TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050790/0507121.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 11.6 KB | 221 lines

                                                                                EDUCATION, Page 104

Bigots in the Ivory Tower


An alarming rise in hatred roils U.S. campuses

By NANCY GIBBS -- Reported by Naushad S. Mehta and Susan
Tifft/New York and Richard Woodbury/Austin


    Whoever haunted Sabrina Collins' room in Longstreet Hall had
a knack for terror. The black Emory University freshman came
home one evening last month to find her teddy bear slashed, her
clothes soaked with bleach and NIGGER HANG written in lipstick
on the wall. When death threats began arriving in the mail,
college officials supplied extra locks and an alarm system. This
month, as she got ready to move out, she lifted the rug to find
DIE NIGGER DIE written in nail polish on the floor. Sabrina
collapsed and was hospitalized for "emotional traumatization."

    This naked display of racism is only one example of a
general "breakdown in civility" on U.S. campuses. Such is the
theme of a report that will be issued this week by the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which surveyed
American colleges for a year before compiling Campus Life: In
Search of Community. Though the report's language is muted and
scholarly, its message is loud and clear: the "idyllic vision"
of college life "often masks disturbing realities," including
racism, sexism, homophobia and anti-Semitism.

    Fractured civility, in fact, seems a tepid description of
campus behavior that sometimes borders on the barbarous. This
past fall, frat members at the University of Mississippi
scrawled KKK and WE HATE NIGGERS on the naked bodies of two
white pledges and dumped them on the campus of Rust College, a
mostly black school nearby. At Bryn Mawr, freshman Christine
Rivera found an anonymous note slipped under her door. "Hey
Spic," it said, "if you and your kind can't handle the work
here, don't blame it on the racial thing . . . why don't you
just get out. We'd all be a lot happier." Members of the Hillel
Foundation at the University of Kansas found a letter taped to
the door. "Jew-Boy get out," it said. "I'm going to burn your
Torah."

    In the heat of such boiling hatreds, it is hard to sustain
any notion of the university as a protected enclave devoted to
opening minds and nurturing tolerance. Instead, many campuses
seem to distill the free-floating bigotries of American society
into a lethal brew. Since 1986, according to the Baltimore-based
National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence, more than 250
colleges and universities, including top schools such as Brown,
Smith and Stanford, have reported racist incidents ranging from
swastikas painted on the walls to violent attacks and death
threats.

    Virtually every minority group finds itself under fire. For
blacks, the trigger is often affirmative action: whatever their
backgrounds or abilities, black students may find themselves
viewed as beneficiaries of lowered standards. Last fall the
University of Virginia accepted more than half the blacks who
applied but only one-third of the whites, even though the
blacks' average Scholastic Aptitude Test scores were 194 points
below the whites'. At a time of rising competition, and with no
sense of the past injustice that affirmative action seeks to
redress, white students use such statistics as battering rams.
"Affirmative action is organized governmental racism against
white people," charges Temple University student Michael
Spletzer, co-founder of the White Student Union. "Individual
merit should be the only criterion."

    Asian students are attacked for the opposite reason -- for
"curve busting" on grade scales and raising the level of
competition for jobs in such fields as math, science and
engineering. "I hear Asian jokes a lot," says a junior at the
University of Illinois. "You're going to get out of the
university and make $80,000, so people can make fun of you while
you're here." In the case of gays and lesbians, fear of AIDS has
brought homophobia out of the closet: of 1,411 reports of "gay
bashing" on college campuses in 1988, 227 were classified as
AIDS related. At Penn State, for example, a group calling
itself the Committee for an AIDS-Free America tacked up posters
with skulls and crossbones around campus and the message:
HOMICIDE HAS A DEFINITE PLACE AT PENN STATE.

    Jews too have found that in a climate that seems to tolerate
intolerance, incidents of harassment are on the rise. A Trinity
University fraternity in San Antonio was placed on probation
after requiring a Jewish pledge to dress in a Nazi uniform and
parade through the campus cafeteria. Jewish women are derided
as "Jewish-American princesses." At Cornell and elsewhere,
students wear T-shirts reading SLAP-A-JAP! and BACK OFF BITCH,
I'M A JAP-BUSTER! "Anti-Semitism masked as sexism is more
socially acceptable," says Rabbi Laura Geller, director of the
Hillel Jewish Center at the University of Southern California,
"because, unfortunately, sexism is still an accepted form of
bigotry."

    It is not only fellow undergraduates who harass and
intimidate. Many students charge universities with
"institutional racism" for failing to recruit more minority
faculty members, broaden the curriculum and show more
sensitivity on race issues. At Trinity College last May, a
campus guard entered the university's computer room. Of the 40
students in the room, just one was black. For no apparent
reason, the guard singled out the black student and asked for
his ID card. "For blacks, it's an alien environment," says Eric
Dixon, a broadcasting student at the University of Texas. "The
school incubates segregation. It can't control students, but it
can change attitudes. It isn't fulfilling that aspect."

