By Camas Frank
On Dec. 12 the Cal Poly Campus was surprisingly quiet. There were a few joggers on the paths between the hillside dorms and the campus core. The library was closed for the weekend and for a schedule change in the off-season.
Aside from a few signs denoting special commencement event parking and shuttle busses crisscrossing lanes normally reserved for bicycles, the only notable difference walking on campus were the number of soon-to-be grads milling about in black gowns.
In many ways it was the calm after the storm.
For anyone who isn’t tuned into campus culture, the calm of “dead week” followed a series of highly attended protests for diversity, and nominally, against hate.
The round figure of 1,000 people, mostly students, were estimated to have attended protest rallies held Dec. 2 -3 after Matt Klepfer, president of the Queer Student Union and co-coordinator of SLO Solidarity, received a death threat via Facebook.
Sent through a comically fake and outrageously anti-Semitic false identity on the website, the message was alleged to read, in part, “The day of the rope will be coming soon, and you people will be the first to go.”
Cal Poly University Police later arrested fellow student Charles Raymond Bird, 20, on felony threats and hate crime charges in connection with the incident, but not before President Jeffrey Armstrong marched with protestors himself on campus.
1:20 PMhe threat was similar in content and form of those sent in November against black students at the University of Missouri using the anonymous messaging platform Yik Yak. Following the protests at Cal Poly users of that service, presumably local students themselves, went on Yik Yak to speculate that Klepfer had faked the threat or to argue with one another about the nature of the 41 “demands” that the SLO Solidarity group had delivered to campus administration.
While the CEO of Yik Yak, Tyler Droll, has publically maintained that the app is supposed to fill the role of a, “central plaza or campus bulletin board,” in actually use it has proven to have a more apt comparison to bathroom stall graffiti. Identities are hidden but subjects are tagged in much the same way as Twitter, allowing localized and very public discussions. Like many aspects of the internet, institutions are playing catch-up, but unlike Twitter or Facebook which have become established as useful tools in their own right, Yik-Yak
In fact, in 2014 Norwich University gained national attention when the school blocked the app on campus networks and the University President Richard Schneider asked students to cease using the service because, he said, he could “see that it was hurting his students.”
For its part Cal Poly is taking a more open approach to dialogue.
In a statement sent to the SLO City News in response to specific questions about the SLO Solidarities “demands,” Cal Poly spokesman Matt Lazier wrote that, “we want to make it clear that Cal Poly administration is committed to the process of improving the university’s diversity and inclusiveness. This was true before recent campus events that brought about the SLOSolidarity student group, and it remains true going forward.”
He added that, “to be prepared to truly succeed in today’s global workforce, our students must be exposed to a broad variety of cultural and professional experiences. And all of our students, faculty and staff must feel safe and comfortable in this learning environment in order to reach their fullest potential…. University administrators have worked diligently to hear those concerns, through an open forum on campus and smaller meetings with students and employees. These are serious discussions that will continue as the campus moves into 2016.”
