A New Bigotry Ripples Across U.S. Campuses : Incidents in the Last Two Years Suggest Colleges Are No Longer Enlightened Havens From Racism

DE KALB, Ill. —  Walking home from a campus bar last weekend, Cedric Smith was jarred by taunts from a handful of fellow students as they drove past him at Northern Illinois University here.

“Niggers go home!” Smith says they shouted. “Niggers, we ought to lynch you!”

Slurs and slights are nothing new to Smith, a graduate mathematics student who is one of about 1,100 blacks on this 25,000-student campus 60 miles west of Chicago. The school, which draws blacks largely from the inner city of Chicago and whites mostly from more affluent suburbs, has been the scene of several ugly incidents over the last two years.

Race-Baiting Flyers

A partial list includes the distribution of race-baiting flyers on campus buses, slurs yelled at the school’s black football quarterback during a game and a handful of white students shouting “nigger” as they drove past an outdoor rally at which the Rev. Jesse Jackson was speaking.

Another controversy erupted last winter when black students complained that they were being targeted for harassment by white workers at the campus bookstore after it was hit by a shoplifting spree.

Although serious, such problems are by no means a phenomenon unique to NIU. The intellectual atmosphere of academia is proving to be no haven from bigotry, as reports of similar incidents--from cross-burnings to hate-stained graffiti and even to physical assaults--have rippled through universities both large and small, liberal and conservative, Southern and Northern, in recent months.

Far worse, and more widespread, many minority students contend, are the more subtle forms of racism they must confront daily as white students treat them with chilly standoffishness and white professors with condescension. “You feel like an Earth man visiting Mars,” complained Anthony Slaughter, an NIU senior who is black.

Not even Ivy League and Big Ten Schools with progressive reputations have been immune from controversy. A street brawl broke out between black and white students at Columbia University in New York last year. Black students at the University of Michigan were outraged by racial jokes aired over the campus radio station and a flyer declaring “open season” on blacks distributed in a dormitory.

The University of Pennsylvania recently shut down a white fraternity after its members shouted racial epithets during a “rush” party while a pair of black female strippers danced naked. Another white fraternity at the University of Wisconsin was suspended after its members donned blackface and erected a cardboard figure of a dark-skinned Fiji Islander with fat lips and a bone through its nose for a party with a Polynesian theme.

The National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence, which began tracking campus racial conflicts with the start of the 1986-87 school year, says outbreaks of what it terms “ethnoviolence” have been reported at no fewer than 130 colleges and universities across the country.

Joan Weiss, executive director of the Baltimore-based group, said it is hard to tell whether the reports indicate a dramatic worsening of campus tensions or whether the news media, latching onto a “sexy” issue, have just begun covering a longstanding problem they had previously ignored.

Whatever the reason, Weiss said, the conflicts provide disturbing evidence of how thoroughly entrenched racial divisions have become in American society. “The acting out of prejudice is not something that is limited to any one economic class, social class, level of education or geographic region,” she said. “It is very pervasive.”

The troubles have led to a resurgence of campus activism not seen since the turbulent days of the 1960s. Students from Berkeley to Penn State to Amherst have resorted to sit-ins, marches and even building takeovers to protest racial friction as well as air demands that their schools recruit greater numbers of minority students and faculty.

At the same time, racial problems have triggered a wave of hand-wringing among faculty and staff at many schools. The “in” topic at educational seminars this last semester has been how to defuse tensions, promote harmony and cope with negative stereotypes many in the academic world had presumed students had been checking at the door when they enrolled.

“We confused desegregation with integration,” said Clarence Shelley, an assistant vice chancellor who deals with minority problems at the University of Illinois in Urbana. “ . . . We were a little too simplistic in the assumption that in a community of scholars and gentlemen and ladies, truth will always rise above the din and clamor. Bring these white students and black students together in this rarefied, controlled, intellectual, rational environment, we thought, and they would come together naturally and they would mix and mingle. It was naive because we did not reckon with all the garbage they brought with them.”

Mix & Mingle

Students at many of the nation’s campuses clearly seem to have flunked Mix & Mingle 101. Not that blacks and whites never interact, but they often find it hard to bridge the gaps instilled by a lifetime of largely segregated living.

Administrators like Shelley say they frequently hear black students complain of either being ignored by white counterparts or treated as curiosities on display.

“When I walk into a classroom, everyone looks,” said Dawn Massop, 18, a freshman at the University of Colorado. “Out of 500 students in a class, I’m the only black.”

Not all blacks are products of special minority programs, but many whites seem to assume that they are. Johnny Taylor, a University of Miami honors student who is black, said teachers at the start of a school year often “take you aside to ask if you need help.”

At Columbia, black senior Pamela Perry said she was once accosted by a white student incensed because the student assumed that Perry was taking a slot at the school away from a more academically deserving white. “I said, ‘I have 1200 SAT’s (Scholastic Aptitude Test scores) just like you do,’ ” Perry recalled. “ . . . No matter how intelligent I am, people see me as a black female. They always assume that every minority is on financial aid.”

Blacks, too, can prove insensitive when the demographic tables are turned. “I’ve often heard snide remarks such as ‘preppie little white boy,’ ” said Archer Woggon, a white sophomore at the primarily black Triton College in suburban Chicago. “Once I was asked if I could be any more whiter than I am.”

Klan Interview

Wesley Odom, a white senior at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, insists that blacks are too quick to complain about discrimination and use their race to demand special treatment. Odom, who is at the center of a controversy over an interview he conducted on the campus radio station with a Ku Klux Klan member, contends that blacks should pattern themselves after Asian students who rarely make waves but study hard and get good grades. “Asians have a subtle approach,” he said. “They go out into the community and prove themselves as individuals.”

