd5wSYyX
— roxane gay (@rgay) November 12, 2015
This would be nice if it were true. But the past few years at Purdue have been characterized by massive anti-racism protests similar to the ones that took over University of Missouri and Yale.
Last December, more than 150 Purdue students marched to Daniels’ office in a “Purdue Can’t Breathe” rally. The year before, hundreds of students chanted, “Mitch, let’s face it/It’s time to deal with racists.”
Students of colors have told stories about others on campus hurling racial epithets at them and even physically assaulting them. There were also more high-profile incidents, like when someone scrawled the N-word across a picture of Dr. Cornell Bell, a prominent African American academic and advocate for minority students, or when the words “white supremacy” were written in the Black Cultural Center. Two anonymous Twitter accounts dedicated to mocking Asian students at Purdue also elicited protests. In 2012, the FBI announced that Purdue had reported the second largest number of hate crimes on campus, including five incidents of racial bias in one year.
The 2013 protests demanded the administration take specific actions to improve the culture on campus, including doubling the number of minority faculty and students in the next years, requiring racial sensitivity workshops for faculty, and creating a zero-tolerance policy that results in expulsion for racist acts. The 2014 rally followed up with more demands, saying Daniels was too slow to act.
Daniels may be trying to head off another flare-up of protests, as students say the ousting of the University of Missouri leadership “is a warning for campuses like Purdue.”
“My first thought was, ‘Wow, this sounds identical to the Purdue experience,’” one Purdue alumnus involved in the 2013 rally told the Lafayette Journal & Courier. “Students yelling epithets as they pass by black and brown bodies. Students displaying hate-filled race symbols on Purdue’s campus. I think this illustrates the experience of students of color in many universities across the country.”
The Purdue president’s email also invoked a line conservatives have used to criticize the college protests: that the movement is an assault on “free speech” because journalists were barred from speaking to students at University of Missouri, while Yale students attempted to shut down a conservative free-speech panel.
Daniels, once considered a viable Republican presidential candidate, also has a record that may not inspire confidence in students seeking a commitment to racial equality. During his tenure as governor, Daniels tried to purge Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, an iconic text that recounts American history from the perspective of marginalized communities, from Indiana school curricula. Daniels called the text “irredeemably slanted and unsuited for teaching to schoolchildren.” The Purdue president has also used popular conservative dogwhistles for people of color during his political career, accusing President Obama of being “pro-poverty” and leading a “constant effort to divide us” in his GOP State of the Union response in 2012.