A Systematic Plan to Fight Hate on Campuses
Daniel Hiroyuki Teraguchi, AAC&U, 2004

EVERY YEAR
more than half a million college students are targets of bias-driven slurs or physical assaults.

EVERY DAY
at least one hate crime occurs on a college campus.

EVERY MINUTE
a college student somewhere sees or hears racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise biased words or images.

From Southern Poverty Law Center’s 10 Ways To Fight Hate on Campus: A Response Guide for College Activists, available for free at www.tolerance.org.

Introduction
The Association of American Colleges and Universities’ (AAC&U) brief summary is designed to encourage campuses to think about more comprehensively about how they might establish systematic, proactive ways to prevent and respond to hate crimes and bias incidents. We encourage readers to send in additional examples that expand upon what is included in this document. Send your examples to dt@aacu.org.

This document was produced for the Bildner Family Foundation’s New Jersey Campus Diversity Initiative, a partnership with the Association of American College and Universities (AAC&U) and the Philanthropic Initiative (TPI). The Bildner NJCDI seeks to make diversity a strength on campus and a resource for the future of the state of the New Jersey. Over the next three years (2002-2005), Bildner will invest in colleges and universities as key sites of citizenship and learning, confident that higher education can help reduce prejudice and promote intergroup understanding.

The overarching goals of the Bildner New Jersey Campus Diversity Initiative (NJCDI) grants are threefold: to reduce prejudice, promote intergroup understanding, and foster comprehensive institutional change needed to support such learning. The Bildner schools receive ongoing assistance from AAC&U over the three year life of the project, which have included three capacity strengthening meetings, consultant site visits, and the dissemination of diversity resources.

Definitions
To distinguish the difference between hate crimes and bias incidents, we begin with definitions. The Federal Government, more than 40 states, and the District of Columbia have hate crime statutes. Traditionally, hate crime is a crime of violence, property damage, or threat that is motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias based on race, religion, ethnicity, or national origin. A smaller number of states cover hate crimes motivated by an offender’s bias based on gender, physical or mental disability, or sexual orientation. In short, a hate crime must meet two criteria:

• · A crime must happen, such as physical assault, threat, and/or vandalism.
• The crime must be motivated by bias.

In New Jersey, any crime is given an enhanced penalty if “the defendant in committing the crime acted with a purpose to intimidate an individual or group of individuals because of race, color, gender, handicap, religion, sexual orientation or ethnicity.” Also, New Jersey law enforcement agencies are required to report bias incident offenses to the Diversity of State Police, Uniform Crime Reporting Unit, on a monthly basis. If you or someone you know is a victim of a hate crime in New Jersey, you should call the Office of Bias Crime and Community Relations, which is required to monitor and assist local authorities in bias crime investigations and prosecutions. Their Web site address is www.njbiascrime.org/index.html.

Bias incidents are conduct, speech, or expression that is motivated by bias based on race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, gender, disability, or sexual orientation, but don’t involve a criminal act. However, bias incidents may violate campus codes or policies, so they may be handled through campus grievance procedures. Examples of bias incidents are degrading, derogatory comments or email messages.

Sometimes the victims are unsure if a crime has been committed, so they do not report the incident to campus officials or the police. If a person feels that he/she may have been the victim of a bias-motivated attack, he/she should report it to the proper officials and let them determine if it was an incident or a crime. Something that seems to be rather minor could be perceived as a bias incident, but, in fact, could be a punishable crime. For example, in United States v. Machado, a former student was convicted of disseminating an email containing racially derogatory comments and threats to 59 college students, nearly all of whom were of Asian descent.

Summary of the Research
According to a snapshot read of the literature on hate crimes and bias incidents, a systems-wide plan to fight hate on campus generally develops in four phases. The phases are:

1. Establishing a crisis plan with response protocols;
2. Determining an educational strategy that is focused on campus life;
3. Instituting curricular strategies to embed issues within courses;
4. Creating a college-wide crisis response team.

The first phase is initiated when an institution creates a crisis response plan to address possible acts of intolerance or sexual harassment on campus. The response plan generally results in a set of protocols to clarify legal protections and to highlight services available to victims. These protocols are typically developed and carried out by the department or division of the institution where the incident or crime occurred. This isolation of protocols, which often produces inconsistent legal procedures and disconnected services to the students, is a common phenomenon on campuses and a major barrier to establishing a system-wide response plan.

The second phase is typically an educational strategy to prevent hate from reoccurring or new acts of intolerance from surfacing. After the legal response protocols are produced, a task force, generally housed in student affairs, is assembled to develop a preventative plan through education. This plan includes training programs for campus police, administrators, faculty, and residence hall leaders on the response protocols.

