BELLINGHAM — Bail has been set at $10,000 for the Western Washington University student arrested on campus and accused of making racial threats against black students and others on social media.
Nineteen-year-old Tysen Campbell has not been charged, but the Whatcom County prosecutor’s office has scheduled an arraignment for Dec. 11.
Campbell, from Granite Falls, is a sophomore at Western and is on the school’s track and field team, the Bellingham Herald reported.
University officials say the student has been suspended and banned from campus pending the outcome of legal proceedings and the university’s student conduct process.
Administrators canceled classes last Tuesday, the day before the scheduled Thanksgiving break, after learning about racist remarks on social media that included threats of violence against the student body president, who is black.
Most, but not all, students returned to campus Monday, the same day Campbell was arrested. His comments on social media, as well as comments by others, led the administration to shut down the campus a week earlier.
The university asked Yik Yak, an anonymous social media platform popular among college students, to turn over the names of the commenters, who posted pictures of the student body president, a gun and references to lynching and nooses. Officials said the student arrested Monday has been linked to a threat posted on the social media platform and that university police are continuing to investigate.
The long stream of posts mentioned almost every ethnic group, including blacks, Muslims, Jews and American Indians, blaming them for an effort on campus to debate changing the university’s mascot, a Viking. The threats came days after several student leaders suggested that the mascot is racist.
Most of the online comments contained racist language and profanity, making fun of the mascot debate and the students who proposed it. One post called black students crying babies and another complimented the school for having an “overtly Aryan” mascot.
Campbell’s mother, Lisa Concidine, told The Seattle Times that her son told her his post on Yik Yak was “sarcastic because he was annoyed by all of the uproar.” She said she did not have information on the content of his post.
She described Campbell as respectful and said she was shocked by the news of her son’s arrest.
“He’s never been violent, he’s never racist, he’s a star kid,” Concidine said. “If he was a kid that was always on the edge, I wouldn’t be surprised, but this has taken me by surprise.”
At a campus forum on Monday, college faculty, staff and students met to talk about a wider problem of racism on campus.
Larry Estrada, associate professor in the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies, opined that fighting racism in higher education will be a long battle because universities were established for the elite and exclude women and minorities.
“Racism is like a cancer,” Estrada said. “There is no quick pill to fix racism.”
Alex Ng, a graduate student in the college’s teaching program, expressed optimism that something can be done to make Western more comfortable for minority students, but he said non-white students and professors can’t be expected to do all the work.
“Going forward, to heal we have to spread that burden,” he said.
University President Bruce Shepard has made bringing a more diverse student population to the university one of his top goals, but he has acknowledged that he has failed in another goal: making the campus of 15,000 students a place where all feel safe and supported.
“On behalf of Western, I apologize to our students, faculty and staff of color. It should not have taken an incident such as this for all of us to recognize and emphatically understand their experience,” Shepard said Monday at the campus forum.
He said racism continues to be a serious problem at Western and vowed to keep working to transform the campus culture.
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