On a campus steeped in racial history, a student protest in the very heart of the university draws attention. A protest that was caused, driven and sustained by social media, however, marks the start of something new.
On a Thursday night in late September, New York columnist Shaun King received emails from students more than 1,000 miles away. They sent screenshots from a Facebook post: “I have a tree with room for all of them if you want to settle this Wild West style.”
The comment was posted by an Ole Miss student, referring to black protesters in North Carolina who mourned the death of a man shot by police officers.
“Several students emailed it to me directly,” King said. “They were not only offended; they were literally concerned for their safety.”
King tweeted a question to @OleMissRebels, seen by his 382,000 followers.
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., Tysianna Marino, president of the student NAACP chapter, was preparing a presentation on a research project she had worked on for two years. She began hearing from Ole Miss students who were hurt, scared and angry.
The post set off a swift chain reaction that illustrates both the power and the peril of social media. Ole Miss — once a place where student opinion marched almost in lockstep in the same direction — heaved to and fro under the pull of different student groups.
All in an hour
King said he didn’t expect the post to go viral – that wasn’t the point – he just wanted to make sure Jordan Samson was held accountable. Samson, the business major who made the original post at around 2:30 p.m., quickly deleted his Facebook account and the comments after King tweeted it out around midnight.
“Yes, it was hate speech, but it was also violent,” King said. “Sadly, on historically white college campuses, it often takes a public push for students like this to be held accountable.”
King’s post gained even more national recognition when 49ers’ quarterback Colin Kaepernick retweeted it. Kaepernick had recently gained attention – good and bad – for refusing to stand for the national anthem in protest of police brutality in America.
The tweet also drew the attention of the Ole Miss’ public relations Twitter account, which is run by Ryan Whittington, assistant director of public relations.
“When we saw Shaun King’s tweet, we felt it was important to immediately acknowledge the situation, and since the tweet was directed @OleMissRebels, we felt it best to respond from that account ASAP,” Whittington said. “We monitor mentions for all of our official social media platforms, and we’re both entrusted with the responsibility of responding directly to any and all tweets we deem necessary.”
The UM NAACP wasn’t planning to protest–not at first. When interviewed by The Daily Mississippian that Friday morning, Marino said she wanted to give the university the opportunity to speak first, to reassure the students that they were safe.
“At the moment, we just want to know what the university is going to do,” Marino said before the protest. “If they do nothing, we will absolutely respond. (But) we’re going to give the chancellor the opportunity to respond.”
Chancellor Jeffrey Vitter responded through the university’s public platform UM Today around noon, but his words didn’t comfort students.
“The University of Mississippi condemns the use of language that might encourage or condone violence,” Vitter’s statement said. “Instead, let’s be respectful and civil in our discourse, as called for in the Creed.”
Almost immediately, students on campus reacted to the statement.
“We were upset, but we weren’t moved to do anything until the chancellor sent his report out about it,” Marino said. “It wasn’t sensitive to the message that Samson had portrayed or to the feeling that the African-American community–or any community of color that has had a history of lynching–could be feeling at that time.”
So they rallied. Less than an hour after the university sent out the statement, students filled the halls in peaceful protest and demanded to speak to the chancellor and his administrators.
“It was really amazing to see all of that unfold and happen in half an hour. They did some amazing work,” Marino said. “To see them come together and work together so effortlessly and so flawlessly was just inspiring to me.”
The students documented their protest with Facebook Live and Periscope, shareable, real-time recording platforms. They tweeted and posted on various social media sites, inviting students to join them. The crowd grew to more than 100 people. In Martindale, just a dozen yards away, more students gathered for a small protest as well.
Their posts gained thousands of viewers and drew local and national media attention. Kim Dandridge, an alumna from 2012 and the first black female Associated Student Body president, decided she wanted to support the students.
Support in the form of bottles of water, Gatorade and granola bars were delivered to protesters occupying the Lyceum.
Dandrige, now an attorney in Memphis, said she was about to board a plane when she saw tweets saying the students were sharing snacks after hours of protesting.
“I support fully what they’re doing,” Dandridge said. “Me being away, what can I do to help? I thought maybe we should send some food or something.”
So she called Courtney Pearson, a friend and alumna who was the first black homecoming queen for Ole Miss. Pearson helped her coordinate food delivery to the Lyceum.
Pizza is being donated to protestors who have been in the Lyceum since 2 p.m. #OccupytheLyceum pic.twitter.com/ZpzbCMAsDc
— Daily Mississippian (@thedm_news) September 23, 2016
Pearson said social media kept interested alumni like her involved in the activism at their alma mater.
