San Diego State University announced Monday that a student-led speaker series has been revised to eliminate speakers who have embraced anti-Semitic rhetoric in the past.
In an opinion piece published Saturday by Times of San Diego, SDSU English literature professor Peter Herman noted that the SDSU College of Education announced that four graduate students in its joint doctoral program with Claremont Graduate University received a combined $170,000 to design programming for black students during the spring semester.
One student indicated they would use their cut of the funding to host a summit on reparations featuring, among others, journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates. The summit also included Ava Muhammad, a spokeswoman for Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, which the Southern Poverty Law Center designates as a hate group.
The student leading the summit has since agreed to revise the program to remove the controversial speakers.
“We strongly reject anti-Semitic and other disparaging messages and actions,” the university said in a statement posted on its Twitter account. “SDSU will offer support to the student organizer to ensure that the original basis for the event — a critical exploration of slavery and reparations — can proceed.”
The $170,000 in funding came from the Student Success Fee, which is added to the university’s tuition to hire tenure-track professors and support “student-led academic related programming outside of the classroom,” according to SDSU. The university added in its statement that questions and concerns could be sent to the SDSU Division of Diversity and Innovation at diversity@sdsu.edu.
“Any effort that serves to further societal division is antithetical to what SDSU values,” the university’s statement reads. “We are a diverse community and it is our diversity and the preservation of an inclusive environment that creates our greatness.”