Public Pressure on Hopkins Continues

The press coverage of Justin Park and Johns Hopkins continues. United Press International, the Baltimore Examiner, and Inside Higher Ed all ran accounts of the story.

In an editorial published in the Baltimore Sun, Gregory Kane, a black writing professor at JHU, writes:

I’ve said it a couple dozen times before. Others have said it. We’ll just keep saying it until the idea sinks in: There is no right, constitutional or otherwise, to not be offended.

The News-Letter, JHU’s weekly student newspaper, ran two articles about the case. Both document the extent of student unrest with the fairness of the Conduct Board hearings and the Board’s decision, and the administration’s indifference to this unrest. In one article, Ravi Gupta and Charles Tsai write:

[Executive director of the Office of Communications and Public Affairs Dennis] O’Shea commented that popular student opinion as expressed in a Facebook.com group, for example, would unlikely influence the fraternity’s appeal, if there is one.

“The grounds for the appeal in a Student Conduct Board case are limited. I have never heard that popular opinion, one way or the other, is among those grounds,” he said.

It seems at Johns Hopkins, the voices of a few, namely the members of the Black Student Union and the Baltimore chapter of the NAACP, silence the voices of many others on campus.