Dead & Breaking Silence
IU Bloomington’s silent coverup of the Hailey Toch controversy with the cost of academic and political warfare
Note: The editor wants you to know that this is an opinion piece, and is not meant to hurt anyone. Thanks to recent issues by IU President Pamela Whitten to a Palestinian artist, I couldn’t hold onto my opinion of this president anymore as a senior I feel the hope to speak out, and I hope this helps you too.
On this winter break, a hidden silence stretches towards the damp winter months on the Indiana University campus in Bloomington, Ind.
However, in October, the Sample Gates brought Israeli and Palestinian students to an ultimate breaking point. The street filled with spits and a short fight between students and other faculty no matter if they supported the two countries' actions or not.
There is also another hidden silence on this campus, and no, she is not from Israel or Palestine. She can be best described as a rich All-American girl from the outside looking in.
The girl, a student at the IU’s Kelley School of Business named Hailey Toch made threats in a TikTok posted to social media.
As I wrote on LinkedIn back in September 2023, the racist remarks she made towards another Palestinian student while doing makeup in her room to the dismay of social media, ruffled too many lines between racism and class online.
Social media blasted Toch for her fight that she didn’t need to start. I wrote in September to LinkedIn which has been seen by over 1,000 people, I said,
“On Saturday, TikTok user, Hailey Toch, a sophomore from New York City and a student from the Kelley School of Business, made racist remarks about causing harm towards a Palestinian student attending IU this fall. She spit her thoughts while doing a makeup tutorial in the five-minute video.
Toch talked about her neighbor, a fellow student who was dating another student from Palestine. Toch, speaking while doing her makeup, said she was out to cause heavy violence to the Palestinian student and made threats to hurt any other students like him.
She then instructed her roommate to “… kick that guy out.” of her living space while visiting her. Then she made this shocking remark, “I wouldn’t even open the door for him if I didn’t know he was from Palestine, let alone let him in and have a full conversation.” She also made comments about using pepper spray anytime he comes near her.”
“Many call her words disgusting and heavily anti-Palestinian like this was a joke to laugh about. The situation has gotten so bad that many have made comments through IU’s various social media pages calling on her to receive punishment from the school after posting the video.
The university has not yet taken action against the student as content creators spoke to IU to take action.”
Since the video was taken down, and news sources parachuted the calling on the video and the response by the university, there was no response from anyone under any office to address the video and punish the young woman.
The most disturbing parts about parachuting to the scene, and the troubling silent response by President Pamela Whitten and even the school’s student newspaper, where I was on staff for two semesters in The Indiana Daily Student continue to flood the university TikTok pages every day is giving the public a perception that the university doesn’t care about both Palestinian students or punishing this student.
The Indiana Daily Student, for lack of a better word, does… not… care anymore about covering the Toch incident. As a former staff writer, we would never talk about Toch or even bring her up as a story idea. It would be denied by our editors, as were many of the stories I unsuccessfully wrote due to staffing and bringing this idea of talking about Indiana University or else type of attitude.
The writers who write the tremendous story of a woman getting off of drug addiction or a journalist exposing fraud to the point where she would get expelled from school to expose the truth about sexual assault coverups at the Jacobs School of Music is what the IDS is meant to do. Provide the bread and butter to Indiana and the surrounding areas because that is what student journalism is meant to teach future writers going into the workplace.
I even find it harrowing that a now Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for the Washington Post came to our class at the age of 31 to talk about being a 22-year-old senior working for the IDS who covered one of the biggest court cases in modern Indiana history. That was later overturned as she spoke to our class and told us to reach for the stars in our reporting.
She would tell us that she sat in court as a college student talking to the most professional bigwigs in the media industry. Now her health has declined and mentally she doesn’t feel there at times, but she spoke to us anyway.
I say this because that is when IU and the IDS don’t make students feel downgraded to tell stories. That is when journalism works and the writer along with Ms. Ruth gets their paychecks.
Help student journalists become something. Hailey Toch is the biggest coverup in IDS history, and these writers, who I know very well from my past working for them, have a chance to make a production of this story and tell people about why punishment has not been given… but they choose not to and neither has anyone at IU.
