Word: yearwood
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Swarthmore College president Alfred Bloom awoke one morning last semester to find that dream come true. Ewart Yearwood, a 5-ft. 11-in., 185-lb. Hispanic freshman from New York City, met petite Alexis Clinansmith, product of Michigan and the International School of Paris, not long after both watched the obligatory orientation-week video on date rape. They agree on how their "relationship" started: he picked her out of the freshman "face book" and decided he wanted to date her; they chatted at a party, crossed paths around the campus and talked on the grass one night. She told...
...story unfolds, the perceptions diverge, and by the end of the semester, the college faced a crisis. Clinansmith says Yearwood began to stalk her, to lurk outside her dorm and send lewd and threatening messages. Yearwood admits to some aggressive flirting -- at one point, he reached out and caressed her cheek -- but denies doing anything wrong. In the end, Swarthmore president Bloom made a decision that some might call Solomonic and others a - novel attempt to pass the buck. Bloom found Yearwood guilty of intimidation (but not sexual harassment) and offered him a deal. If the young man would enter...
...punishments go, it was an extraordinary proposal: the notion of one elite college paying another to take a troublesome student off its hands. The deal's emphasis, says Bloom, is on counseling. Yearwood, he observes, still does not think the problem is that he is intimidating but feels instead that "other people don't stand up to his intimidation." Without the leverage of a promised semester elsewhere, the student would be unlikely to seek help. "If we'd just suspended him," argues Bloom, "he'd become even more hostile...
...some Swarthmore students believe that Bloom in his creative sentencing was succumbing to intimidation rather than battling it. "If I had my way, we'd tar and feather and toast him," says sophomore Laura Starita of Yearwood. "When you have someone like that, he's a danger to everyone on campus, especially women...
Ignorance, not intention, fuels most facially biased actions, agrees Ahmed A. Yearwood '95. "Most cases involving race issues do not involve someone carrying a KKK flag and wearing a hood over their head," he says. "They simply don't know what they're saying...