Michigan Tech students and members of the Young Americans for Freedom organization spoke out about a university professor’s angry comments against their group.
The professor, Dr. Carl Blair, allegedly criticized their Freedom Week project, calling it “childish,” “stupid,” “homophobic,” and “racist.”
“For those of you who weren’t aware of it, good. For those of you who were aware of it, it was childish, stupid, homophobic, dumb, racist twits. That’s the polite version,” Blair said.
The students were surprised and confused by the accusations and expressed their commitment to their beliefs despite the incident.
“So I was kind of thinking just how could he slander our university club and all these students, some of which were even his own students? I just thought it was kind of out there for him to do that and slander us and call us those names,” one student said.
“It seems at this university, we kind of are always at odds with the left. And we do have, you know, the occasional few problems. But other than that, we haven’t had anything major like this before.”
“A lot of students will come up to us, and thank us for being the ones to stand up and use our voices because they’re scared to come out and say something for fear of losing friends or fear of getting bad grades and things like that. But yeah, we’ve received also quite a bit of support from faculty members, particularly our sort of pseudo-advisor. He’s been very, very helpful for us,” they added.
“That is an excellent question, and we do not have the answer to that. Because I’m left wondering myself what exactly we did that would make us have those names or let us have those names? I’m not sure,” YAF member Jacob Romanowski stated.
“We’ve had some issues, but they’ve usually been relatively isolated and isolated usually to a particular group of students on campus with whom we’ve been in contact with before and had meetings with before about why they target our events. But outside of that, mostly the student body and many faculty remained neutral or in quiet support of us.”
Following the viral comments, the university replaced Blair for the remainder of the semester and emphasized its support for freedom of speech and academic freedom.
“As an institution with a strong research focus, Michigan Tech vigorously supports freedom of speech and academic freedom. We follow the Chicago Principles in this manner. With this we expect an environment of respect and acceptance of diverse perspectives, perhaps most importantly within our classrooms. We regret that this has not been your experience in this class this week,” a university email read.
“Tomorrow’s class (Friday Nov. 17) has been canceled, and upon return after the Thanksgiving break we have arranged for a different instructor for the remainder of the semester. You will receive information from your new instructor prior to the first day of class after break.”
The students encouraged other college groups to persevere in the quest for free speech on campus.
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