Bigots in The Ivory Tower

By Susan Tifft

On the magnolia-lined grounds of the University of Mississippi last August, arsonists torched the first black fraternity house before its members had even moved in. At Memphis State University last fall, the Jewish Student Union was spray-painted with swastikas. Gay men and lesbians at the University of Texas at Austin have been pelted with rocks and beer bottles while participating in campus parades. At Temple University in Philadelphia, 130 undergraduates have formed a White Students Union dedicated to fighting affirmative-action programs and promoting "white pride."

Such signs of intolerance are all too common on America's college campuses. Two decades after the Love Generation traded in its tribal beads for briefcases and business suits, bigotry and prejudice are making a comeback. Underlying this ugly renaissance is a change in the nation's political climate from the idealism that spawned the civil rights movement in the 1960s to the me-first ethic that has flourished in the '80s. Many educators blame recent outbreaks of campus bigotry on the fact that today's students are largely ignorant about past struggles for racial, sexual and economic equality. "We failed to help our children learn the lessons we learned," says Mary Maples Dunn, president of Smith College in Northampton, Mass. "We thought we'd done good things in the 1960s, but we rested on our laurels."

The current crop of U.S. undergraduates, who were just toddlers in the late '60s and early '70s, grew up during a time when the social gains of those years were under attack. "They have been raised in an era when equal opportunity has been questioned," says Albert Camarillo, chairman of a Stanford University committee on minority concerns. "They have heard people ask if we have done too much for minorities." Others blame the Reagan Administration's lax enforcement of civil rights laws for making prejudice socially acceptable. "The Reagan years provided a context that made people feel more comfortable expressing intolerance," says John S. Wilson, assistant director of corporate development at M.I.T.

At the same time, competition for college admissions, as well as jobs and promotions, has made remedies for past inequities less appealing. At Berkeley, 22% of the students in last year's entering class fell into "protected" categories, including Native Americans, Hispanics and blacks. Asian Americans, who make up 26.5% of Berkeley's undergraduate population, are an especially | tempting target for abuse because of their high academic performance. "People say they're too motivated," explains a student. "Especially in the sciences, whites are insecure." Such fears may even have tainted the admissions process: last fall the Department of Education launched an inquiry to determine whether Harvard and UCLA had set illegal quotas to limit Asian students.

Most schools are taking a tough stand against bigotry. Last October, after the independent conservative paper Dartmouth Review compared college president James Freedman, who is Jewish, to Hitler, the trustees denounced the editors for "ignorance and moral blindness." Months earlier, the university had taken sterner action, suspending three Review staffers for harassing a black professor of music. However, reinstatement of the students was ordered this month by a superior-court judge, and they are now suing the university for breach of contract, arguing that it did not live up to its bylaws, which guarantee free expression.

Some of the most effective actions against campus intolerance have been taken by students. Ole Miss's mostly white Interfraternity Council raised $20,000 to renovate another residence for the black fraternity whose house was burned down. Students at Syracuse University last month organized a week-long symposium to celebrate their racial and cultural diversity. The University of Chicago's mainstream paper, Maroon, took the lead in denouncing staffers of a right-wing campus periodical who humiliated homosexuals by placing phony personal ads in a newspaper and then exposing the identities of those who answered. As a result of the Maroon's campaign, two editors of the offending publication were suspended last spring and a $10.1 million damage suit has been filed against them by some of the injured parties.

These are steps in the right direction. But it is likely that the country's colleges will be plagued by prejudice as long as students, complacent in their insensitivity and ignorance, feel that parents, politicians and even professors find such attitudes acceptable. Observes Joseph Duffey, chancellor of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the scene of several racial incidents: "Our campuses are a testing ground for some of the resentments young people sense are out there in society."

With reporting by Melissa Ludtke/Boston and Michael Mason/Atlanta