0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
Racial Slurs and AssaultsOn March 30, 1990, Ann Dean, a black sophomore at Kansas University, was delivering pizzas to the SAE house near campus when she encountered Matthew Willenborg, a 19-year-old student and SAE brother, along with several other members of the fraternity.Dean, now a 44-year-old photographer in Lawrence, Kansas, told BuzzFeed News that when she arrived at the floor, the brothers, who appeared to be drunk, harassed her.“I started going down the stairs, [Willenborg] pushed me, and I fell along with the pizzas,” Dean said. “They started throwing the pizzas at me and then [Willenborg] called me a “n****r bitch.”Willenborg was reportedly arrested the following month when he and his roommate allegedly beat up a man in an unrelated incident. Willenborg was also reportedly charged with disorderly conduct and battery in Dean’s case.The incident sparked a protest of about 500 students, demanding that the university combat racism. Dean believed that without those protests, Willenborg would not have been charged in her case.Willenborg, who resigned from SAE, was sentenced to 30 days in jail but was granted two years of probation after he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. He was asked to pay a fine of $192, not to consume alcohol for two years, and to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, the Lawrence Journal-World reported. He didn’t return a request for comment from BuzzFeed News.He did not return to KU in the fall, according to his lawyer. A Lawrence Journal-World report from Willenborg’s court hearing quoted his attorney as saying “this whole thing got blown way out of proportion” and that Willenborg made “a few inappropriate comments on a night when he and his friends had a few drinks.”“It was drunkenness and ignorance and foolishness,” Dean told BuzzFeed News. She said that Willenborg called her to apologize after the incident but “it came off as hollow and insincere.”KU appointed a seven-member panel to review SAE. But the school said it was unable to take action against Willenborg because the SAE house was off campus grounds. SAE signed an agreement to teach its members about racism, to hold presentations on cultural sensitivity, and to try to recruit minorities after the KU panel found that the fraternity lacked racial sensitivity programs, the Lawrence Journal-World reported.But Dean said she was unsure how effective these programs were. “Every time something like this happens, it’s like, let’s do some diversity training. We don’t know how far that goes in getting any real understanding across.”Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, KU’s news service director, told BuzzFeed News that “because SAE has remained on campus since that incident, it would suggest they met the requirements and sanctions.”These sanctions required SAE to design a recruitment program that “addresses the inclusion of minority members” and discuss “human dignity issues.” They were to periodically update the assistant director for Greek life for three years after the incident.Barcomb-Peterson said that SAE’s KU chapter is “currently a very diverse chapter and has made diversity a priority over the years,” but she said they did not keep statistics on the racial makeup of the chapter.“What black person is going to want to pledge SAE?” Dean said. “When you have a history of racism, you’re not going to get a lot of black, brown, or any other ethnicities wanting to pledge your house.”
If it were up to me, Wintz would be on a fan scholarship, full ride.
