Law enforcement personnel are searching for the person who hung up “anti-feminism” posters around American University’s campus late Tuesday evening.
The posters parody the recent International Women’s Day as “International Nags [sic] Day,” and include the meme “Stop talking and bitching woman on March 8 and make me a sandwich.”
Rather remarkably, as Fox-5 reports, police are investigating this “vandalism” as a hate crime.
A crime alert was issued to the A.U. community which included photos of the suspect:
Misogynistic posters were put up on American University's campus on the eve of International Women's Day. https://t.co/SNXZ9H0vyz pic.twitter.com/MVJYrjYFz0
— DCist (@DCist) March 10, 2017
The Eagle reports Provost Scott Bass sent out an email noting that the posters “were against AU’s poster policy,” and said “We condemn the message as misogynistic, disrespectful, and divisive. Our university is no place for such hostility and disrespect.”
Kogod School of Business Dean John T. Delaney added that “This is not the place for such disrespect to be shown. We must stand together to overcome hate and ignorance.”
These days such statements are quite expected from college administration. But hate crime charges for what is really, at most, a tasteless joke?
Check out my latest story for @TheEagleOnline about the posters on campus yesterday https://t.co/Ux5K76mZ5q
— maria (@mariaspov) March 9, 2017
“I can believe that people feel those things,” [graduate student Alexandra] Long said. “I’ve seen and heard sentiments that are similar to that, but the fact that today someone would have gone through the effort of putting that in our faces, it made me disgusted and sad.” …
The Student Advocacy Center, led by director Will Mascaro, recently passed a recommendation in February so that the Student Conduct Code now has specific language for identity-bias attacks.
According to the new code “significant factors” in determining sanctions will include “evidence that the respondent’s conduct was motivated by bias towards an individual or group on the basis of real or perceived, race, sex, gender identity, religion, national origin, age, disability, ethnicity, veteran status, or sexual orientation.”
With this change, if the perpetrator in this incident is caught and is a student, the Student Conduct Code will include in the report that this was a gender-biased attack, Mascaro said. If that is the case, Mascaro said it will test the new conduct code and the University.
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