Days after a rampage in San Bernardino, Calif., left 14 people dead, the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump seized on the religion of the shooters, calling for “a total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the country. “Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses,” he said in an announcement, “our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in jihad.”
Those remarks added new fuel to discussions that had already been happening over the last few weeks on many college campuses. Sometimes prompted by the verbal harassment of Muslim students, Muslim professors and student leaders began many of those discussions. At the University of Texas at Austin, Hina Azam, an associate professor of Middle Eastern studies, has brought up recent events in her courses, sometimes dedicating entire class periods to discussing the news.
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