‘White Supremacists Are Targeting College Campuses Like Never Before’

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A white supremacist walked through a crowd of people awaiting a speech by Richard Spencer at the U. of Florida in October. An analysis by the Anti-Defamation League found a spike in white-supremacist fliers and similar material on campuses.

White-supremacist propaganda at colleges increased by 258 percent from the fall of 2016 to the fall of 2017, affecting 216 campuses across the nation, according to a study released on Thursday by the Anti-Defamation League.

For just the fall-2017 semester, the organization found 147 incidents of white-supremacist fliers, stickers, banners, or posters on campuses — up from 41 reported during the fall-2016 semester. In the past year, the group said, 346 incidents have been reported in all, at colleges in 44 states and Washington, D.C., from community colleges to the Ivy League.

“White supremacists are targeting college campuses like never before,” the Anti-Defamation League’s chief executive, Jonathan Greenblatt, said in a news release. “They see campuses as a fertile recruiting ground, as evident by the unprecedented volume of propagandist activity designed to recruit young people to support their vile ideology.”

Large public colleges in California and Texas saw the most incidents of white-supremacist propaganda in the last year. That’s in part because white-supremacist groups are most concentrated in those areas, said Carla Hill, an investigative researcher at the league’s Center on Extremism, in an interview.

The data were compiled from news-media reports, complaints by students or the institutions themselves, extremist sources that have been verified by a secondary source, and police reports.

‘Rampant’ Propaganda

After the November 2016 elections, colleges saw a widely reported spike in white-supremacist flier-posting and hate-inspired incidents.

Hill said she started noticing a pattern of white-supremacist groups’ targeting colleges in a coordinated and widespread way in early 2016, and began keeping records of the instances in the fall of 2016. She’d previously seen other kinds of white-supremacist propaganda on campuses, like handing out CDs of hate music, but nothing before to match the magnitude of the 2016 surge. Since then she has noticed a continued sharp increase in incidents, with propaganda “rampant” on campuses.

“If one college has it, they shouldn’t feel like a minority,” she said. “There’s literally hundreds of schools that have been touched by this. I wouldn’t take it as ‘my school is a school of hate.’”

White-supremacist groups like Identity Evropa, Patriot Front, and Vanguard America are some of the more notable that are taking aim at colleges. Identity Evropa is responsible for nearly half of the reported incidents of propaganda.

The numbers in the study do not include other kinds of white-supremacist propaganda, such as writings on sidewalks and chalkboards, faxes, and public-speaking engagements by firebrand white nationalists like Richard B. Spencer.

Over the last year, the Anti-Defamation League saw declines in white-supremacist propaganda only during the summer and other periods of college vacations. Hill said white supremacists aim to have the most impact with their propaganda, hoping to attract news-media attention and even bragging about the postings on social media. Sometimes the groups seem to be competing with one another, Hill said.

“The most interesting thing is the effort these groups and individuals doing this have gone to to market it,” she said. “It has a lot of effects: It’s put in the paper there, people seeing it has an effect, the campus having to denounce it, the media reporting on it gets more attention, the proof of them doing it, the images of the material on campus, the people complaining about it. It’s multipurpose; it creates more propaganda for them to use for their cause.”

The only states with no reported incidents last year were Alaska, Hawaii, Louisiana, Maine, New Hampshire, and West Virginia, according to the data. The Anti-Defamation League declined to release a list breaking down the number of incidents by institution.