The students at the president’s office
About a dozen students have occupied the offices of the University president Christopher L. Eisgruber at Princeton to demand that Woodrow Wilson’s name be removed from one of the schools.
The students also want want cultural sensitivity training for staff members and faculty; the demands also include making classes in African American studies, Latino studies, Gender and Sexuality studies, and other courses as part of what’s called the Distributionary Requirements, core classes taken by all Princeton students. The students are also demanding an African American students center.
At around 8pm the students told The Black Star News that they may spend the night in the university president’s office.
The students were part of a larger group of nearly 150 African American, Latino, White and Asian students who went to the president’s office to present him with the set of demands at around 11.30 AM today. When some students left the president’s office they were prevented from returning by campus security.
Eisgruber met with the students for about an hour without making any commitments, said Destiny Crockett, 20, a Junior majoring in English, African American studies and Gender and Sexuality.
She’s one of the students occupying Eisgruber’s office. “We don’t know the disciplinary actions if we stay,” Crockett said, when interviewed by phone. “But we think we’ll stay.”
The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs is named after the nation’s 28th president whose racist views were well known.
Wilson once told a group of visiting Black professionals that “segregation is not humiliation but a benefit” and he screened Birth of A Nation in the White House.
The movie was based on the book The Clansman, written by Wilson’s friend Thomas Dixon. Of the film, Wilson said it was like “writing history with lightning” and that his “only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”
Crockett and the other students occupying the president’s office belongs to a campus organization called the Black Justice League.
