After my previous article published here on Odyssey, titled “I Love My Small Private College,” I felt a strong obligation and need to write this one.
It’s very disappointing that just days after that article was published, where I praised the school for it’s diversity, an incident has broken the news surrounding racism on campus.
A couple of months ago, the Phi Delta Theta fraternity was indefinitely suspended from campus, although the school never gave us details as to why it was being shut down or specifically what had happened. All that was said was that the chapter was being closed due to the “chapter's risk management violations and failing chapter operations”.
On Tuesday, May 3, the information of what happened was finally released and it’s not what I expected to find out.
We knew that one member of the fraternity was specifically suspended but we didn’t know why, and now we do. This student was sending out offensive and just flat out racist snapchats to other fraternity members and students on campus.
I was actually in the newsroom with the other Franklin newspaper staff when everyone was gathering information about the story. One of our reporters had interviewed students who witnessed the snapchats and when she read the quotes that she had gathered, all of our jaws dropped. We couldn’t believe what the snapchats were saying.
One was described as a picture of a burnt piece of toast with the Black History Month filter overlaid. Another was a picture of black students sitting at a table with monkey emoji’s covering their faces with the caption “It’s a zoo in here.” A third one was described as a picture of a poster that had the college’s Office of Diversity Inclusion students with drawings of guns in their hands or blunts in their mouths.
After hearing this I was disgusted. I couldn’t believe someone on our campus, let alone a person in general, would post something as hurtful, harmful, and offensive as that.
The student’s attorney calls the snapchats “untasteful but not harmful” which to me is just ridiculous. The student was suspended on March 14 after a disciplinary hearing which involves a community board made up of faculty, staff and students, as well as officers to oversee the process. However, the student’s attorney claims that his hearing was informal and did not follow the standard procedure. Since the process, the student has remained on campus and continues to attend classes.
In my opinion, the student should not be allowed on campus. For a school that wants to promote diversity, this should not be taken lightly or even tolerated. If a student is harassing and targeting a group of students, that student should not be on campus anymore. Luckily this was only harassment through social media but it could have easily turn into physical harassment.
For a small private school in Franklin, Indiana, there is a good number of black and minority students at Franklin College. It saddens me to think that my classmates and part of my community was being targeted. It makes me wonder how many other students could be silently participating in the harassment. The fact that only a couple students initially spoke out about the snapchats shows that there is also an underlying problem.
A Franklin College student cited lines from the college’s handbook and posted a status on Facebook saying, “[One thing outlined] is students who are bystanders to the situation and don’t report,” she said. “The sheer number of people who were on his Snapchat friends list who saw this every day and said nothing shows the systematic racism embedded into Franklin College.”
I completely agree. Something needs to change and this issue NEEDS to be talked about. The only way to push towards ending racism in our community is to fight against it and to refuse to allow/tolerate it. Racism is also not something that just comes out of nowhere. It’s something that is taught and accepted. Somewhere or somehow this kind of behavior was demonstrated as acceptable to the student whether that be from home/family life, the people he is surrounded by, etc. People need to be educated and taught that this IS NOT OK or acceptable. It’s 2016. Racism NEEDS to stop. If we don’t teach people that this is an issue, it will never change. We cannot allow this to continue. The college needs to make it an even greater priority to make sure it is teaching its students the value of an accepting environment that will stand up for what is right.
With that being said, I still believe that Franklin College is a wonderful college with good intentions and there are a majority of kind and caring people that are accepting of EVERYONE. We just need to make sure that incidents like this will not continue. If we don’t end it here at college, these actions and bigoted ways will only be continued once the student enters the world and working field.
