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Record for NoIndoctrination.org entry #270.

University of Washington (UW)

Oct. 19, 2003

http://www.washington.edu

Other University or Dept.-Sponsored Bias

Required: Not Sure or N/A

Level of Bias: Excessive

Comments: About a year ago, some of the women's rights organizations on campus held a bake sale charging men one dollar and women 75 cents to demonstrate the current disparity in work pay. The sale was covered by our school's official paper and lauded by much of the faculty. Recently the U's College Republicans (not my favorite group, but they have their rights nonetheless) held a similar bake sale in which white and asian males were charged the highest prices for goods, females the second highest and minority males the least in an effort to show the advantages that people get through affirmative action. This time however, after the bake sale was about half-way through the day, students began yelling at vendors, stealing their cookies only to throw them back at them and eventually some tried to just tear down the whole stand. The UW administration's response was to immmediately revoke the bake sale's outdoor stand permit and call the UWPD to shut them (the College Republicans) down. No search or subsequent punishment was made for the radical students who had become so rowdy and vandalized the stand. In fact, the school-supported paper [The Daily editorial "UWCR stunt in bad taste" (10/09/2003)] actually blamed the College Republicans for the incident saying basically that it was a self-serving publicity stunt and that they were not only asking for it, they deserved it for not being sensitve to to the racial tensions on campus. (Note: I know high racial tensions, and there are none on campus. The paper has been painting a picture as if the LA riots were avoided by the UWPD's actions. It was a bunch of stiff conservatives having a small but nasty fight with uber-liberals. There were minorities involved on both sides of the debate.) I was blown away, more than anything ever pulled by my school before (even our gambling coach). Not because the bake sale was met by conflict, but by the fact the UW's adminstration was able to take such a blatantly biased position. The UW's anti-war group staged a publicity stunt by blocking off a highway in town and the campus paper's official editorial endorsed it saying it was peaceful (though it delayed a lot of commuters and potentially EMS vehicles). The Republicans get pushed around by other students for stating a point of view and the UW administration responds by saying that not only are they not going to protect them and their right to freedom of speech, they will in fact punish the conservatives by shutting them down. The vandals, as of this posting, are still "at large" and are not being pursued despite the fact that the College Republicans say they have photos of the primary instigators. A University is expected to promote thinking, debate and free speech. It should not allow any peaceful, non-obstructing expression of said speech to be met with violence, no matter how odious some individuals find it. Even more disturbing than UW's action of shutting down the Republican's stand is their inaction in finding their attackers. This administration's stance is one big step back from the constitution and one small step towards facism. ["BE IT RESOLVED THAT Membership in the academic community imposes on students, faculty members, administrators, and Regents an obligation to respect the dignity of others, to acknowledge their right to express differing opinions, and to foster and defend intellectual honesty, freedom of inquiry and instruction, and free expression on and off the campus" - from the official UW statement on Academic Freedom (http://www.washington.edu/faculty/facsenate/handbook/Volume4.html)]

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