Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 9, 1990 TAG: 9005090353
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The perception of racial hostility is inducing more families to send their children to historically black colleges to avoid the issue altogether, while others are scrutinizing predominantly white schools more carefully to weed out those that appear less racially tolerant.
"Our schools are getting more and more applications from students who are disgruntled," said Alan Kirchner, vice president for programs and public policy at the United Negro College Fund.
"These students want the chance to develop without the threat of harassment that looms over many of those campuses."
Kharis McLaughlin, a Boston guidance counselor who works with black college-bound students, remembers the apprehension a group of black students felt when she recently took them to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where a racial melee occurred after the 1986 World Series.
"Some students were a bit fearful," McLaughlin said.
"Whether it's right or wrong, these things will sway people if they perceive a danger. If you hear that someone had a horrible experience at a school, you're not likely to go. That's how decisions are made."
But the choices seem to be getting narrower for blacks looking for predominantly white schools not touched by racial turmoil.
In the last five years, incidents of racial harassment or violence have been reported at more than 300 colleges and universities across the country, according to the National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence, an independent non-profit policy research group based in Baltimore that tracks racial violence on college campuses.
All types of campuses are involved, including the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, The Citadel, Smith College, Brown University, Wesleyan University, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Florida.
The incidents range from racist graffiti and hate notes to the formation of white supremacy groups and allegations of racially motivated brutality by campus police.
And at hundreds of other campuses where there may be no reports of overt acts of bigotry, black students describe a general sense of polarization and hostility.
Last week, more than 1,000 students, most of them black, halted traffic with a sit-in on Broad Street in the middle of Temple University's Philadelphia campus, after members of a white fraternity, armed with baseball bats and sticks, chased three blacks they believed had broken windows of their fraternity house.
Eleven students were injured in the melee, eight of them black, and students said the campus police had used excessive force and handcuffed only black students.
At Emory University in Atlanta last March, a black woman found racist epithets scrawled in her dormitory room and her stuffed animals ripped apart.
The case is being investigated by the police and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
On Sunday at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., billiard balls were thrown through a window at a black cultural center, setting off a protest march by black students the next day.
Because of such incidents, racial harassment has become a standard question facing college representatives trying to recruit black students to predominantly white campuses, and with each racial incident comes a battery of calls from concerned black parents of current or prospective students, college officials say.
The officials are less inclined to say whether black applications to their schools have risen or decreased, and without access to such data at all campuses where incidents have occurred, it is impossible to quantify cause and effect.
Despite the recent incidents, a big majority of the nation's 1 million black college students - about 80 percent - remain enrolled at the nation's predominantly white colleges, as against about 20 percent at historically black colleges, said Dr. Reginald Wilson, a senior scholar at the American Council on Education.
"There's no question in my mind that black kids are leaving white schools or not going to them in the first place because of the chilly climate," he said.
by CNB