Wrong Message from Academe

By Ezra Bowen

Last week leaflets appeared on the University of Michigan's campus at Ann Arbor. Their message: GET YOUR BLACK ASSES BACK TO AFRICA. Like a poisonous weed, that sentiment has sprouted in various forms at campuses across the U.S. as an upsurge of racism has shocked and embarrassed an array of institutions.

-- At Purdue last month, a black academic counselor, Irene Johnson, had a graffito -- DEATH NIGGER -- scratched on her office door; a few weeks earlier in front of the Black Cultural Center, a crude wooden cross was found doused with fuel that remained unlighted when whoever put it there fled.

-- At Northern Illinois University, white students in a pickup truck yelled slurs at blacks attending a speech by the Rev. Jesse Jackson; an unauthorized N.I.U. student magazine printed sick poetry ("O.K.,/ Look nigger,/ We are white./ White is supreme./ Jesus was white./ God is white./ All of our Presidents have been white./ Thank you God"); and swastika-decorated flyers saying NIGGERS GET OUT appeared in campus buses.

-- At the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, after the last game of the World Series, about 1,500 milling students swirled into a white-black brawl.

-- At the Citadel in South Carolina this fall, white students burned a paper cross in the room of a black, who quit school.

* -- At Columbia two weeks ago, a fight broke out between whites and blacks after a white student patted black Senior Michael Jones on the head, according to bystanders, and taunted, "Chickie, chickie." Someone cracked Jones on the head, felling him, though without serious injury.

-- At UCLA, posters announced a rally for "the white students who have stood by while minority students have their hands held . . . Whites are prepared to fight to preserve their rights! God bless America!" At about the same time, there was, in fact, a fight -- when a fraternity tried to bar a black from an open party.

These outbursts of racism are merely the most visible. Black students report that indignities are routine: student security passes being checked for blacks but not whites, whites moving away from blacks in lecture halls, racial jokes told openly. Moreover, many blacks hold the angry belief that the colleges have been inattentive to their complaints and slow to move against bigots.

Indeed, many administrators, while upset at the disturbing trend, seem puzzled about why it is happening and are not sure what to do about it. Though the number of black students has been dropping in many schools, that alone does not explain black frustration. Columbia, for example, claims an 11% enrollment of black undergraduates, a steady ten-year increase and among the highest of old-line private colleges. Said President Michael Sovern: "We thought we had left no doubt that racial harassment is never acceptable, least of all at Columbia."

Examining other reasons, John Jacob, president of the National Urban League, sees no satisfactory explanation in economics. Says he of the offenders: "These young people are reasonably affluent and not part of the disadvantaged. It's not like the argument we had with blue-collar workers about losing a job. The students' peers are not a threat." Adele Terrell, program director of the National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence, disagrees, contending that some of the hostility is rooted in money. "Students are competing for scholarships and grants that are drying up," she says, with a resulting reaction by whites against perceived rivals.

Many students see the college troubles as part of a resurgent bigotry countrywide, signaled by such events as the Ku Klux Klan march in Forsyth County, Ga., and the Howard Beach incident in New York City. Michigan Junior Brett Stockdill, who is white, says of the national atmosphere, "Racists % have been led to feel comfortable and are coming out of the closet." Columbia Senior Stephanie Smallwood, among many other blacks, believes the racism goes right to the summit: "The same disregard for black people you're seeing in the university, you're seeing in the White House."

A few schools are moving to respond to black concerns. At the University of Massachusetts, Chancellor Joseph Duffey has agreed to improve campus security, add black students and faculty, offer more courses in Afro- American studies and enforce more strictly the school's racial behavior code, including disciplinary penalties for slurs and graffiti. At Michigan, President Harold Shapiro has pledged to increase black faculty, raise black student enrollment from its present 5.3% and hire a new vice provost to head up the recruitment drive. The offenses at Northern Illinois eventually resulted in eleven suspensions of white students.

Nonetheless, says N.I.U. Graduate Student Thomas Morgan, such actions are "too little, too late" -- a view shared by blacks, based on patterns at other schools. Frederick Hurst, of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, who investigated the World Series riot, found a "historical denial of racial problems." This official reluctance is compounded, says Hurst, by the fact that "today kids are far less sensitive to racism." At Michigan, Provost James Duderstadt concedes a background of slackened attention to affirmative-action goals: "Quite frankly, we haven't fulfilled those objectives."

The real root of the problem, as some students and administrators perceive it, lies in subtle attitudes. Columbia Dean of Students Roger Lehecka notes, "There are things that happen to black students week by week that are offensive to them." With each incident, attitudes harden, making resolution harder to reach. Blacks at Columbia, for example, support Jones' decision to file a police complaint rather than leave the matter to the college. "We did not feel we trusted them," says Smallwood bluntly. But in the end, as Columbia's undergraduate dean Robert Pollack observes, after a college has taken every step to establish racial harmony, the campus antagonists must come to terms with one another. "For all of our much flaunted administrative structure," he admits, "we are in the hands of our students."

With reporting by John E. Gallagher/New York and Sarah Gray/Ann Arbor