BJL sit-in countered by petition opposing their demands

An online petition to counter demands made by Black Justice League protesters has gained over 800 signatures since launching on Thursday afternoon, as of Saturday at 1 p.m.

Drafted by Josh Zuckerman ’16 and Evan Draim ’16, the petition calls upon the University to promote “increased dialogue and the creation of a process that properly considers the input of all students and faculty, not merely those who are the loudest.”

Draim is a former Editorial Board member for The Daily Princetonian.

The petition followed a 32-hour-long sit-in protest by several members of the newly formed BJL in the office of University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83. The sit-in ended on Thursday evening when Eisgruber, members of his administration and student leaders in BJL agreed to a revised list of the students’ demands.

Titled “Protect Plurality, Historical Perspective, and Academic Speech at Princeton,” the petition was written in response to those demands. It is a product of “concerned Princetonians,” according to both Zuckerman and Draim, but no official student group or organization endorses the document.

The petition requests that the University affirm the danger of historical revisionism in purging campus of the Wilsonian legacy. It asks that a potential diversity requirement for non-American or American minority culture be accompanied by a course in Western civilization, and claims that “affinity housing” would be racially segregating and against the promotion of campus diversity.

The petition first went live on Change.org at around 5 p.m. on Thursday afternoon, according to Zuckerman. By Friday afternoon, 24 hours after its release, over 500 people had signed.

Zuckerman said that he and Draim had been concerned with the development of the protest since Thursday, as more students began hearing about the sit-in.

However, their decision to formulate the petition occurred before Eisgruber and the University administration officially reached a compromise with protesters to bring the historic 32-hour student sit-in to a close, he added.

Associate Dean of the College and Director of Programs for Access and Inclusion Khristina Gonzalez, the point person for the agreement between Eisgruber and the students, said that many students have expressed concerns over the agreement.

“I’m hearing a lot from students who have a variety of different perspectives on the issue and I think it’s a complicated one,” she said.

Draim said a large number of students on campus disagreed with the protests, with regard to either the protesters’ tactics or their specific demands of the administration.

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“We created a petition that we felt was reflecting the views of this silent majority on campus that had valuable opinions on these issues but hadn’t spoken out yet,” he said.

The general consensus on campus, he said, is that students respect the concerns of the protesters and acknowledge that they are important issues on campus. However, he added that students don’t think the demands of BJL are the right way to go about addressing the issues.

Zuckerman added he wanted to broaden the conversation, to allow students whose opinions differ from the protesters’ to voice their views on issues that affected all of campus. A few very vocal students had been monopolizing the conversation, but the administration needs to hear from people with alternative perspectives, Draim said.

Key members of BJL and participating protesters were contacted for this story but either did not respond to requests for comment or declined to comment.

Both Zuckerman and Draim explained that they do not want to reinforce the antagonistic division that currently separates student protesters from those who disagree with them.

Disagreeing with BJL’s demands is not the same as ignoring the wrongness of clear historical grievances, Zuckerman added. He explained that the problem lies in historical revisionism and the attempt to purge history of what individuals find offensive, even when they are rightly so.

“I think it’s extremely dangerous if you’re going to anachronistically impose modern values on past people. If you want to condemn Woodrow Wilson for his racism, fine, you’re correct to do so. But when you look back, you’re going to find very few people of magnitude in the past whose morality lives up to modern standards,” he said. “From Woodrow Wilson it’s only a small step to go back and say ‘Well, by modern standards, Aristotle is a sexist.’ Do we need to start removing Aristotle from places? Plato was a pedophile by modern standards. Jefferson was a horrible, horrible racist as well.”

Furthermore, Zuckerman said, Wilson’s views do not become any less bigoted or racist in removing his name from campus buildings. History is not pretty, he noted.

“I am no fan of Woodrow Wilson — I detest the guy’s politics — but the fact of the matter is I don’t want to go back on history and wipe out and cease honoring the people I disagree with, no matter how repugnant their views are,” he said. “Woodrow Wilson’s views are incredibly repugnant. He was wrong then and he’s wrong now. But he also did some great things for this University and deserves to be honored for them.”

Draim said the political correctness that discourages discourse needs to be addressed, noting that people who might publicly support BJL’s demands might also have more private concerns that they feel they cannot express for fear of sounding politically incorrect, and this attitude needs to be discussed more.

Draim said he would like to see more opportunity to engage in dialogue with the student protesters as well. Racism persists in the United States, he acknowledged, but the manner of discourse to achieve a more diverse and equal society is critical.

