Content area
Full Text
Many colleges and universities are mobilizing "response teams" to deal with what appear to be increasingly brazen bias incidents as diversity increases. // BY MORRIS THOMPSON
It seems to be happening at colleges and universities all over the country: Yet another "blackface" party. The "N" word scrawled on a student's dorm-room door, public bulletin board or a wall. Comments in class about "illegals" overloading government services. A slur screamed at someone perceived as gay, lesbian, transgender or at someone who is Jewish, Muslim, "foreign" - anyone who is "different."
What's going on, and why?
In truth, no one seems certain whether more bias-motivated incidents are happening in higher education across the land, or whether we just know about more of them.
"I don't know of anyone who's tracking the data," said Dr. Alma Clayton-Pedersen, a senior scholar at the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) in Washington, D.C. "I don't know whether we've become less civil, or whether it's come above ground. Maybe our government is feeding this, by the incivility that happens at the national level."
Leon Wiles, chief diversity at Clemson University, the public research institution with more than 20,000 students in South Carolina, said, "Kids follow the grown-ups."
Wiles said that Clemson saw more slurs and intimidation incidents related to race and sexual orientation during the 2008 election campaign and after the election of the nation's first black president. Cheryl Crazy Bull, president of the Denver-based American Indian College Fund, cited social media as a key to heightened awareness of incidents. "Students see something or hear something, post a video, and it goes 'viral,'" she said.
TAKING ACTION
In response, hundreds of colleges and universities - there seems to be no better number - have set up bias-incident response teams as their first line of defense.
Shane Windmeyer, executive director and a founder of both the Charlotte-based national LGBT support group Campus Pride and of its affiliated Stop The Hate coalition effort, said somewhat fewer than 20 percent of the nation's nearly 2,800 four-year-andup colleges and universities have something like that, a campus anti-hate task force.
Many schools now set goals for what AAC&U terms diversity, inclusion and excellence, which some college officials say can prompt majority-white resentment of the...