Case Western Reserve University used to be called "the Harvard of the Midwest". Maybe now it should be called "CWRU Police Barracks":
Black lives matter at Case Western Reserve University. That's why several Black Case Western students, including myself, drafted an online petition demanding answers for Case Western President Barbara R. Snyder's quartering of 1,700 out-of-state police officers and 200 members of the National Guard in the university's dormitories during the Republican National Convention (RNC). A whistleblower had alerted us to her unilateral agreement with Cleveland Mayor Frank G. Jackson to house hundreds of police officers, which she had made without students' knowledge or consent. Within a week of posting our petition on Change.org, we had more than 330 signatures.
Feeling the pressure, Snyder finally came clean about her plans to quarter soldiers on campus. Her June 24 email to the campus community referred to them as "peace officers" -- whereas our petition had warned against "riot police" -- yet she did vaguely acknowledge police brutality and bias. She then caricatured our petition: "Nevertheless, presuming that every peace officer coming to Cleveland is predisposed to violence or discrimination represents its own kind of profiling, and is in direct opposition to our core values as a university."
You can read the rest @
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/37188-why-is-a-university-quartering-police-and-soldiers-in-its-dorms
I graduated from CWRU long ago. The campus borders Cleveland's East Side, which at the time was a site of rioting and extreme poverty.
It would not surprise me if the university and its students, most of whom are white and middle class or above, somehow felt threatened by the Black Lives Matter movement and by blacks in general. When "the best location in the nation" became "the mistake by the lake", profiling became the norm. I doubt things have changed much since then.
But if I'm wrong about this, please let me know.
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