America’s legacy elite colleges continue to lose reputation in the public eye. Today’s example is Sarah Lawrence College, where intolerance for heterodoxy is part of the culture.
Fortunately, civil rights have been vindicated, if only in a small way, at the college.
The story begins in October 2018, when professor Samuel Abrams described the college administration’s role in intolerance in the New York Times. The thanks he got for this argument began with vandalism of his office and continued on and off as new students learned about the dissenter in their midst. (Abrams and I serve together on Harvard Alumni for Free Speech’s advisory board.)
Skipping ahead to 2024, intolerant students of the anti-Israel Divestment Coalition at the college shamefully disrupted the college’s commencement in the spring. Then, as the fall semester of 2024 opened, the coalition pushed students to boycott Abrams on the usual, tired grounds of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) and with common anti-Semitic rhetoric.
Finally, in November, the same group took over a campus building and encamped, reliving their glory days of 2023. Since the administration wouldn’t or couldn’t do what was needed to restore order, the accurate headline was, “Sarah Lawrence Has Fallen.”
Recently, Abrams also described what he’s been seeing at the college here on Minding the Campus. He explained how the “intense cancel culture” at Sarah Lawrence illustrates “how dissent is almost impossible without real social and reputational consequences.” (See also his 2022 piece, “Let Sarah Lawrence College Be a Warning.”)
In short, when you’ve been “Sarah Lawrenced,” you’ve been unpersoned.
After I learned about the Abrams boycott, I decided to investigate: Is Sarah Lawrence College so intolerant that it is even violating civil rights laws? The answer was yes.
Under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, colleges that get federal funding are required not to discriminate on the basis of race. Yet the college’s Thrive Mentorship Program for Students of Color was explicitly doing so. The program looks valuable, but it was limited to “students of color.”
In particular, the college advertised it as “a yearlong mentorship program that will connect incoming first year and transfer students of color with upperclass students of color at Sarah Lawrence College” (emphases added). The icing on the cake was this irony: “student participants and leaders will have a better understanding of Sarah Lawrence College’s Principles for Mutual Respect and core values,” values that apparently included condoning racial discrimination.
Thrive is sponsored by the college’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Office.
On August 29, 2024, I filed a federal civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Filing such complaints is easy; it involves a simple email and a personally signed and dated consent form.
I requested a process called rapid resolution, since this was an easy one. If you don’t get rapid resolution, your complaint can languish at the department for years and years, as many filers have experienced.
My complaint succeeded.
On January 13, 2025, OCR notified me that the facts of my allegation “are no longer present.” That’s because the college now states that the Thrive Mentorship Program for Students of Color is not “for” only students of color but is “open to all Sarah Lawrence students who feel such a mentorship opportunity would be beneficial during their first year.”
Case Number 02-24-2528 – Sarah Lawrence College by jaredsgould on Scribd
The exclusionary language has also been edited to comply with the law. The Thrive page now says that the program “will connect incoming first year and transfer students with upperclass students,” with no reference to color other than the name of the program.
Readers might be confused in seeing that Thrive is still called a program “for students of color.” But the nondiscrimination disclaimer is enough for OCR; the name of a program alone is not enough for a civil rights violation. A reasonable student can now go to the website and see clearly that mentoring is available regardless of color.
Notably, OCR also required this disclaimer on the other website evidence I submitted, where Sarah Lawrence College advertised Thrive specifically as limited to “students of color.” This resolution, adding a disclaimer, is the right way to handle historical or archival documents rather than rewriting them and pretending that a press release or news story never said what it said.
Meanwhile, Sarah Lawrence’s DEI office maintains a “Bias Incident” reporting system, which threatens free speech. I wonder how much the DEI office cares about the student boycott and vandalism against Sam Abrams.
Sarah Lawrence College, you’re dead to me. I’m Sarah Lawrencing you—until next time.
Image of Sarah Lawrence Westlands by Djrobgordon on Wikipedia
This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org
