Terrified University of Washington Holds ‘Community Healing’ For Trump Trauma



The aftermath of Donald Trump’s election has been tough on our nation’s college campus special snowflakes. Forced to endure school the day after such a decisive Clinton defeat, they were quick to ask for a number of concessions from their professors and administrations.

Yale students were so distraught they asked their professor to cancel midterm exams (at least one professor happily agreed to do so).

Cornell Students shared their grief with a mass “cry-in.”

University of Michigan students occupied the school’s library where they held a candlelight vigil to protest Trump’s victory. Professors at the University of Connecticut, University of Rochester and Iowa State University cancelled classes because they simply couldn’t face the day.

But perhaps it was the University of Washington that took the cake — because the feelings of fear, marginalization and distress (at this taxpayer-funded school) came straight from the top.

University President Ana Mari Cauce sent a letter out to students and faculty Wednesday afternoon in which she described herself as “an immigrant Latina lesbian”.  She informed students of a Trump-inspired gathering of healing in the “Unity Room” of the school’s ethnic cultural center. President Cauce further wrote:

washu

According to President Cauce, many students are feeling “marginalized, threatened or afraid. It has been a very difficult election season for us all.”

Really?

Several UW students who spoke to Heat Street told us they did not feel as though they were in any immediate danger from President-Elect Trump, nor were they experiencing any lingering election day trauma. But we did locate one student who said her professor had cancelled class to “pull herself together” after the results.

The healing event did go on as planned, with President Cauce joining UW students in holding signs and hugging it out – though, it seems, attendance was initially sparse.

Eventually, the crowd grew into a circle of students voicing their concerns about a potential Trump administration, though mostly at each other.

Once they had aired their grievances, the group dispersed, leaving only a few hardcore activists to spread the message.

Hopefully, they will have worked out their complicated feelings by Saturday, when ESPN’s College Game Day visits the campus.

UW has, of course, had quite the relationship with social justice, apart from their Trump group therapy. The school was among the first in the nation to install “gender-neutral” bathrooms to serve the transgender campus community, but ran into trouble when confronted with possible “cisgender” students who wanted to use the bathrooms as well.

The result was a complex bathroom policy, admonishing students who, in their haste to do their business, used the gender-neutral restrooms and “took away spaces designed to right wrongs.”

Hopefully, after tonight’s events, they’ll all be okay.

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