University Of Rhode Island

University of Rhode Island
City:	Kingston, Rhode Island
Type:	Public
Sports:	baseball, basketball, cross country, field hockey, football, golf, gymnastics, rowing, soccer, softball, swimming, tennis, track and field, volleyball[1]
Colors:	blue, orange
Mascot:	Rhody (Rams)
Endowment:	$97.6 million[2]
Website:	http://www.uri.edu/

The University of Rhode Island (or URI) is a Rhode Island public university chartered as the state's agricultural school in 1888.^[3] The school has four campuses, the flagship is located in Kingston, Rhode Island. It was ranked a third tier school in US News's 2008 "National Universities: Tier 3" list.^[4]

History[edit]

Rhode Island was a land grant college, meaning Morrill's Land Grant Act (which gave each state thirty thousand acres of public land to be sold, with the profits being directed to a university) funded it (although, initially the profits went to Brown University, and did not shift to URI until 1894).^[5] John H. Washburn was the school's first president.^[5]

Controversies[edit]

In September 2020 Erik Loomis, a professor at the University of Rhode Island, justified murdering right-wing activists as "nothing wrong" "from a moral perspective" in a comment on his own blog post.^[6] The professor has a history of threatening comments toward right-wingers,^[7] and another contributor to the blog wrote on September 8, 2020 that "American universities are generally hostile to conservative views, because conservative views are generally wrong" and that "a liberal university can’t actually “welcome”...religious fundamentalists into its interpretive community".^[8]

Afterward Loomis wrote in another blog post, "I stand behind every word of what I said." He wrote that "I always wondered when Fox News would come after me." He followed this with an unsubstantiated claim that "armed fascist groups [are] taking over our nation."^[9]

Notes[edit]