As I write this letter, I am in the HUB, speakers calling out to several hundred students. The passions are running high, and the spirit of change is thick and galvanized with the electricity of the accumulation of the racist events that everyone should be painfully familiar with by now.

What I am seeing is a refreshingly vivacious passion for reform and true democratic action that I previously thought extinct at Penn State. What I am seeing are students camped out in the HUB -- civil disobedience from a student body labeled as "apathetic" and "moronic," and a show of robust unity and solidarity that nobody on this campus had expected. What I see right now is the woman given the racist death threat finishing her eloquent and cogent speech, and I hear the crowd below and around her erupting in a unanimously boisterous show of support -- amazing! What I am not seeing or hearing is violence. When the crowd first gathered in front of Old Main yesterday, the university locked down its doors and posted guards outside. Police stood around the crowd in close reminder that they expected violence. It is a beautiful and powerful fact that never have the students ceded to such assumptions of violence; rather, we have held strong in our insistence that this movement is separate and different from the Beaver Canyon incidents in every way imaginable. The students have a cause and a need; we have no cause or need for violence.