'White Student Union' announces night patrols on Maryland college campus

In a move likely to spark outcry, a student group calling itself the White Student Union at Maryland’s Towson University intends to enact night-time "patrols" throughout the school’s Baltimore County campus.

While student patrols or after-hours chaperones are not unheard of at American universities, the fact that the plan has been announced by what is already an infamous, Whites-only group is certain to not sit well in a city like Baltimore, which boasts a 60% African American population.

White Student Union (WSU) president Matthew Heimbach (or Commander Heimbach, as he is referred to on the group’s blog), informed Towson’s student paper, The Towerlight, that the group’s patrols will be concerned with on-campus safety walks, and members will be equipped with flashlights. While Heimbach has said that none of the patrollers will carry weapons, female participants will carry pepper spray and have reportedly been enrolling in self-defense classes.

Student review website College Prowler has rated Towson as “C+” on safety, placing the 20,000-plus student campus in the bottom quartile among US schools.

As the WSU has been unable to find a faculty adviser to take part, the group is not University affiliated. Regardless, Towson has allowed it to continue meeting, and has evidently used the school’s facilities to that end in the past. WSU’s website states that its mission aim is “to create an avenue for people to participate in political, cultural, educational and social events to celebrate European heritage.”

During Towson’s fall semester, Heimbach rented a school meeting rooms to host a lecture on “how diversity is not a strength” with speaker Jared Taylor, president of the New Century Foundation, and an advocate of “racial realism” - a pesudo-scientific system of racial classification that advocates for segregation.

It's not the first time the WSU has made headlines for its activities. A number of members recently attended the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, one of the preeminent yearly gatherings of conservatives from around the US in Washington, DC.

At the conference, WSU participated in a panel entitled “Trump the Race Card: Are You Sick and Tired of Being Called a Racist and You Know You’re Not One?” and were vocal in their promotion of “the white vote” as a cornerstone of the Republican party.

A lengthier interview was posted by ThinkProgress with one of WSU’s members, Scott Terry, in which he was asked if he’d “accept a society where African-Americans were permanently subservient to whites.” Terry stated that he would be “fine with that.”

The Daily Caller has reported that members of WSU have been recently spending time at local gun ranges to “sharpen their skills,” though Heimbach stresses this is not being conducted in “a military way.”