LETTERS

Profs: Mitch Daniels leaves it to us to fend off racist, right-wing threats at Purdue

J&C readers
Purdue University

If a wall of faculty, students and staff had stood up to the Nazis on that Friday night in August on the University of Virginia campus, what would the morning after have looked like?  If the Nazis who chanted “Jews will not replace us” or “blood and soil” had been stopped then and there, would they have marched with the same confidence the next day, Saturday, in Charlottesville? Would Heather Heyer still be alive?

Since Charlottesville, and the murder of Heather Heyer, every instance of counterprotest by antiracists against the Nazis shows that mass mobilization against racism has the power to demoralize and demobilize their forces. 

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The lesson is also brutally stark in reverse.  Every instance where Nazis and white nationalists have felt confident to practice their politics, they have brought terror, suffering, and in the case of Charlottesville, death. 

We face a clear choice here at Purdue: Resist the Nazis or allow their politics to flourish.

Since last November, there have been seven recorded instances of open Nazi propaganda on campus.  In an Honors College classroom, recently, desks were rearranged to resemble the Nazi swastika. 

It is in this context that the Purdue chapter of Campus Antifascists Network sent documented evidence of support by people at Purdue for Identity Evropa — a white supremacist, anti-Semitic group — to Purdue President Mitch Daniels and urged an investigation into the matter in the interest of safety and security of all of us who work and study on this campus. 

In response, President Daniels chose to: (a) reassert the principle of “free speech” for Nazis; and (b) target a faculty member with a long record of antiracist work in a polemic closely resembling that of the U.S. president when the latter blamed “both sides” for the tragedy at Charlottesville. 

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As women and people of color teaching and working on this campus, we find this response deeply frightening. 

President Daniels has deliberately chosen to champion freedom, a precious value and right, in the most narrow and circumscribed way possible — as free speech alone. 

We believe our universities and communities ought to be constitutive of freedom understood in the broadest possible sense.  The freedom, for instance, for women to walk alone at night without threat of violence.  Or the freedom for people of color and people of Jewish and Muslim faiths to be able to come to class without the shadow of violence mocking us.  The principle of free speech is only one freedom which ought to be part of this expansive assurance of freedom to work and live on our campus and in our community without threat of violence.  What good is the right to free speech if it is severed from the right to work and exist freely without the threat of racist violence?

We come from communities and faiths which have had to historically fight for our freedoms.  President Daniels' response has reminded us forcefully that when it comes to guarding and protecting those hard-won freedoms, we always have to look to ourselves not to administrators or people in power.  So we will continue to organize against this clear and visible right wing threat.  We will continue to teach our students our values of freedom and social justice.  And we will continue to educate the message that standing up to fascism is always the right thing to do.

Tithi Bhattacharya, Department of History

Susan Curtis, Department of History

Jean Beaman, Department of Sociology

Monica Trieu, American Studies Program

Megha Anwer, Honors College

Yvonne Pitts, Department of History​

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