Student activists at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale plan to host a puppet show promoting their “demands” for an Africana Philosophy professor, mandatory racial sensitivity courses that deal with “privilege,” and for the school's economics department to be renamed “Wage Slavery Studies.”
On the website for the “MAY 2 STUDENT STRIKE,” students who dub themselves the “MAY 2 STRIKE COMMITTEE” write that they are trying to bring attention to the “damage” done to students “economically, environmentally, through racism and sexism.”
The activists are upset over a lack of state funding for higher education and the general “rising climate of racism” on campus. The group is also reportedly upset over the university's funding of research into the clean use of fossil fuels, which the activists call a “green capitalist fantasy.”
Even though one of the students' biggest grievances is that people graduate “saddled with debt, holding in their hands degrees that have lost all meaning,” one of the major demands by the MAY 2 STRIKE COMMITTEE is that the university hire an African American and Africana Philosophy professor.
According to SIU doctoral candidate Johnathan Flowers, hiring an Africana Philosophy professor will “enable white students to understand their own white privilege, to understand what people are talking about when they say that America is organized around white supremacist ideologies.” The professor will also help white students “understand black lives matter” and “what role they can play in pushing back against these kinds of institutionalized oppressions."
According to a job listing on Glassdoor.com, the university is apparently already looking for an Africana Philosophy professor.
In addition to hiring an Africana Philosophy professor, the activists also demand the university replace a preexisting required course with a class that deals with “awareness of racial, gender, and class privilege, or something” and for taskforces to be created to deal with how to make the university “anti-racist” and “anti-sexist.”
As a “joke,” the students also demand the economics department to be renamed “Wage Slavery Studies” because “[t]he discipline of economics is ignorant of its own history, and the foundational violence of slavery, enclosure, and genocide that has, over centuries, built up the money economy that economics takes for granted.”
The students also demand “the abolition of student debt” and for “free higher education be recognized as a right.”
Finally, the students have called for the university administration to be “abolished” and for the school to be run by “by a rotating counsel of faculty, staff, students, and community members.”
In order to draw attention to their cause, the MAY 2 STRIKE COMMITTEE's suggested “ideas for action” include hosting a blockade or a sit-in, a march, a barbecue, a dance party, and even a puppet show.
The actual scheduled events for the day involve an “anti-racism T-shirt giveaway” hosted by the Graduate and Professional Student Center, a march, and an “OPEN PIC Reading for Social Justice.”