About a week ago I described—and showed with a video—the disruption of Reed College’s required Humanities 101 class by Offended Students saying that the class perpetuates racism and white supremacy. Many of the students apparently belong to a group called “Reedies Against Racism”(RAR), and are determined to shut the class down until they can fix the supposedly bigoted curriculum. (It actually includes literature from the Mediterranean and Middle East, which, last time I checked, were considered to be areas populated by “people of color”.)

Now, however, a piece in the Atlantic, called “The surprising revolt at the most liberal college in the country,” gives examples of how those Reedies determined to actually get an education—instead of foisting their ideology on everyone else—are striking back, and the RAR group seems to be waning. First, a brief description of the fracas:

A required year-long course for freshmen, Hum 110 consists of lectures that everyone attends and small break-out classes “where students learn how to discuss, debate, and defend their readings.” It’s the heart of the academic experience at Reed, which ranks second for future Ph.D.s in the humanities and fourth in all subjects. (Reed famously shuns the U.S. News & World Report, as explained in a 2005 Atlantic article by a former Reed president.) As Professor Peter Steinberger details in a 2011 piece for Reed magazine, “What Hum 110 Is All About,” the course is intended to train students whose “primary goal” is “to engage in original, open-ended, critical inquiry.”

But for RAR, Hum 110 is all about oppression. “We believe that the first lesson that freshmen should learn about Hum 110 is that it perpetuates white supremacy—by centering ‘whiteness’ as the only required class at Reed,” according to a RAR statement delivered to all new freshmen. The texts that make up the Hum 110 syllabus—from the ancient Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Egypt regions—are “Eurocentric,” “Caucasoid,” and thus “oppressive,” RAR leaders have stated. Hum 110 “feels like a cruel test for students of color,” one leader remarked on public radio. “It traumatized my peers.”

This notion that such classes actually traumatize people is ludicrous, and should be rejected. It is faux outrage. “Trauma” is the new word for “offend”. But I digress:

Beginning on boycott day, RAR protested every single Hum lecture that school year. In-class protests are very rare on college campuses. During the nationwide upsurge of student activism tracing back to 2015, protesters have occupied administrativebuildings, stormed into libraries, shut down visiting speakers in auditoriums, and walked out of classrooms—but they hardly ever disrupt the classroom itself. RAR has done so more than 60 times.

A Hum protest is visually striking: Up to several dozen RAR supporters position themselves alongside the professor and quietly hold signs reading “We demand space for students of color,” “We cannot be erased,” “Fuck Hum 110,” “Stop silencing black and brown voices; the rest of society is already standing on their necks,” and so on. The signs are often accompanied by photos of black Americans killed by police.

As I’ve said before, students have every right to give professors their input into a curriculum, but I don’t agree that they have the right to either demand changes in the curriculum, decide what those changes should be, or disrupt classes that don’t fit their ideological bent.

In the article, author Chris Bodenner interviewed a fair number of students (many of whom wanted to remain anonymous, which says something right there), and found that there is considerable pushback against the tactics of RAR. Despite being bullied on Facebook and elsewhere for ideological impurities, and even doxed, these students simply want to get the education they’ve paid for. And many of the students who are pushing back aren’t white:

This school year, students are ditching anonymity and standing up to RAR in public—and almost all of them are freshmen of color. The turning point was the derailment of the Hum lecture on August 28, the first day of classes. As the Humanities 110 program chair, Elizabeth Drumm, introduced a panel presentation, three RAR leaders took to the stage and ignored her objections. Drumm canceled the lecture—a first since the boycott. Using a panelist’s microphone, a leader told the freshmen, “[Our] work is just as important as the work of the faculty, so we were going to introduce ourselves as well.”

The pushback from freshmen first came over Facebook. “To interrupt a lecture in a classroom setting is in serious violation of academic freedom and is just unthoughtful and wrong,” wrote a student from China named Sicheng, who distributed a letter of dissent against RAR. Another student, Isabel, ridiculed the group for its “unsolicited emotional theater.”

Two days later, a video circulated showing freshmen in the lecture hall admonishing protesters. When a few professors get into a heated exchange with RAR leaders, an African American freshman in the front row stands up and raises his arms: “This is a classroom! This is not the place! Right now we are trying to learn! We’re the freshman students!” The room erupts with applause.

Here’s that video, which also shows the nature of the protests in Humanities 101:

I’ll give one more excerpt, and then wish the counter-protestors well. The Reed faculty seems eager to find some kind of accommodation with the protestors so they can get on with their teaching, but students like the ones above aren’t eager to compromise: it’s their way or the highway. Reed is a very good school, and it’s heartening that the students are aware of what’s happening in society at large. They can protest all they want, but outside class, and if they continue disrupting courses like Humanities 101, Reed will be remiss if it doesn’t discipline the disruptors. They will also lose applicants.