She added that she would resign, along with the Provost and another dean, if they didn’t meet the demands to the students’ satisfaction.īelow are the University’s response to the student demands (click on screenshot to see full document), listing each demand, how Bryn Mawr would meet it, when it would be met, and how much it would cost. As you can see from the video below, President Cassidy, faced with a bunch of angry students, simply crumpled and said she’d meet all their demands. The students produced a 23-page list of demands (it took over an hour to read them to the President), and then had a Zoom meeting with administrators in which the students’ faces didn’t appear but the administrators’ did. But she later apologized for those words when she and her administration completely capitulated to the student demonstrators. She also decried the “shaming” and “acts of intimidation” against faculty and staff by the student strikers. At first, President Cassidy showed some spine, announcing that classes would resume quickly and that students were expected to attend them. The title of my own piece above comes from Minnie’s angry characterization of the school (see below). Doe says her child will be leaving Bryn Mawr now that it’s become toxic. It is the usual story, but related eloquently, of entitled students using racial unrest to leverage power, turning a non-racist school into a Critical-Theory-oriented antiracist school in which dissent is brutally suppressed. The story of this strike and its sequelae is recounted by the mother of a Bryn Mawr student, who understandably used the pseudonym “Minnie Doe” when she wrote the piece for Quillette below (click on screenshot). In solidarity with Haverford, most Bryn Mawr students also went on strike on October 28, not attending classes and shaming or bullying those students who wanted to go to class and those professors who still held them. Until the killing of George Floyd, the Philadelphia shooting, and then the strike at nearby Haverford, there were no accusations of “systemic racism” at Bryn Mawr or demands for institutional change. There’s no evidence that Bryn Mawr was racist, either. The student strike was inevitably accompanied by a laundry list of demands, to which Haverford caved (granted, some demands were reasonable, but most weren’t given that the institution was not racist). (I just found out that Bridges has resigned and will be gone by June.)Īs I reported in early December, there was a strike among students at nearby Haverford College after an October police shooting in Philadelphia of a black man, Walter Wallace, Jr., that led to demonstrations and riots in the city (see my reports on Haverford here and here). At that school, tuition, room and board will run you a cool $74,000 a year.
We now have a female version of George Bridges ( the spineless President of Evergreen State): she is Kim Cassidy, President of the ritzy Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.