The flag was quickly replaced, but the college board announced that it would be flown at half-staff, “both to acknowledge the grief and pain experienced by so many and to enable the full complexity of voices and experiences to be heard.”

That didn’t work, Jonathan Lash, the president of the small liberal-arts college in western Massachusetts, said Monday.

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Lowering the flag to half-staff offended many, and the backlash was immediate, especially from veterans and military families who saw it as disrespectful of the tradition of national mourning.

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On Friday, Lash told the campus community that its efforts to convey respect and sorrow had had the opposite effect, and he announced that the college would remove the flag entirely for a while.

He said there is a tremendous range of views on campus, “people for whom the flag is a very powerful symbol of fear they’ve felt all their lives because they grew up as people of color, never feeling safe — and people for whom it’s a symbol of their highest aspiration for the country.”

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Dissent over the flag’s meaning has intensified nationally in recent months, with some seeing it as a symbol of unity and pride and others as one of oppression. Lash said he was trying to find a way to allow the community to have a direct, open, respectful conversation about those contradictory ideas. He hopes removing the symbol, and not flying any sort of flag, will free people up to talk.

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Similar debates are playing out on other campuses, where protests and demonstrations followed the election results, some of them with anger directed at the national symbol.

At Brown University, some students tore up and stomped on flags from an event honoring veterans last week, while others hurried to replace and protect the flags.

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At American University the day after the election, students upset about Trump’s victory burned flags and shouted “F— white America!”

Two days after the election, an American flag in St. Mary’s City was founded shredded and flying at half-staff, and the college’s office of public safety determined that two St. Mary’s College of Maryland students were responsible.

And at many campuses, minority students have been targeted and harassed since the election, with swastikas scrawled on doors, women’s hijabs yanked off, black students called racial slurs, and racist posters glued to campus walls.

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In a message to the Hampshire community earlier this month, board leaders wrote that the divisions and conflicts of the presidential campaign that erupted after the election were felt acutely and personally. “On campus we have seen numerous expressions of pain, fear, anger, and vulnerability — understandable given news reports from across the country about acts of hostility and violence against people of color, immigrants, international citizens, and Muslims,” it said.

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In an email to the campus community Friday, Lash wrote that college leaders hoped that removing the flag “will enable us to instead focus our efforts on addressing racist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and behaviors.”

He also wrote, “Some have perceived the action of lowering the flag as a commentary on the results of the presidential election — this, unequivocally, was not our intent.”

The decision was met with anger, outrage and derision from many on social media.