Bigots in The Ivory Tower

By NANCY GIBBS

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?"

With reporting by Naushad S. Mehta and Susan Tifft/New York and Richard Woodbury/Austin