Marches, meetings, and anger: the aftermath of Milo Yiannopoulos at DePaul

CHICAGO — Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, the President of DePaul University, met with students and faculty at a closed Town Hall meeting last Friday to address concerns of racism and exclusion at DePaul.

These concerns reached a fever-pitch on May 24 when students and protesters clashed over an on-campus event hosting Milo Yiannopoulos, a conservative speaker. Students and protestors marched on the Student Center, where the event was being held, and shut down the event in protest of Yiannopoulos.

Tensions were high on-campus before Yiannopoulos’ event, part of his “Dangerous Faggot Tour” to campuses across the country to speak against what he calls “rampant PC-culture”. A petition with 422 signatures circulated on Change.org beforehand, calling for DePaul administration to ban Yiannopoulos from coming to the school. The petition claimed Yiannopoulos, “perpetuates the dangerous systems of oppression that exist in our world,” and was started by an anonymous account.

After DePaul College Republicans chalked political messages on-campus earlier in the quarter, Rev. Holtschneider released an email statement saying that DePaul would remain an “open forum” for political discourse, and for dissenting views.

On the day of Yiannopoulos’ event, a section of the DePaul Democrats and Socialists referring to itself as the Social Justice Committee held a peaceful protest in the Quad. According to Maddy Obrzut, a committee member, the event was high-jacked by outside protesters.

“We shouldn’t have gone in [the Student Center], those were not our people,” she said. According to Obrzut, these outside protesters led many from the Social Justice Committee’s protest into the Student Center, where photos and videos posted online showed them crowded around the entrance to the auditorium where the Yiannopoulos event was taking place, some pounding on the doors.

The event itself was taken over by protesters led by Edward Ward, a DePaul alum. The protesters chanted things like “Dump the Trump” and “Black Lives Matter,” while Ward blew a whistle and a fellow protester took a microphone from the College Republican moderator. As shown by a video stream of the event on Youtube, at one point Ward lunged at Yiannopoulos.

According to Alvan Calderon, an attendee at the event who witnessed the exchange, Yiannopoulos provoked Ward by saying, “If you weren’t a [racial expletive] I’d hit on you,” to him.

“I was ashamed for DePaul University when I saw a student rip the microphone from the hands of the conference moderator and wave it in the face of (the) speaker,” said President Dennis Holtschneider in an email statement to students and staff the next day. “This is unworthy of university discourse.”

Brendan Howard, another Republican attendee at the event, claims that the protestors who were in the event had not RSVP’d, and said that people who “act like that are not welcome.”

At one point during the event, Nicole Been, the president of the College Republicans announced that Chicago Police were en route to the event and that anyone onstage who wasn’t supposed to be would be arrested. When Chicago Police arrived though, no arrests were made and nobody was removed from the stage. A camera live-streaming the event showed DePaul Public Safety officers and Chicago Police standing on the sidelines.

According to both Calderon and Breitbart News, an organization that co-sponsored the event, DePaul administration would not allow the protesters to be arrested and told Public Safety not to act in removing them from the event.

“I’ve protested other events and I got pulled out immediately,” says Calderon. He said that it was frustrating to see Public Safety seeming to take a double-standard, he feels, because the event was conservative.

DePaul Administration and Public Safety have not made it clear whether there was in-fact an explicit order for Public Safety not to act. When questioned that day, Public Safety officers on duty said that policy prohibited them from answering questions. Robert Wachowski, the Director of Public Safety declined to be interviewed.

After the event ended with Yiannopoulos leading the attendees on a march across campus to the Quad, students, protestors, and Yiannopoulos supporters remained in the Quad. Yiannopoulos soon left for safety reasons, and shortly thereafter his supporters left the campus.

This event comes at a time when many commentators, like Yiannopoulos, say “PC culture” is taking hold on campuses, with students protesting conservative speakers and claiming that systemic racism is present at schools.

A similarly inspired event occurred in November 2015 at the University of Missouri. Many students at Missouri held wide-scale protests after the school’s football team refused to play until claims of racism from the students were addressed. An online video went viral of the Mizzou protesters harassing student journalists and keeping them away university public spaces, which protesters claimed were being used as “safe-spaces.”

While speaking at a Town Hall meeting in Des Moines, Iowa in September 2015, President Obama described liberal college students — the kind of students who ban speakers from campus due to their political beliefs, at least — as “coddled.”

“I’ve heard of some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative,” Obama said, according to The Hill. “I’ve got to tell you; I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view.”

According to the DePaulia, Holtschneider ended the Town Hall on Friday by acknowledging that the University has not created “that community that we’ve always talked about,” and saying that the University would begin working on a plan to address grievances raised by students.