Georgetown Students Got Credit for Attending Anti-Trump Event

Professor turned World AIDS Day into Bash Trump and His Supporters Day.

1.2.2017

Georgetown University continues its vendetta against President-elect Donald Trump by giving students credit for attending an anti-Trump teach-in.

GU’s views of the newly elected presented were most recently exhibited by one of its professors, Christine Fair, who told a former GU professor and Muslim Trump voter to “f*** off” and “go to hell” for voting for the real estate billionaire. And now, as Campus Reform learned, the school handed out course credit for attending a “radical teach-in” on how to “resist hatred and violence” in the age of Trump.

The workshop happened on December 3, World AIDS Day, by none other than the Women’s and Gender Studies Department. The department’s students were required to attend at least one event for World AIDS Day. However, most of the events were held off campus and involved a donation. So, Professor April Sizemore-Barber offered the free teach-in for those who might not have the means to travel and pay for the other seminars.

She sent the following e-mail to students:

“You also have the option of attending this teach in event tomorrow and reflecting on its approach to activism, teaching, and on-campus advocacy. Though it does not directly reflect on HIV, your write up should make an effort to relate it to the class and to world events more generally. What will activism look like under trump? [sic]”

The workshop was titled “Teach-In for Radical Hope: Sowing Seeds for Liberation” and was designed to “channel all the anti-Trump rage into a pro-Liberation rhetoric that moves people into action.”

Pictures of the classroom where the workshop was held showed Black Lives Matter signs and one that read, “No human being is illegal.”

Campus Reform reported on the audio that a student captured:

Several hours of audio captured at the event by the student reveals that teach-in attendees spent two sessions discussing what it is, exactly, that they should be resisting and “how to resist.”

One attendee said people should resist Trump and his supporters because they are “normalizing and vocalizing and promoting this hatred and violence.... that’s been happening forever in America.”

Another explained that they cannot work with Trump because “that’s what they tried to do with Hitler.”

“There’s a sentiment like, ‘oh well he’s in the presidency and we have to work together...’ he has literal, literal, white supremacists on his cabinet...That’s what they tried to do with Hitler and it didn’t work...they tried like ‘oh we’ll give him this and we’ll give him that and let him do this’ and then WWII and the Holocaust.”

Throughout the session, attendees listed police brutality, capitalism, ableism, “everyday microaggressions,” and “misgendering” as things worth resisting.

In order to confront these issues, declared one attendee, “violence may be necessary.”

A facilitator of the discussion responded that he, “I agree wholeheartedly,” but warned the attendee that it takes privilege to be violent because “some people can’t afford to do that illegal shit.”

Some students left halfway through “exhausted from the radical rhetoric that demonized anything to the right of Stalin.”

“Professor Sizemore-Barber often assumed that the beliefs of the people in the class ran a narrow spectrum,” one anonymous student said. “Professors can be partisan, of course, but it causes issues when they assume all of their students share similar belief systems, even in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department.”