At Davidson College, in North Carolina, two students who had been outed for their alleged racist language online are no longer enrolled, the college says.Dacoslett, Creative Commons via Wikimedia
Earlier this month an anonymous Twitter account accused two students at Davidson College of posting racist messages sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi party. Now the North Carolina college says those students are “no longer enrolled,” though it remains unclear if they were expelled or chose to leave.
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At Davidson College, in North Carolina, two students who had been outed for their alleged racist language online are no longer enrolled, the college says.Dacoslett, Creative Commons via Wikimedia
Earlier this month an anonymous Twitter account accused two students at Davidson College of posting racist messages sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi party. Now the North Carolina college says those students are “no longer enrolled,” though it remains unclear if they were expelled or chose to leave.
“These events have prompted conversations in and outside of classrooms, discussions amongst teams and in and between student groups, calls for institutional action, and reflection on our values and mission,” the college’s president, Carol E. Quillen, wrote in an email to the campus on Friday. “Many at Davidson — students, faculty, staff, alumni, and trustees — are already engaged in this urgent, crucial community-building work. Please join us so that we can build the campus community we want and deserve.”
The Davidson administration had said little in the immediate aftermath of the posts, but did stress that everybody on the 1,800-student campus was safe. The Friday email contains the most information the college has shared with students.
The two students’ departure came amid continued turmoil at the small, private college over claims about their online lives.
White supremacists have been making a concerted effort to provoke campuses large and small, public and private. Have both short- and long-term response plans ready.
The Carolina Workers Collective, a Twitter account that describes itself as “working-class opposition to white supremacy and the state,” exposed their names earlier this month. The Chronicle identified one of them as Martha Gerdes, a teaching assistant in the German-studies department and a cadet in the Army Reserve Officers Training Corps. The Chronicle has been unable to confirm the identity of the second student.
When asked about the students’ departure, the anonymous operators of the Carolina Workers Collective said they felt vindicated and pleased that the students “are no longer enrolled at Davidson, and hope this serves as an example to others that hate has consequences.”
The episode at Davidson occurred amid a backdrop of increased anti-Semitism across college campuses. On Monday someone at Duke University spray-painted a swastika on a mural meant to honor the victims of last month’s mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue that left 11 dead. The University of Tennessee at Knoxville also recently dealt with anti-Semitic vandalism, with someone painting the message “Kill Jews” on a campus landmark. And at Cornell University three swastikas had been found on the campus in the past nine days.
In 2017 the number of hate crimes reported to campus police forces was up to nearly 280 incidents, an increase from 257 in 2016 and 194 in 2015. The Anti-Defamation League, a group that fights anti-Semitism, also documented a 77-percent rise in white-nationalist propaganda in the 2017-18 academic year, compared with the previous one.
New Revelations
The Carolina Workers Collective was able to match photos in Gerdes’s personal social-media accounts to those of an anonymous Twitter user called “femanon__,” and the collective posted that information in a long Twitter thread on November 7. The femanon__ user had posted messages that supported the Klan, Nazis, and other racist causes.
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Initially, Maj. Gen. John R. Evans, commander of the cadet program, said on Twitter that an investigation had cleared Gerdes. In a later post he said the U.S. military was assisting in an investigation. Lt. Col. Christopher L. Belcher, a spokesman for the organization, didn’t say when the investigation would be finished.
“At this time, Ms. Gerdes remains enrolled in ROTC, a final determination on her status with the ROTC program will be made after all investigations are completed and reviewed,” Belcher wrote in an email.
Quillen’s email also offered more clues to why Davidson students had reacted so vigorously to the knowledge that racist students might be hiding in plain sight. On October 29 someone wrote a “hateful, anti-Semitic” message on a whiteboard in a building. (A local TV station reported that the message was: “Hitler did nothing wrong.”) In another incident, someone wrote a message, also on a whiteboard, that included the phrase “school shooting,” though it might have been related to an academic project.
Chris Quintana was a breaking-news reporter for The Chronicle. He graduated from the University of New Mexico with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing.