This is because of various reasons, but one reason could be that IU never cares about race or color. Instead, it’s all about money and corruption.
In addition, the school and the newspaper choose to disgustingly turn the other cheek and forget about Toch and the Palestinian community.
First of all, I think Toch should be banned from IU for life, and second, the male Palestinian student should also receive justice or an incentive for dealing with the student. This should also be a claim to the Title XI office at IU as the matter should be handled swiftly.
It’s already a hardship being from Palestine or Israel right now anyway and watching your family brutally die in a war with no winners or losers, so why should he not get money or a hug from the university and an interview with an IDS writer that could change views and start a conversation on campus and globally about how to handle racism on college campuses?
A third and final thing I can add is this. Stop letting President Whitten control, Ms. Ruth. Every writer I met at the IDS has the potential to write Pulitzer Prize-winning pieces.
At the age of nine, I saw the potential in the paper after looking at a man crying and holding a candle in tribute to a fallen student.
The whole point of coming here was to report on stories and get professional, out-of-body, out-of-mind, and out-of-the-box real-world experiences that would help me better my life and go become the best journalist God ever created.
Instead, it has been painfully challenging, but I won’t get into that this morning.
My thought as a writer was, just let us be us. Stop with the lectures and daily ZOOM meetings and get us to work.
Stop with the BTN+ meetings where the head program director rambles for hours and gets us, again, to work. Take our seats away from the table ledges if you have to! God, I hate corporate and you are seeing why.
Our professors, one in particular, former Tampa Bay Times writer, Professor French, who wrote on the death of a tiger and a woman’s abduction, gave the best most inspiring lectures in our Narrative Journalism course last semester.
They tell you one day, “Frankly, I don’t give a fuck about what the university said. Report what you want to report on and don’t let anything stop you from doing it,” to “Report on something with fair and just honesty, and you can change the world with one paragraph at a time.” (these were real statements not just by him but in all of our classes I have taken here)
If you pitch Toch’s case the IDS denies the coverage. They may accept it at first, but pitches at the IDS are hard to come by once approved or denied by management who seem corrupt and even more out of place than the university.
If you look at the paper, it is full of solidly written opinions and sports pieces. It’s not The New York Times by any means, but when kids write stories that are controversial by any means, they are likely to not cover them unless there is a major impact happening at the university.
To further end this message, I have to say I am in no support of either side in the current war happening in the Middle East. I am too uneducated about what is going on, I know nothing about Humas or any of the terrorist groups, and I hate watching the news anymore due to how polarized it has gotten in recent years.
In the words of Alan Jackson in the 2001 post-9/11 song, “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)”, “I’m just a singer of simple songs
I’m not a real political man.”
I support nothing on the matters of this war and am frankly appalled by the killings. I have learned to turn to Christ and not to big mainstream news stations. This kid is going through a lot, and every time IU doesn’t take action against racist students to any student like him, I feel like that is more than a slap in the face, it’s a killing to the care of minority students on campus.
As we have seen with Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, presidents and even organizations are frankly committing crimes against students with their words, lack of comfort, and use of misinformation. All for a narrative and money.
College in 2024 has become nothing more than a corporate machine and an unnecessary waste of money and time if they are acting like this toward students.
No matter what, Toch has not been punished since posting that video. Her Instagram page is sitting privately with over 2,000 followers, and her LinkedIn and TikTok accounts have since been deleted. The IDS is still taking a ton of heat online and is silently supporting racism at any cost.
As for the Palestinian student, I hope he is doing okay and stuff like this doesn’t happen at IU as much as it already has. If you’re different at IU you are never seen or heard, and that is a narcissistic tendency the university has used since Whitten has been using to shun the lost and forgotten of IU.
It is even spilling over into rage and frustration not just by Palestinian students, but also by students of LGBT and disabilities.
There is still silence through the meadows of Franklin Hall at IU Bloomington as the callings of Hailey Toch, racism, and greed echo beyond the college town along with TikTok.
It’s dangerous messaging and the silent community shuns anyone different for speaking up about the controversy at all costs.