Semester Break

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

For those who have wondered what college administrators dream after too much cheap faculty-party wine, the nightmare goes something like this. Two freshmen: one a scholarship student from a tough neighborhood and the other a well-traveled white woman educated on the Continent. She claims sexual harassment, and he charges cultural insensitivity.

Swarthmore College president Alfred Bloom awoke one morning last semester to find that dream come true. Ewart Yearwood, a 5-ft. 11-in., 185-lb. Hispanic freshman from New York City, met petite Alexis Clinansmith, product of Michigan and the International School of Paris, not long after both watched the obligatory orientation-week video on date rape. They agree on how their "relationship" started: he picked her out of the freshman "face book" and decided he wanted to date her; they chatted at a party, crossed paths around the campus and talked on the grass one night. She told him she had a boyfriend; he observed that no romance lasts forever.

But as the story unfolds, the perceptions diverge, and by the end of the semester, the college faced a crisis. Clinansmith says Yearwood began to stalk her, to lurk outside her dorm and send lewd and threatening messages. Yearwood admits to some aggressive flirting -- at one point, he reached out and caressed her cheek -- but denies doing anything wrong. In the end, Swarthmore president Bloom made a decision that some might call Solomonic and others a - novel attempt to pass the buck. Bloom found Yearwood guilty of intimidation (but not sexual harassment) and offered him a deal. If the young man would enter behavioral counseling and take a semester's voluntary leave of absence, Swarthmore would pay his tuition at another college. Yearwood said Columbia sounded good. Soon an application landed in Yearwood's mailbox.

As punishments go, it was an extraordinary proposal: the notion of one elite college paying another to take a troublesome student off its hands. The deal's emphasis, says Bloom, is on counseling. Yearwood, he observes, still does not think the problem is that he is intimidating but feels instead that "other people don't stand up to his intimidation." Without the leverage of a promised semester elsewhere, the student would be unlikely to seek help. "If we'd just suspended him," argues Bloom, "he'd become even more hostile."

But some Swarthmore students believe that Bloom in his creative sentencing was succumbing to intimidation rather than battling it. "If I had my way, we'd tar and feather and toast him," says sophomore Laura Starita of Yearwood. "When you have someone like that, he's a danger to everyone on campus, especially women."

Even Swarthmore's Hispanic Organization for Latino Awareness refused to back his cause. Says member Andy Danilchick: "The issue is behavior, not culture."

Yearwood's supporters, on the other hand, decried what they viewed as a violation of his free-speech rights, portraying him as a victim of gender politics and socioeconomic prejudices. "We are from two different worlds," says Yearwood of Clinansmith. "People from my background, from an urban setting, understood."

Yearwood was not entirely new to the sheltered academic life-style. Born in Belize and raised by an aunt and grandmother, Yearwood excelled in the public schools, and with help from Prep 9, a recruiting program for gifted minority students, he vaulted into private boarding schools. But two years ago, he was expelled from St. Andrew's School in Delaware following repeated incidents of what its headmaster calls "staring" and "vulgar comments" directed at female students. Admits Yearwood: "When I reflected on it, I thought, 'Damn, that was inappropriate.' "

Legally, a private school can act with near impunity within the confines of its closed community, a point echoed by Bloom in recollecting Yearwood's defense of his "intimidating" manner. "He said, 'That's the way the world is.' But that's not the Swarthmore world." In keeping with the college's Quaker tradition, Bloom chose to give Yearwood another chance. Last week, however, Columbia rejected Yearwood on academic grounds, and the application deadline for many other schools he might have considered has passed. Bloom's nightmare begins once more.

With reporting by Mubarak Dahir/Swarthmore and Sharon E. Epperson/New York