    The need for a change of attitudes arises from some
experiences common to the current generation, the first to come
of age after the civil rights battles of the '60s and '70s. Most
parents of today's undergraduates remember Freedom Summer and
the Selma march, but somehow they have failed to impart the
lessons to their children. When confronted with the name of
Malcolm X, the Black Muslim leader, for example, one white
student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst
innocently asked her professor, "Who is this Malcolm the Tenth?"
Says Daniel Levitas, executive director of the Atlanta-based
Center for Democratic Renewal: "We have today a whole young
society that has not been called to conscience."

    Many students have had no firsthand experience with
different cultures until they arrive on campus and walk squarely
into the middle of a grand social experiment. In the past two
decades, college after college opened its doors at last to
women, minorities, the poor, the disabled. Not only are most
campuses far more diverse than they were 20 years ago, they are
also vastly more heterogeneous than most high schools or
neighborhoods. Under such hermetic conditions, the chemistry has
proved volatile and relations explosive.

    The impact of constant racial friction on student life is
profound. Nonwhite students suffer tremendous pressure to
outperform their classmates just to beat the stereotype. Some
drop out rather than battle on; others move to schools they
consider more supportive. Those who decide to remain often
segregate themselves at single-race cafeteria tables or cultural
centers, fueling complaints of cliquishness and militancy. "I
can't believe they would accuse us of being reverse racists,"
says Brown undergraduate Martina Johnson. "For 45 minutes out
of the day I want to be comfortable. I want to not need to have
my guard up."

    University officials, and many students as well, are
fighting to reverse the trend by cracking down on bigots and
joining in consciousness-raising efforts. Many
freshmen-orientation programs now include seminars and workshops
on race relations, ethnic diversity and homophobia. This school
year Columbia University organized a mandatory "multicultural
sensitivity-training" session for 1,800 new students. "These
things may seem kind of Mickey Mouse," says William Damon,
chairman of the education department at Brown. "But I'm in favor
even of symbolic gestures because it does communicate to young
people what the priorities are."

    Elsewhere there have been some unlikely victories for
old-fashioned activism. Few could have imagined that Toni
Luckett, a lesbian and an Afro-American studies major with
spiked hair and a flair for quoting Malcolm X, could build a
minority coalition and get elected student-body president at the
University of Texas. Long a stronghold of white frat men, the
university had no experience with firebrands. Luckett is
changing all that. Preaching confrontation, Luckett has staged
rallies that have put the university on notice that recent
racial incidents cannot go unpunished. "The issues have been
burning for years," she says. "We'll take to the streets, do
whatever it takes, any means it takes." For her efforts, she has
found threats in the mail and MANDELA-LUCKETT, RIP scrawled on
the walls.

    The best place to battle willful ignorance and bigotry, of
course, is in the classroom. Teaching that strengthens reason
over reflex, curiosity over insularity may help improve
students' behavior outside the classroom as well. Though the
changes are often controversial, many colleges have revised
their curricula to include courses in non-Western cultures and
values. Fewer and fewer of the history and literature surveys
focus exclusively on the West European heritage. "The curriculum
has been radically realigned," says Carnegie Foundation
president Ernest Boyer. "Minorities have insisted on it, women
have insisted on it, and frankly it's made universities
dramatically better places."

    But some other antidotes, however well intentioned, may
prove more toxic than the racial poisons they are meant to cure.
Nowhere is the First Amendment more imperiled than on college
campuses. In the past two years nearly a dozen schools have
cobbled together policies outlawing insulting and demeaning
speech. At the University of Connecticut students may be
expelled if they use "derogatory references" or "fighting words"
to harass anyone face to face. Yet if such bans succeed in
suppressing obnoxious impulses, they merely drive them
underground -- along with many ideas that deserve to be aired,
if only to kindle a more heated debate.

    Faculty members vehemently denounce what they call the
Thought Police for muzzling the free exchange of ideas, however
provocative or unfashionable. Many professors charge that the
bans invite misinterpretation and self-censorship. Last May, for
example, a Brown art professor canceled a screening of The Birth
of a Nation, the D.W. Griffith classic about the Ku Klux Klan,
because the local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. opposed it.

    The Carnegie Report and others like it are searching hard
for ways to rebuild the sense of community that should
characterize the campus -- and society at large. The report
prescribes a "Campus Compact" that universities must adopt if
they are to restore peace to the ivory tower. The compact
embraces principles of justice, openness and discipline that are
meant to form the foundation of a "community of learning." But
no seminar or speech or required reading will change overnight
the attitudes embedded in a culture that children absorb while
growing up. Nor will they easily break the cycle of hate. "If
you can't have a university that lives together with some
degree of civility and integrity amidst the diversity," asks
Boyer, "how can we expect our cities and towns to do the same?"