PORTLAND, Ore. — Reed College has acknowledged that a video posted to TikTok and Twitter "shows a Reed faculty member making offensive and racist comments at a local business."
Reed President Audrey Bilger and Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Psychology Kathy Oleson commented about the video in a message posted on the college's website on Friday.
"We express our support for the employees insulted in the video," they wrote. "This matter has our full attention, both to ascertain the accuracy of the video, to engage a valued member of our community in conversation about what it appears to show, and to follow our guidelines for addressing discriminatory speech."
The video shows a man in the driver's seat of a vehicle with the window rolled down, apparently in the midst of an argument with the person recording and an unknown number of other people standing near the car. It's unclear when or where the video was recorded.
The roughly 30-second recording begins mid-sentence with the man in the car saying "... hiring illegal immigrants."
A person off-camera responds "illegal immigrants?" and the man repeats the phrase, and then asks a series of questions about whether the other person was born in the United States. He then turns and begins speaking to someone else who is standing outside the passenger side window.
The video was posted to TikTok on March 17, but appears to have come to Reed's attention after a Twitter user posted it on Friday and claimed that the person in the video was Paul Currie, a professor of psychology at Reed.
The Reed College Twitter account responded to multiple Twitter users who retweeted the video on Friday afternoon, and then shortly thereafter tweeted a link to the statement on the website.
Reed's statement does not name Currie, but does acknowledge that the video depicts a Reed faculty member.
