Alton Luke II is an African American sophomore at Occidental College who backs the broad goal of racial equity for students. But he has chosen not to support the minority student movement aimed at ousting college President Jonathan Veitch and improving campus diversity — and bluntly announced his views on Facebook this week.
For that, he has paid a price.
Luke said some of his friends, both black and white, have started ignoring him. He's been called ignorant. He said the hostility of some protesters toward those with different views is a major reason he is not supporting their current uprising.
"They're doing what they claim white people do to us, which is marginalize us and cast us as the bad guy," said Luke, a graduate of Long Beach Polytechnic High and kinesiology major who aims to become an orthopedic surgeon. "You can't have a different opinion here or you're persecuted. But I'm standing against their tyrannical and unjustified actions."
Protests at Occidental, Claremont McKenna, Yale, Ithaca, Brown and other campuses throughout the nation appear to have wide support as they demand action to address the bias some minority students say they face.
But sharp dissent over the movement's tactics is also emerging, as critics have begun to step forward.
At Claremont McKenna College, where protests have led to the resignation of a top administrator, more than 300 students sent a letter to the campus community expressing support for the fight against racial discrimination. But they called the use of hunger strikes to force Dean of Students Mary Spellman to step down "extremely inappropriate" and also castigated the cursing at administrators at a recent student protest, the "cyberbullying" of students over an offensive Halloween costume and the filing of a federal civil rights complaint against Claremont.
"Never have we been more divided as community. Never did we think the day would come where we were scared to speak our minds, where fear of our fellow students' rage silenced us," said the letter, signed on behalf of the students by Nathaniel Tsai, a junior majoring in government. "It is time for the demonstrations and the hostile rhetoric to stop."
At Yale University, nearly 800 students, faculty, staff and others sent a letter this week to campus President Peter Salovey expressing concerns about several student demands — among them mandatory diversity sensitivity training, an ethnic studies requirement and the firing of a faculty member who questioned staff warnings about culturally offensive Halloween costumes.