Two examples of phase two activities are: (1) The Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) World of Difference Institute established in 1992 to “define and advance a discipline of diversity education;” and (2) New Jersey City University’s Peer Education Peers (PEP) based in the school’s psychology department. The World of Difference Institute aims to increase awareness of hate crimes and bias incidents and encourage university students to make proactive changes on campus. PEP engages students to educate their peers using films, small group discussions, and campus speakers to increase awareness and promote safety. More examples of phase two activities are provided in Appendix B.

A less developed third phase occurring when campuses focus on instituting curricular strategies that promote tolerance, deepen knowledge about injustices, and encourage assertion of democratic principles of equality, dignity, and opportunity. Ethnic and Women’s studies and other diversity-based courses contribute to this curricular strategy. They focus on the history of struggles for democracy by different groups and have used learning goals to expand a student’s ability to understand and experience the world from different social locations. In addition, these types of courses examine the psychological, social, and scientific ways that bias, prejudice, and intolerance operate, are sustained, and justified, so students can problem solve to find ways to remedy these persistent injustices in our society.

A useful pedagogical tool to teach tolerance is intergroup dialogue projects. These projects require students to work in diverse groups that focus on a community-based project to help them understand and experience diversity and difference as a source of strength, not hate. Intergroup dialogues draw on students’ experiences as a resource for discovering a potential solution to the community-based issue they are assigned.

New curricular attention that promotes intergroup dialogue to reduce bigotry could strengthen efforts to create positive learning and living environments. The curricular phase would focus, in part, on establishing ties between the institution’s educational mission and the reduction of bigotry through understanding and skill development.

A fourth phase that is beginning to emerge is the establishment of a campus-wide crisis response team that links different components of campus through a common set of protocols, including steps to enhance educational strategies within student affairs and academic affairs. The establishment of a campus-wide crisis response team facilitates immediate actions regardless of where the act of intolerance occurs on campus. When an act of intolerance is reported, a member of the response team is informed, so they can assemble to respond in an efficient and appropriate manner as laid out in the protocols.

Ideally, campuses would have a crisis response plan reflecting different aspects of the four phases appropriate for their context when an act of intolerance occurs. Below is a set of resources to assist institutions to strengthen their crisis response plan. Each of the resources provide versions of the different phases integrated together.

Best Practices and Resources
1. A resource that integrates many of the phases is a report produced by the U.S. Department of Justice. The report was prepared by the Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence at the University of Southern Maine, under contract with Community Research Associates, Inc. to assist institutions to deal with acts of intolerance on their campuses. A series of best practices and ways to overcome several problems areas that occur on campus are provided. For a copy of this report, see Appendix B. It is also available free on-line at: www.cphv.usm.maine.edu/monograph.pdf. The collection of system-wide models and concrete examples in this report complements the protocols created by Southern Poverty Law Center’s 10 Ways to Fight Hate on Campus: A Response Guide for College Activists. For free copies of the SPLC’s Response Guide see tolerance.org.

2. Southern Poverty Law at www.tolerance.org continue to provide a plethora of resources for college campuses. The SPL’s 10 Ways to Fight Hate on Campus: A Response Guide for College Activists is a powerful student-centered, proactive way that students can intervene and interrupt hate and bias to create a more equitable, safe campus for learning—it is a wonderful resource.

3. Two universities, New York University and St. Lawrence University, are currently enhancing their campus-wide crisis response team. Brochures and educational materials are not available yet, but they have agreed to send AAC&U their information when it is completed. NYU is consolidating their protocols across campus to ensure consistency and align training workshops for campus police, administrators, faculty, staff, and students. A larger, more difficult effort in NYU’s initiative is developing an educational plan that links co-curricular and curricular strategies to prevent acts of intolerance on campus and sustain a safe, supportive, and welcoming environment in which students may learn. St. Lawrence University has recently implemented a campus-wide response team that seems to be very effective in responding to acts of intolerance regardless of where they occur on campus.

Conclusion
During a short conversation with Dr. J.J. Jackson, Associate Provost of Student Affairs at New York University, she indicated the value of organizing a campus-wide committee because it forces the campus to institutionalize both an educational and an institutional response plan. This strategy was also used at St. Lawrence University to avoid the problems associated with phase one: isolated and inconsistent response protocols.

If no response plan is in place, one of the first steps is to create campus-wide protocols similar to the University of Rochester’s set of brochures. The campus-wide task force should then focus on preventative strategies in both student and academic affairs. The resources above provide several models and programs that institutions could adapt for their campus.

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