Fordham Punishes Coffee Shop Manager for Kicking Out Pro-Trump Students
US President Donald Trump told the Washington Post that he came up with his "Make America Great Again!" campaign slogan on November 7, 2012, the day after Republican Mitt Romney lost to Democrat Barack Obama
by Tom Ciccotta
30 March 2018
Fordham University in New York City is disciplining a student coffee shop manager after she kicked out a group of students for wearing Donald Trump hats.
Breitbart News reported on the incident in December after Fordham coffee shop manager, student Kristal Ho, kicked a group of students out for their pro-Trump apparel. The incident was captured on video.
You are threatening the integrity of our club. This is a community standard you are wearing hats that completely violate safe space policy, she continued. You have to take it off or you have to go. She told the students that the Make America Great Again hats represented fascism and Nazis.
We went there because we wanted to test the unwritten rule that conservatives were banned from that coffee shop, one of the students who was thrown out said after the incident. We went there and just started doing some homework and studying. Then we were asked to leave.
We are tuition-paying students, therefore we should be able to use any building on campus that we want, he argued. This school is over $70,000 a year in tuition, therefore I feel that I have the right to go into all of the buildings that other students are allowed to go into. I also have the right to wear what I want to wear and express my own political views.
Now, Ho, as well as one of the students she kicked out, have been disciplined by the university as a result of their participation in the altercation. Ho was disciplined for violating the campus Disorderly Conduct policy. Sebastian Balasov, the conservative student behind the camera, was disciplined for filming the altercation and publishing it online. Balasov is also prohibited from returning to the coffee shop.
The students involved claim that the disciplinary process was long because the incident took place in mid-December, the end of a semester. Administrators were not able to investigate the incident until classes resumed in January.