The protests at UCLA, USC, and other schools across the country have inflamed tensions on college campuses. But those tensions were nothing new..
A study from the University of Chicago found that since the October 7th attack by Hamas and Israel’s retaliatory war on Gaza, more than half of Jewish and Muslim college students say they’ve been afraid for their safety.
Political science professor Robert Pape, who authored the study, told KNX News that the responses also revealed an acceptance for hateful views among a small minority of students.
“We asked them scenarios about what would you think if there were students on campus calling for genocide, say, against blacks, or genocide against Muslims, genocide against Jews?” he said. “And what we discovered is across the board, over 10% of college students support, actually find calls for genocide acceptable against any of those three groups. Another 10% are kind of ambivalent about it.”
Pape called the findings “sobering.”
“I've been a professor for decades. I wanna believe that [we] live in a community that tolerates a wide diversity of views,” he said. “But to think that there's a significant degree of acceptance and toleration for calls to genocide or mass harm to a people, that's actually, that's just one step further.”
Pape said colleges need to engage with hate on campus and “recognize these issues are not fading away.”
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