Dale Brigham thought he was doing the right thing.
As anonymous death threats against minorities swirled on social media Tuesday night, setting the college town of Columbia, Mo., on edge, the bespectacled Mizzou professor began receiving e-mails from terrified students.
“Good Evening Professor Brigham,” wrote an African American student in Brigham’s Nutritional Science 1034 class. “There are online threats at our school warning the minorities to not step on campus tomorrow. I am scared for my life therefore, I will not be attending class tomorrow. When can I makeup the exam?”
[Ed. Note: Translation: I didn’t study for my exam because I was out being a drama king or queen.]
Brigham, a popular professor and fitness buff who volunteered with many Mizzou athletic teams and clubs, responded with a challenge.
“If you don’t feel safe coming to class, then don’t come to class,” Dale Brigham replied in an e-mail that appears to have been sent to his entire class. “I will be there, and there will be an exam administered in our class.
“If you give into bullies, they win. The only way bullies are defeated is by standing up to them. If we cancel the exam, they win; if we go through with it, they lose.
“I know which side I am on,” Brigham wrote. “You make your own choice.”
Many minority students responded with anger and disbelief.
“That’s our lives in danger,” said Triniti, 19, an African American student of Brigham’s who asked The Post not to use her full name for fear of retaliation. “I don’t want to even touch campus. I don’t even want to leave my house, let alone go to campus.”
“My Teacher had the nerve to email me, ‘If we cancel class, then we let the bullies win.’ Like this is a game or something,” wrote another student on Twitter.
Soon the anger spilled beyond the confines of Brigham’s classroom. People posted his office phone number and e-mail address on Twitter
“How can [you] tell a student to face bullies when there are threats that he will die?” reads another e-mail posted to Twitter. “He is fear for his life and you are telling him to still risk his life to come to YOUR class to take a test? Are you kidding? These aren’t bullies we are talking about…”
By late Tuesday night, Brigham had apologized to students.
“I could have and should have used much better words in trying to say that we must stand up to hatred and not let those kind of people who make threats run our lives,” he wrote at least one class member.
But it was too late.
By Wednesday morning, the flood of criticism had become too much for the Missouri professor, whose most high-profile previous interaction with the media was an interview on the inelasticity of demand for peanut butter.
“The exam is cancelled,” Brigham wrote. “No one will have to come to class today. And, I am resigning my position.”
Good for Professor Brigham. He stood up for principle. These privilege spoiled brats need to learn a thing or two about courage and standing proud in the face of adversity. A threat on social media? Not so much.
Both President Bush and President Obama have basically said the same thing that Professor Brigham has said. Stand up to bullies. Scared? Of some jackass on social media? Perhaps some of their ancestors had some real fears. Those fears appeared in the middle of the night wearing white sheets and carrying torches, or bombs. I have seen no evidence that such is the case here. In fact, if they were all so scared, why were they all out in the open in their publicly owned safe zones?
These kids are privileged. Anyone on a college campus nowadays is privileged. College costs have gone through the roof. College loans cost a small fortune. Many take years to pay back.
As a multi-decade educator I want to send the students of all races of Mizzou a message:
“Get back to class. Do your homework, study for exams. It is time to stop protesting because most of you don’t know what the Hell you are even protesting about if your spokespersons I have heard are any example. Talk to your grandparents about what opportunities they had and what they feared. You might learn a thing or two.
Finally, don’t take that exam. Deal with the 0 that you get on it. Man up.”
My brother and sister-in-law both got their PHd’s from the University of Missouri. I have emailed him and asked him to contact his old buds and find out how to contact Professor Brigham so I can give him a cyber standing ovation for standing up for principles and for calling out bullshit when he sees it.
Fear free to add your own message to these whining cry-babies.
Invite him to teach in Virginia.
Do you think it was a forced resignation? I really don’t see anything wrong with what he said. He said nothing that the current president and the past president haven’t said about terroriststerrorism.
I see death threats to generalized populations the same as terrorism.
I read that the university has refused to accept his resignation. Finally some sanity.
I think that the profs should walk out en masse in protest against the idiocy of the college.
I think the president of Mizzou took one look at what was coming and thought to himself…..”they don’t pay me enough to put up with this BS.”
Yea, people get to that point. How well I know.
I am not sure though that he wasn’t pushed along by the new administration. We shall see. I get more and more furious every time I read anything about him.
Cargo, half of them are the problem. Well, I don’t know the exact percent. let’s just say some of them are encouraging the students to protest.
Yesterday, on Veteran’s Day, when the ceremony started with 2 minutes of
silence, I was thinking about the young men who joined the services after
Pearl Harbor. They came from all parts of the country and from all kinds of
backgrounds.