“I think that that is part of the story. We no longer have to wait for news the next day or the next week,” Pearson said. “We are able to see (events) unfold and watch them happen. That was really beneficial to Kim and I to be able to pull things together really quickly.”
After posting about the deliveries, other alumni began contributing. Dandridge said some alumni reached out to her and asked to reimburse the cost of the deliveries. Other alumni began posting messages of support to the protesters.
Social media provided a way for the people who love Ole Miss to stay involved in issues.
“We still care about what’s happening on campus,” Pearson said. “We care about students’ experiences. We want to see Ole Miss become the great institution that we know that it is.”
Donald Cole, assistant provost and assistant to the chancellor concerning minority affairs, said he was proud of the students for speaking up.
“I, in some sense, joined in in spirit and in heart with them, because the language that was mentioned in the post is one that not only stirs up anger and distrust (but) can lead people to violent acts,” Cole said. “The interpretation by many, including myself, could only have been one way, and that was a racist interpretation.”
Cole, who first attended The University of Mississippi in 1968, just six years after integration, said racist language has no place on the Ole Miss campus. In 1970, Cole was forced to leave the university when he and other students protested on campus.
“I’ve been around a good while, and I’ve seen the norms change,” Cole said. “I remember when that language was an acceptable language. That’s just not the case anymore, particularly here at the University of Mississippi.”
Cole said the initial statement released by the university was intended to address a multitude of issues on campus, not that specific comment. But when the university understood the students’ dismay, Cole said they worked quickly to respond.
After a few hours of protesting, the leaders of the student protest and university administration met together in an upstairs office while the protest below continued. The university leaders asked the students to turn their phones off. For the first time since the protest began, there was no way for the public to know what happened behind the closed, white doors.
“We all sat at the table equally,” Cole said. “We let the students work through their issues as they were telling us. We saw their hurt. We understood their pain, and we took time. We aggressively spoke to one another, and we equally aggressively listened to one another.”
Freedom of speech
One of the main issues the leaders talked about is the constitutionality of punishing comments from social media.
(Photo by: Taylar Teel)
Brandi Hephner LaBanc, vice chancellor for student affairs, said this was not an instance where the university could respond with punishment because the statement was still constitutionally protected.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education specializes in defending students’ constitutional rights to speech, protest and legal equality.
Marieke Beck-Coon, senior program officer, said the foundation deals with cases of universities trying to enforce restrictions on speech on social media often.
“There’s a common misconception that the first amendment does not protect hate speech; it does actually protect hate speech,” Beck-Coon said. “There are certain categories of speech that it doesn’t protect. It doesn’t protect harassment or incitement to violence, obscenity, child pornography. There are several things the first amendment does not protect. Hate speech is not one of them.”
Beck-Coon said the university does have the right to create certain standards of behavior and conduct on campus, but it has no lawful ability to enforce it.
“(The university) doesn’t have the power to punish an individual if they say something that the university views as hateful or not fitting in with the values that it itself has articulated. That would be a rather dangerous power to give to a government institution.”
Beck-Coon said giving the institution this kind of power would endanger free speech.
“Do you want to give an institution that has authority over you the power to decide the values that you have to stick to when you are speaking?” Beck-Coon said. “If you’re thinking of this issue, especially in the context of social media, there are things that I ask people to think about. Very specific to social media, do you want to give your school, as an institutional bureaucracy, that kind of 24/7 control over your speech?”
Lee Tyner, the university’s chief legal council, was in the meeting that day. He said his sole purpose there was to help students understand this line in protected and unprotected speech.
After the protest
Tyner’s presence in the room was a problem for some onlookers. JT Thomas, assistant professor of sociology and a faculty adviser to the university’s NAACP chapter, said the university bringing legal representation to a meeting with students angered him.
“It’s highly inappropriate that legal counsel was in the meeting with our students and they didn’t have faculty representation,” Thomas said. “I think that’s highly problematic. I think our university needs to recognize that.”
Thomas was in a meeting when he first heard of the protest and could only stay for a few minutes. Thomas said the presence of only student affairs officials wasn’t enough representation for students.
“They don’t walk into that room representing the students; they walk into that room representing the university,” Thomas said. “Students absolutely needed faculty representation in that meeting, and I think if they don’t understand that, they need to understand that.”
Thomas said the university should have gauged the real reason for the protest before bringing in representation.
“This isn’t so much a critique of Chancellor Vitter as it is a critique of the responsive apparatus,” Thomas said. “Oftentimes, and I’m not the only one who I think has noted this, our university’s response to these incidents and other universities’ response to these incidents are more about damage control and protecting the brand than they are about actually addressing what happened in a meaningful way.”
Thomas said he was proud of the student organization’s growth in the past year since the removal of the state flag from campus.
