Student Threats = Hoax.

Disrespect, or hardening?

UNION, N.J. — On the campus of Kean University here on Wednesday, students said that threats made against black students on Twitter during a rally in mid-November had dominated conversations in classrooms and around dorms, at basketball practice and on their social media feeds.
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Now, the talk was of a new revelation: that the police had charged a black Kean alumna, Kayla-Simone McKelvey, 24, who was known by many as an active presence on campus, with sending the Twitter messages.
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On Nov. 17, during a student rally on racial issues at this public university of about 15,000 students, someone posted vicious missives against black students. “I will kill all the blacks tonight, tomorrow and any other day if they go to Kean university,” read one of the messages sent from the account @keanuagainstblk, screenshots show. “Black people at kean university will die,” the person posted a minute later.

Union County prosecutors said Ms. McKelvey, a participant in the rally, had stepped away to make the threats from an anonymous Twitter account, then returned to call attention to them.
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The threats created a climate of fear on campus, with many students staying home, though the university remained open. They reverberated beyond the university as well. A group of black ministers called for the resignation of Dawood Farahi, Kean’s president, connecting the threats to what one described as a pattern of “racial intolerance” at the university.

On Wednesday, students said they worried about what the apparently fake threat would do to the credibility of other activists trying to draw attention to racial issues on their campus, as well as at many others across the country.

“It just wipes out everyone’s credibility,” said Eboni Wood, 20, a Kean junior studying psychiatric rehabilitation. “People can look at all these other colleges that are protesting Black Lives Matter and think, ‘Oh well, maybe it’s a black student doing it as well.’ ”

Ms. Wood, who is black, said that Kean’s diversity was one of the reasons she decided to attend. But she was critical of university administrators for keeping Kean open in the aftermath of the threats. “The threats were targeted towards a certain group,” she said. “You don’t close campus and it’s like you’re disrespecting us.”