On Tuesday, Oct. 23, an email was sent out to, what the Office of the Chancellor said was, “several hundred members of the University of Denver community,” including both faculty and students. The email addressed the suspension of a student, who was suspended this Fall Quarter for using racist and homophobic slurs toward her classmates, as reported by 13 individuals in her dorm. The student herself denied the allegations and appealed the suspension, saying she was targeted because she is a vocal conservative student.
The email was a letter addressed to Samantha Harris, the Vice President of Policy Research for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), who, according to the email, sent a letter of support for Puffer to DU in May. FIRE’s mission is to “defend and sustain the individual rights of students and faculty members at America’s colleges and universities,” including freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, legal equality and religious liberty.
Throughout the letter were “inflammatory and derogatory remarks” aimed at an investigator with the DU Office of Equal Opportunity and Title IX office, who handled the investigation of the suspended student. It referred to the investigator as a “failed attorney who graduated from a third-tier law school” and a “grotesque and overweight Latina actively involved with the militant LGBTQ movement on the University of Denver’s campus.” It stated, “The sight of a beautiful Republican Caucasian student with seven academic letters who will one day have a gorgeous family in a traditional marriage reminded the Latina bully of her inability to achieve any of those wonderful things.”
The email targeted several other minority groups on campus: “DU’s Black and Latino Student Alliances frequently hold events with loud rap music where the most vile form of misogynistic and racist statements exit from the holes of brown and black faces, yet the students who hold these events never end up in front of an academic disciplinary committee. And even if they did, would the university administer a similar punishment? Would a black student be forced to watch a documentary on the grossly disproportionate crime and poverty rates in black communities?”
The letter also targeted Asian and Muslim students, and asked if a Latino/a student would be “forced to watch a documentary on the havoc illegal aliens have wreaked across most US cities, the ensuing destruction of the American identity and the caravans of filthy Latinos illegally heading north for the US border.”
Office of the Chancellor responded to the incident in an email, describing it as “full of inflammatory and derogatory remarks,” sent out to DU students and faculty on Wednesday, Oct. 24, saying that the DU community “received a spam email that referenced specific community members. The message, which came from an encrypted web-based service, does not appear to have originated from anyone on the DU campus.”
The encrypted email was sent through an anonymous web-based service called Hushmail, presented as being sent from a variety of different names, such as Elise Richard, Beth Kennedy and Martha Goldberg—all from an email ending in hushmail.com. While staff and faculty emails are public information on DU’s website, student emails are not, and they are only accessible if one has an active DU ID and password. The source of the email and sender are still unknown.
Regarding the suspension of the student, the Chancellor’s email stated that DU stands by its decision: “As a University, we stand behind our policy and processes related to any investigation and have the utmost confidence in the highly trained faculty and staff that support that important work.”
The Chancellor’s email ended by asking anyone with knowledge about who wrote the piece to send a report to the Office of Equal Opportunity.