“We now have the organizational capacity to pull something like this off in an hour. We could never have pulled this off last year,” Thomas said. “Our student leaders now have a sense of how to be proactive and not just reactive. We now have mechanisms in place that can keep up with our institution and continue to hold it accountable in step so that we’re not constantly trailing behind.”
Thomas said he believed social media was a great galvanizing factor for this protest, but he also said social media presents a real issue for the university.
“I don’t think you’re going to eliminate racist comments, and it’s harder to monitor some platforms like Yik Yak, which are anonymous,” Thomas said. “I would encourage all students to understand that anything you put on the internet, whether you think it is anonymous or private, it’s completely public, and it’s not anonymous. It’s very easy to figure out who is saying what and when.”
Contrary to others, Thomas said he believed these statements could be disciplined.
“By disciplining it, you can control it,” Thomas said. “We’re saying what you said and what you did did not fit the standards of our community, and you need to understand that, and our community needs to understand that.”
If a student’s actions do not align with the values of the institution, Thomas said, the student shouldn’t be a part of the institution.
This struggle, between the constitutional right to expression and the need for a safe environment conducive to learning, affects many areas of campus.
Austin Powell, the fifth African-American president of the Associated Student Body, faces a similar concern.
Austin Powell gives speech outside of the Lyceum last spring.
Powell participated in the protest in the Lyceum. He said it was important for him to understand the needs of the students and to bring what he learned back to his office.
Just one week after hearing about these students’ needs, Powell faced a similar dilemma.
During the election to fill the open ASB senate seats, Sen. Tim Pickett sent a message via the group-messaging app GroupMe that encouraged voters to “keep the NAACP and flaming libs out of office,” and sent a list of people for whom to vote.
“We were trying to figure out what to do because it was during elections,” Powell said. “Does that affect the way the elections process was run? None of those people knew they were on that list.”
Powell said the case was sent to the ethics committee, who will review it and make a decision. Powell said the ethics committee doesn’t remove senators often, but it is within its power.
“That’s not something ASB wants to tolerate. That’s not the kind of behavior or elections process we’re going to tolerate,” Powell said. “As president, I called him and talked to him and let him know what his role as a senator was. When you wear the ASB senator hat, your goal is to prioritize student needs first.”
Powell said the process Pickett’s comment is going through is the same that will be enacted in any case of a senator misrepresenting the university creed.
“I’m not trying to censor anyone’s speech,” Powell said. “We just have to be aware that as members of ASB and as members of the Ole Miss community, this is what we’re abiding ourselves by. This is our code of conduct.”
An apology and a question
On Oct. 5, the university released Samson’s apology to the Ole Miss student body and said Samson had withdrawn voluntarily from the university.
Hephner LaBanc said Samson came to that decision of his own volition.
“He agreed to all of this on his own,” Hephner LaBanc said. “This was not a sanction the university gave him. This is something he agreed to because he, in my opinion, he’s taken responsibility and wants to repair harm.”
When university officials first met with Samson, however, Hephner LaBanc said he was very apologetic but wanted to remain a student.
“He wanted to get a degree,” she said. “He loves this university the same way other students have expressed their love. But he also was extremely remorseful and wanted to know how to apologize and come back into this community in a productive way.”
Hephner Labanc said after talking to the university and understanding the repercussions his post might have, Samson came to the decision that he should withdraw.
“I think it was a mutual conversation in getting to that point,” Hephner LaBanc said. “I worry about him being academically successful. I mean, this has taken a toll on him emotionally and mentally, and his family. I would say his actions were not aligned with his family’s values. That has been at play as well.”
Though Samson will not be attending classes, he will still be on campus. Samson will work with the Center for Inclusion and Cross Cultural Engagement and the William Winter Institute in a restorative justice approach to learn from his actions.
Jennifer Stollman, academic director at the William Winter Institute, said the university will collaborate with affected parties on campus to create the curriculum to “fill in the knowledge gaps that Samson has displayed.”
“That program will be fashioned according to the goals and needs of Jordan Samson as well as the other campus stakeholders,” Stollman said. “That’s how restorative justice operates. It won’t be effective unless it’s a campus-collaborative effort, in my mind. And that’s how we will proceed.”
Hephner LaBanc said she does not know what steps the university would have taken had Samson not withdrawn. She said that after this semester is over, she believes Samson will reenter the university.
“That will be his decision, but my sense is he will reenroll,” Hephner LaBanc said.
The Daily Mississippian reached out to Chancellor Jeffrey Vitter and Alice Clark, vice chancellor for university relations, but they were unavailable for interviews. Jordan Samson, who made the original Facebook post, could not be reached for comment.