“When we focus on smaller issues that divide people and pit people against each other — when we say that people of certain races can’t understand what we’re saying because they don’t look like us — we alienate people and we keep ourselves from being able to move forward towards achieving those ends of being a more racially tolerant society,” he explained.

Counter petition signer Josh Freeman ’18 confirmed that people fear speaking out against the protesters because they will be vilified. BJL fails to represent all black people at Princeton, Freeman said, referring to one member’s criticism of him as a black student with differing views.

“When I posted against [BJL’s signed demands], I was literally told, straight to my face, that white people won’t love me like black people would. And no, that’s not what the case is," he said. "You should love someone for who they are, not the color of their skin.”

He noted that in the past two days, he has been labeled a white sympathizer. In contrast, he said, his mostly white track team cares about him, and he cares about them just as much.

Zuckerman said he sees the petition in the context of a growing trend across college campuses throughout the nation, arguing that University-affiliated signers are effectively fighting to contribute their opinions as well.

“What we want to do is to demonstrate that, unlike at Yale, there are students here who will stand up to these recent protests,” he said. “We will stand up to it, we will fight for what we believe in. This is our campus too, and we’re not going to simply be quiet in the face of a small, loud boisterous group of students making their demands.”

Draim said he was surprised by the diverse sources of support for the petition.

Over the course of the BJL protests, he said he had reached out to many friends and students who he expected to disagree with him vehemently on the issue given their known political orientation. Instead, he found that many of them shared his concerns over the BJL’s demands, showing that the petition represents a truly bipartisan effort.

“I know from my personal experience, there’s almost no issue on this campus where I’ve actually seen this kind of consensus in terms of people who — on other things, have completely different outlooks and are from complete different backgrounds — have all contacted me and said that this is something we should fight for,” he said.

But Draim added that he thinks his left-of-center peers, more so than his conservative peers, are afraid to attach their names to the petition because they have close relationships with and are sympathetic toward students directly involved in the League’s protest.

Gonzalez said this moment presents itself as an opportunity for a more inclusive dialogue and discussion over what values are to be reflected in the University’s academic community.

“I think the primary thing to focus in on is that when students brought [the initial demands] to us and … to Nassau Hall they were telling the entire community — not just President Eisgruber, not just the administration — they were really telling the entire community that they did not feel a sense of belonging here,” Gonzalez said. “It’s really important for us to hear what our students have to tell us across all of the student body.”

She said that she and other administrators plan to host public discussions at each residential college, inviting and identifying students who want to discuss general curriculum standards and what values should be reflected in the academic context.

In addition, Deputy Dean of Undergraduate Students Thomas Dunne will convene with the Undergraduate Student Government senate for a special emergency meeting on Sunday to draft a statement and brainstorm follow-up initiatives to the week’s events, according to USG president Ella Cheng ’16.

Cheng is a former staff writer for The Daily Princetonian.

Gonzalez said it is a primary responsibility of the administration and staff to hear the concerns and needs of the students.

“Our number one concern as a community is how we can care for each other and make sure that we give every individual member of this community a space to feel included and to thrive socially, academically, intellectually, all of those things,” she said.

Both Zuckerman and Draim said they are hoping to circulate the petition as widely as possible.

Dodam Ih ’15, who signed the petition, commented on the petition’s main webpage that “the absolute last thing we need on this campus is a university-sanctioned echo chamber.”

“We definitely have a responsibility to fight prejudice, racism — be it institutional or personal — but I do think that in the national context especially, at colleges we have to do inferential correction and factual correctness, and not political correctness,” he said in an interview with the ‘Prince.’

Ih explained that it would be dangerous to erase history because such an action would begin erasing contexts for present-day experiences as well. Ih added that the “slippery slope” argument against is valid and should be seen as such within academic communities that purport devotion to a truly liberal discussion of ideas.

A better way to go about the issue of tainted yet celebrated legacies on campus, Ih said, is to add a “large asterisk” next to Wilson’s name to explain how even great progressives can come to hold bigoted views.

Regarding a mandatory diversity requirement, Ih noted that such a course could detract from true purpose of a college education.

“I’d want the class to teach us how to think and not what to think,” he said.

Freeman noted the campus climate is suppressing open discussion of ideas, and should instead facilitate intellectual and academic discourse.

“All 5,000 undergraduates chose this school and said they were going to go to Princeton when they were 18 and getting out of high school. We all have an equal stake in this community and see how it grows together,” he said.

Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article implied that all counter petition signatures came from students. The 'Prince' regrets the error.