Five resident assistants from the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University were fired after portraying Muslim kidnappers in a homemade video. Some AU students said the video was indecent and insensitive to the Muslim community.
The university fired the Brookville Hall resident assistants because administrators said the video violated their RA employment contract and reflected insensitivity. The RAs, who are seniors, were fired on Feb. 2.
As a result, a State Supreme Court justice subsequently issued a temporary restraining order preventing the college from taking further action against the students pending a hearing scheduled for yesterday, according to Newsday.
The video showed the RAs wearing black ski masks and pretending to speak in a Middle Eastern language. The RAs taunted a rubber duck in the video, which is the C.W. Post mascot. Newsday said the video was posted on YouTube and Google and then taken down. The video had a disclaimer indicating that it was meant as a joke.
Nafiza Shepherd, the president of AU's Muslim Student Association and a sophomore in the Kogod School of Business and the School of International Service, said she was not shocked that some people still stereotype Muslims.
"There's a lot of misunderstanding still between the [Muslim and non-Muslim] communities," she said.
RAs should represent the students, including the Muslim students, Shepherd said.
It is inappropriate for an RA to participate in making such an offensive video, said Anderson Hall RA Robert Einhorn, a senior in Kogod.
"RAs are representatives for themselves as well as the university," he said.
Centennial Hall RA Matthew Bryant, a junior in the School of Public Affairs, described being an RA as being "the agent of the university."
"I know that at American University we have policies that are in place basically to discourage us from doing anything to harm our representation or the representation of the university," Bryant said.
The RA selection process at AU requires many elements, according to Amber Lange, South Campus Area director. She said RA applicants have to turn in essays and references. RA candidates have an individual interview and then a group activity. RAs are picked based on their interview and application and then put into different residence halls based on their personality and interests, Lange said.
RAs can be fired if they violate a policy or fail to report a policy violation. Yet, Lange said she does not know if AU would fire RAs who make offensive videos.
"Maybe [C.W. Post] has things written in their policy that we don't have here," she said.
In reaction, C.W. Post students have split into groups of students who find the video offensive and groups of students who think the RAs should not have been fired, according to Newsday.
"I don't know if I would have fired them," Ayah Nuriddin, a Muslim Student Association member and sophomore in SIS, said. "They probably weren't doing it out of malice."
Nuriddin said that although the purpose was to be funny, the RAs still shouldn't have used stereotypes.
Wael Qassim, a member of the Muslim Student Association and a Kogod graduate student, said if AU students had made the video, they would have received a very severe punishment.
"You can see here in America that Muslims still fight for their rights, and there are still people willing to help," Qassim said. "The [C.W. Post] campus reacted before they even received any complaints from any Muslim student organization. ... The spirit of equality is still a very valuable factor"
