PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Brown University's president is promising a full investigation and regular meetings on racial issues after a campus police officer handcuffed a student from another Ivy League school, an encounter officials called "heated and physical."
President Christina Paxson apologized in an email Saturday to the campus community for the "fear and pain" caused by the incident earlier that morning.
A Dartmouth College student told the Brown Daily Herald student newspaper that a public safety officer slammed him against a wall, threw him to the ground and handcuffed him.
The student was attending the annual Latinx Ivy League Conference, where Hispanic students from Ivy League schools discuss race, gender and socio-economic issues.
He told the newspaper that he was waiting to enter a party at Machado House when he criticized how police were treating an intoxicated Brown student outside. He said police told him not to enter the building, but he entered through a back door and was confronted by the public safety officer.
The student said he was held until Brown students verified he was a guest. No charges were filed.
The student did not immediately return messages from The Associated Press.
Cass Cliatt, Brown's vice president for communications, told the AP that students feel the incident was racially motivated, but it is too early to make any determinations.
Cliatt said employment agreements prevent the school from releasing identifying information about the officer, who is on administrative duty pending the investigation.
Paxson said in an email that Brown is committed to funding a rescheduled conference, which was unable to continue after the police incident. She also said Brown will consider whether campus officers need additional diversity and sensitivity training, after hearing students' concerns about racial profiling in other incidents.
Last week, Brown students joined their peers at other colleges in protesting racial discrimination on their campuses and showing support for students at the University of Missouri denouncing what they call a racist environment at the school.
In Lawrence, Kan., racial tensions are growing at the University of Kansas with a call for three top Student Senate leaders to resign and a recent graduate initiating a hunger strike.
The Senate's Student Executive Committee is demanding that student President Jessie Pringle, student Vice President Zach George and Chief of Staff Adam Moon step down by Wednesday and that the full Senate take up impeachment measures if they refuse to leave, the Lawrence Journal-World reported. The committee registered a 6-3 "no confidence" vote Friday for the three leaders. One member abstained from the vote.
The resignation demand comes after last week's unrest at the University of Missouri and after a forum that University of Kansas Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little moderated on Wednesday, where student group Rock Chalk Invisible Hawk presented diversity demands, which include hiring a director for the Office of Multicultural Affairs by Dec. 15, mandatory "inclusion and belonging" training for students and faculty, and increased diversity in hiring.
Senate vice president Shegufta Huma, who is also member of the committee, told the newspaper that the vote was the result of months of inaction that culminated in the officers' reluctance to support the diversity demands. Pringle and George were singled out, with the committee saying they did not "stand in solidarity with their black peers and proclaim that Black Lives Matter" at Wednesday's forum.
"This is part of a larger pattern and some much bigger issues that [the] Senate has been dealing with in terms of our relationship with marginalized communities at KU," Huma said.
The three leaders released a statement Saturday, saying they plan to continue serving and professing support for minority groups. "Black lives matter. Black lives matter at the University of Kansas," they wrote.
Gray-Little, who is black, said in a message to campus Friday that her administration will begin sharing information "early next week" about how the school will move forward on the issue of racism.
Meanwhile, John Cowan, a white 2014 University of Kansas graduate, began a hunger strike on campus Friday morning in solidarity with KU student group movements. If the activist groups' demands are not met or if a plan of action is not issued by KU, "then I die or go to the hospital," Cowan told the newspaper, echoing the sentiments of a graduate student at the University of Missouri who ended his hunger strike last week after the resignations of University of Missouri System President Tim Wolfe and Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin.
"I'm kind of at an advantage because of my white privilege, so my suffering is self-inflicted," said Cowan. "Others don't have that choice; it's inflicted upon them."
A Section on 11/16/2015