On many campuses, black and white students live near each other, but rarely fraternize. “All the black girls live on one side of the dormitory and the whites on another,” said Rona Branson, a white freshman at Georgia Southwestern College in Americus. “Even in the classroom most of the black students sit on one side and the whites on the other. Sitting around and socializing in the student center or the cafeteria, you rarely see black and white students together.”

New York University in Manhattan provides a more cosmopolitan atmosphere than the rural GSU, but relations between the races hardly seem much warmer. “People try to keep themselves insulated,” observed Andrea Schulz, an NYU senior who is white. “It is far from the melting pot it is supposed to be.”

Heightened scrutiny of the campus racial climate has produced a disturbing report card on higher education that reveals backsliding rather than progress toward the goal of expanding opportunities for minorities--especially blacks.

The American Council on Education, a Washington-based research group, says fewer blacks are enrolled in the nation’s colleges than a decade ago even though the numbers of blacks graduating from high school has never been higher. Even more unsettling, the organization reports that high dropout rates contributed to a 50% decline between 1975 and 1985 in the number of bachelor’s degrees in education earned by minorities and a 41% dip in master’s degrees for the same discipline.

Vexing Catch-22

Such numbers suggest a vexing Catch-22. The pool of qualified minority teachers appears to be shrinking even as schools come under greater pressure to hire more of them from minority students seeking faculty role models.

There is no clear-cut explanation for the drop in the numbers of blacks on campus or the possible rise in racial tensions, but educators suggest several theories--many of which seem to point a finger at the Reagan Administration for fostering an atmosphere of indifference toward racial harmony and the special needs of minorities.

“Since Reagan, there has been a decline in (financial) support for minorities and for greater integration of minorities into our society,” argued NIU President John E. La Tourette. “From the very top down, we’ve had less leadership on this issue.”

Larry Bolles, the NIU judicial officer who must discipline those involved in racial incidents, said many of today’s students were not even born when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and seem virtually ignorant of the wrenching civil rights struggles of King’s generation. For example, Bolles, who is black, said the white students who disrupted Jackson’s speech last year seemed genuinely unaware of how deeply offensive their shouts of “nigger” were.

“Most of the students today, especially the white students, but a lot of the black students too, have no idea of past history,” Bolles said. “ . . . Their parents don’t talk to them about race relations or past race relations. It’s not taught. It’s not discussed.”

According to the American Council study, money woes are prompting increasing numbers of black youths to pass up college and choose vocational-technical school training or the military. But most blacks who do enroll in universities never finish. Statistics show that most drop out with the expiration of special financial and remedial education incentives, which universities often limit to freshmen. At UC Berkeley, for example, only 4 out of every 10 blacks who enter as freshmen have either graduated or are still in school after five years, as opposed to nearly 7 of every 10 whites, records show.

At NIU, the numbers are far worse--only 18% of the blacks who enter the school ever graduate. By contrast, the graduation rate for Latinos is more than 36% and for whites it tops 55%.

The racial climate at white-dominated schools may be contributing to a renaissance of sorts for the nation’s 117 black colleges, according to Samuel Myers, president of a Washington-based lobbying group for those organizations. After a modest dip in enrollment during the early 1980s, black schools have seen enrollment grow by up to 4%, Myers said.

Supportive Environment

“Many (black students) have rediscovered the supportive environment of our historically black colleges,” he said. “Many black students are finding it acceptable to become rooted in their identity in a comforting environment.”

Renee McDonald is one of those students. Two years ago, the black teen-ager from New York was accepted by two Ivy League schools but was frightened away by racial tensions she sensed at both. Instead, McDonald picked Spelman, a predominantly black women’s college in Atlanta. This spring the school experienced a 50% increase in the number of applications it received from high school seniors.

McDonald, now a sophomore, says she is much happier in school than a brother attending largely white Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. “There is a difference in our mental stability,” she said. “He has to deal with the pressures. I don’t have to fight racial battles every day.”

Publicity about racial conflicts has triggered considerable soul-searching among educators over how to ease the impact of prejudice on campus. Many schools have announced crash plans to increase minority enrollment and minority faculty hiring, as well as to enhance financial aid and guidance programs.

NIU has set up a special Discrimination Hot Line which allows students to report acts of discrimination anytime, day or night. At Colorado, the administration is sponsoring racial sensitivity programs for fraternities, sororities and other organizations, while Purdue University and the University of Illinois schedule annual Ebony and Ivory weekends at which whites and blacks are encouraged to interact.

Both Columbia and Stanford universities have recently revised Western Civilization courses to include works by women and minorities. And the faculty senate at Berkeley is considering a controversial plan to require every student to take a course in ethnic diversity.

Still, for some blacks already in college, the renewed focus on their problems is too little, too late. “I get tired of fighting all these battles,” said Morris Copeland, a senior at Colorado, where blacks have been embroiled in a confrontation with the student newspaper over ads depicting blacks with big lips and spears. “ . . . I’ve paid my tuition. I do my work. I don’t feel I should have to deal with it . . . . I feel bitter that I have to fight for something that should already have been mine.”

Also contributing to this story were researchers Rhonda Bergman in Evanston, Ill.; Dallas Jamieson in Boulder, Colo.; Lorna Nones in Miami; Eileen V. Quigley in New York; Rhona Schwartz in Houston, and Edith Stanley in Atlanta.