One college won't fly the American flag after students burned it in election protest
A Massachusetts college has announced it will not fly the U.S. flag, or any flag, on campus in the wake of fierce controversy surrounding the presidential election.
After Republican Donald Trump’s surprising win on Nov. 8, students at Hampshire College, located in Amherst, Massachusetts, lowered the campus’s American flag to half-staff in protest, according to WWLP. Flying the flag at half-staff is a tradition typically reserved as a symbol of mourning, according to the National Flag Foundation.
The college’s board of trustees agreed to leave the flag lowered in order to “create the space for meaningful and respectful dialogue across the many perspectives represented in our community,” according to a statement posted to the college’s Facebook page and attributed to the college’s president, Jonathan Lash.
However, the move angered local community members, who saw the decision as disrespectful towards veterans. In response, the school said it planned to raise the flag to full-staff for Veterans Day on Nov. 11. However, an unknown group or person removed and burned the flag overnight, per CBS Boston, further upsetting veterans.
“A lot of people really don’t know what that means. I don’t want to say they really don’t care, but it’s disappointing,” one veteran told WWLP.
“It is a disrespect. That shouldn’t have happened in the first place,” Lash told WWLP.
Afterwards, the board of trustees kept the flag at half-staff for several days before announcing Friday that it would lower all flags on campus while the administration consulted with community members and students.
“We hope this will enable us in the near term to instead focus our efforts on addressing racist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and behaviors,” Lash said in a statement.
Lash had sent an email to the college following the presidential election saying he felt “anguish and sadness” over the results and offering counseling sessions for students, per WWLP. However, in his statement, Lash said the decision to keep the flag lowered was not intended to be a commentary on the presidential election.
Lash also did not say when or even if the flag will be raised again, though he did say students were free to display any flags of their own. In another post to Facebook on Tuesday, the college suspended comments on its page, saying its social media team would not be available to moderate comments over the Thanksgiving holiday.
According to WBUR, Hampshire’s issues with the U.S. flag are nothing new. Last year, students protested the school’s decision to lower the flag for the victims of the Paris terrorist attack while not doing so for other terror victims, and again in February, students protested lowering the flag for the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
This story was originally published November 23, 2016 at 1:34 PM with the headline "One college won't fly the American flag after students burned it in election protest."