Maybe we should bring back the draft? A bit of discipline and thinking about
getting along, and what’s good for the country. Maybe?
After what happened in Oregon recently, and given incidents like Virginia Tech, death threats need to be taken very seriously.
No one is saying they shouldn’t. You still shouldn’t run and cower and try to get out of your responsibilities.
It doesn’t matter if death threats are veiled or explicit. You man up. Security was increased.
If someone wants to kill you, does it really matter where you are? This was a collective threat. It wasn’t like you or I were called out by name.
The post reminded me of something now long ago.
I went to university in the late 1960s, early 70s, during a time of massive anti-war demonstrations on and off campus. In the spring of 1970, many schools pretty much shut down in the aftermath of the Kent State killings and devolved from institutions of learning and instruction into mere circus sites for demonstrations. Appallingly misguided though the Viet Nam policy was, as revoltingly senseless were the killings of the Kent State students, a few of us (a definite minority at the time) were of the view that we went to school for a purpose – to learn skills that would help us make the country a better place.
Our university’s faculty Senate voted in May of 1970 to cancel all impending examinations to enable the students to show solidarity with the dead of Kent State and to demonstrate against the war. The day after that happened, one of the university’s most distinguished professors made passing mention in class that his exams (and they were always ball-busters) would be given as scheduled. Several students in the class were outraged: “But the Faculty Senate voted to cancel exams!!” I will never forget the prof’s response. He was an old guy, an eastern European refugee who got out of Europe just ahead of the Nazis and who turned around to work for the OSS. He was a specialist on Soviet foreign and military policy. He spoke a half dozen languages expertly, including English, but in all of them he retained a very thick Polish accent. He said in a measured, but very clear and audible tone: “Fuck the Faculty Senate. You take my courses, you take my exams. You don’t take it, you fail the course.” And then he went on to put things in context: “You think you are revolutionaries but you don’t want to pay a price. You want it on the cheap. Do you think Lenin would worry about getting an F on an exam? Castro? Patrick Henry? Garibaldi?. If you want America to pay attention to you, you have to be willing to sacrifice something. Otherwise you’re just playing at serious political involvement.” As far as I know, we all took the exam, and given his grading habits, probably a few bright kids failed anyway (once a student got a paper back with a big red note in the margin – the lad had started a paragraph with the word “Ultimately”. The prof scrawled in the margin, “in international relations, we are not concerned with the “ultimate”. Only the penultimate is within our grasp, and that not clearly, and not often”)
But he made a very important point that wasn’t being made nearly enough at that time. I see shadows of that now in all this campus unrest. That doesn’t mean the underlying causes aren’t important or that people should not speak out. But be disciplined about getting your education, don’t use outside disturbances as an excuse not to push through to knowledge. You’ll have more impact on improving society if you do.
What an absolutely fabulous story. That should really be written up some place important…like a letter to the editor of the Washington Post for all to see. I wonder what the home paper is for Columbia, Missouri?
I still have very little sympathy for student protest. So few people know the issues. Maybe I just got too much marine influence as a young person. Or…it could have been my parents who told me they would jerk my ass out of college so fast my head would spin if I even thought about getting involved in demonstrations.
Later, when I did do political activism, as a much older adult, my mother bought me a few pairs of wool socks from LL Bean. I guess it all depends on who is footing the bill.
Mizzou police have arrested a person suspected of threatening to ‘shoot every black person’ on campus
University of Missouri police have arrested a person suspected to have posted anonymous threats of violence against black students on social media, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Mizzou police said the unidentified suspect had posted threats using the anonymous app Yik Yak and other social media, and was not on or near campus at the time of the threat, according to the Times.
“I’m going to stand my ground tomorrow and shoot every black person I see,” one message posted on Tuesday evening read.
University chancellor R. Bowen Loftin confirmed the suspect had been apprehended Wednesday morning.
Racial tensions on the Columbia, Missouri, campus have been accelerating since September, when an African-American student was targeted with racial slurs. Loftin and Mizzou president Tim Wolfe both resigned on Monday following claims they did little to alleviate fear and racism on campus.
Following the threats on campus last night, the Mizzou police tweeted out a message saying that they had increased security on campus.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/mizzou-police-arrested-person-suspected-155518040.html;_ylt=AwrC1DGp3UVWyEIA.jSamolQ;_ylu=X3oDMTBydWNmY2MwBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwM0BHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzcg–
This is not a trivial issue.
No, it isn’t trivial. It sounds like a stupid threat made by rednecks. However, we shouldn’t ignore it. People should go one with their daily business, otherwise the terrorists win.
However, it isn’t a reason not to go to class or not to take an exam.
There were threats made to the this blog’s parent back in the day. Very serious threats. We didn’t stop. We called the cops and moved on.