PORTLAND, Ore. — Students at Reed College held protests and sit-ins Wednesday and Thursday in response to a video posted to social media that showed a Reed professor making what Reed president Audrey Bilger described in a statement last week as "offensive and racist comments at a local business."
About 300 students were packed into the main second-floor hallway and part of two stairwells at Reed’s central Eliot Hall late Thursday morning, and the protest on Wednesday reportedly unfolded similarly.
An extensive amount of graffiti had been written on the walls throughout the first and second floors of the building, calling for the professor in the video to be fired and asserting that Reed "protects racists," although shortly before noon a student with a microphone admonished the crowd for creating more work for the janitorial staff, and some students were then seen using sponges to clean off some of the messages.
One student organizer outside the building, who declined to give their name, said the protest could potentially continue on Friday or subsequent days.
"That is the hope. We haven’t planned on anything yet," they said.
Multiple students on the second floor asked a KGW reporter to leave the building, asserting that they were not allowing media inside. Reed is a private school, but a staff member and communications representatives separately spoke to the reporter and did not object to their presence on the campus.
The student who spoke to KGW outside the building said the protesters did not want to be photographed because conservative writer Andy Ngo retweeted photos of protesters that had been posted by The Quest student newspaper on Wednesday, which the student said led to some of the participants being harassed online.
The video that sparked the protest shows a man in the driver's seat of a vehicle with the window rolled down during an argument with someone off-camera who appears to be the person recording. Based on signs visible in the background, the video appears to have been filmed outside a Portland McDonald’s restaurant.
The roughly 30-second recording begins mid-sentence with the man in the car saying "... hiring illegal immigrants." The person recording responds, "illegal immigrants?" and the man repeats the phrase, then questions if the person was born in the United States. He then turns and begins speaking to someone else outside the passenger side window who appears to have been angered by the conversation, and states that the person is threatening him.
The video was posted to TikTok on March 17 but appears to have come to Reed's attention after a Twitter user reposted it last week and identified the person in the video as Paul Currie, a professor of psychology at Reed.
Esmée Silverman, a Reed student who helped organize this week’s protests, said the video was widely shared among students last week, prompting the protests this week after the school returned from spring break.
The protest on Wednesday ran for multiple hours, according to Silverman and an article from the Quest. Bilger reportedly spoke to some of the protesters on Wednesday.
The students reportedly demanded that Currie have a "restorative justice conversation" with the people harmed in the video and that he be suspended or fired if the first demand was not met in a timely manner, according to the Quest article and a message sent to KGW by another Reed student.
Student organizers who spoke to KGW on Thursday said the initial list of demands was being phased out in favor of a new set that would be drafted with input from more students, but that the core goals of the protest were for Currie to be fired and for Reed to implement diversity training and pursue other institutional reforms to prevent similar incidents in the future.
"We really don’t want this to blow over," said the student who spoke about hoping to continue the protest on Friday.
When asked for comment on Wednesday, a Reed spokesperson forwarded an email that had been sent to students and faculty by Dean of the Faculty Kathy Oleson on Monday night, stating that Oleson would meet with the college’s Committee on Advancement and Tenure to determine whether "an investigation of unprofessional conduct may be warranted according to the procedures of Section G or Section H" of the college’s Faculty Rules of Procedure.
Section G considers sanctions less than suspension or termination, she said, and Section H considers "fixed-term suspension or termination of academic tenure." Oleson said the faculty member in question is currently on sabbatical and not teaching.
In an email to Reed alumni on Tuesday that was forwarded to KGW, Bilger acknowledged that "some community members have called for the professor to be dismissed from the college" and included a copy of Oleson’s email about disciplinary procedures. Currie separately sent an apology email to staff and students earlier in the week, the Reed spokesperson confirmed.
Some of the student protesters said they took issue with the fact that the initial emails from Bilger and Oleson didn’t mention Currie by name, and they also said the investigation and disciplinary process outlined in Oleson’s email did not have a clear enough or fast enough timeline.
In a new message posted to Reed’s website on Wednesday night, Bilger acknowledged the protests, mentioned Currie by name and apologized for her "choice of words" in earlier messages.
She also invited students to a "community conversation" on April 6 at the college’s auditorium, and a spokesperson separately said that Bilger had again spoken to students and faculty on Thursday.
"I have confidence in our college’s approach to hold people accountable for their actions," she wrote. "A review by the Committee on Advancement and Tenure (CAT) is underway to address Paul Currie’s behavior, and while I expect this will move as quickly as possible, I ask for your grace in allowing that process to be fully followed."
