How Can Colleges Respond to Extremist Activity Among Students?

Bias-related incidents and hate-group propaganda on college campuses have recently captured greater public attention as America’s political climate has become more charged. Since President Trump’s election, many people with far-right, racist, and sexist views have felt emboldened to speak freely.

Fliers promoting white supremacy, swastikas, and other offensive symbols and language targeting racial and religious minorities have appeared on campuses around the country. Such events have unsettled students and prompted college presidents to emphasize that the incidents run counter to the missions of their institutions. Outsiders are often to blame, but students have been involved in some cases.

The threat posed by extremist views gained new attention this week with the killing of Richard Collins III, a black student who was supposed to graduate on Tuesday from Bowie State University, a historically black institution in Maryland. Sean Christopher Urbanski, a white student at the University of Maryland at College Park, was arrested and charged with fatally stabbing Mr. Collins over the weekend on the College Park campus.

The authorities soon discovered that Mr. Urbanski followed “Alt Reich: Nation,” a far-right, racist Facebook page. The F.B.I. is investigating Mr. Collins’s death as a potential hate crime.

Other public details about the homicide are scarce. So far, it’s unclear whether clues elsewhere could have alerted administrators or law-enforcement agencies to the possibility that Mr. Urbanski might carry out a violent attack, or that his actions were racially motivated. Mr. Urbanski’s lawyer has suggested that alcohol and substance abuse may have played a role.

It’s also difficult to say with precision whether the prevalence of bias-related incidents on campuses has increased in the past year. Still, the Maryland case has raised questions about how college officials should respond if and when they are made aware of hate-group activity among students.

The answers depend on the nature of the behavior and on what actions are prohibited by campus conduct codes, administrators and campus-safety experts said. In many cases, campus officials can’t do much.

Just being a member of a hate group or distributing offensive material on campuses is not criminal, nor is it usually a violation of campus policy, several experts told The Chronicle. It’s also impossible to predict every case of a student engaging in violence or other criminal actions as a result of their views.

Such challenges are not new ones for campus administrators. Many of them said they approach students who espouse extremist views in the same way they’d approach students who were acting erratically or threatening to harm themselves.

But they acknowledge that the free-speech questions at play can make intervening difficult, particularly at a time when colleges are facing intense public scrutiny over First Amendment issues.

The administrators and campus police officers interviewed by The Chronicle said they don’t keep track of whether students are involved with hate groups.

“It’s not conceptually possible to be monitoring and doing that kind of legwork on all Facebook pages,” said Kevin Kruger, president of Naspa, an association of student-affairs administrators. “Even if you knew a student was a member, what would you do?”

If a campus police department learned that a student was posting messages on social media that suggested violence, and that the student also followed an extremist Facebook page, “it’s probably something we’d investigate,” said Randy Burba, president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators and chief of police at Chapman University. But officers aren’t actively looking for hate groups and combing membership lists for students, Mr. Burba said.

Some campuses purchase software that can help them stay up to speed with what students are talking about online, to keep abreast of possible threats, said S. Daniel Carter, a longtime campus-safety consultant. But, he said, “I have yet to see any of these tools be a silver bullet.” In many cases, there’s no indication at all that a student is planning to do something criminal.

Students also communicate in ways that neither administrators nor law enforcement can observe, said Jen Day Shaw, associate vice president and dean of students at the University of Florida. For instance, Ms. Shaw said, students might create GroupMe messages where members will add their friends, who will in turn add their friends until the message has hundreds of recipients.

Officials often rely on members of the campus community to report problematic student behavior. “We have a lot of students and parents who end up being our best source,” Ms. Shaw said.

Her staff is paying attention to the ways that outside organizations might try to influence students. One problem is “fronting,” in which a student group will reserve event space on campus for an external organization, giving the outsiders access to the campus they wouldn’t otherwise have.

Campus officials must also strike a tricky balance between dealing with problematic behavior and upholding students’ First Amendment rights. Ms. Shaw said that while it’s unlikely that Florida students would want to create a far-right organization, “if they wanted to start a student group, they certainly could.”

It can be difficult to protect students’ free speech when their opinions are offensive and racist, yet several administrators stressed that doing so is essential.

Jill Creighton, president of the Association for Student Conduct Administration, said she would never agree with a white-supremacist viewpoint. “But in my job,” she said, “I may have to protect that student’s right to say their thoughts.”

“It is one of the hardest parts of my job,” she added.

At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a student tried this year to recruit peers to join a “pro-white student club” affiliated with the American Freedom Party, a white-supremacist group. He distributed slips of paper that bore the phrase #UWAltRight and encouraged students to “fight anti-white racism on campus.”

The student, Daniel L. Dropik, had previously served five years in prison for racially motivated arsons of two black churches. University officials were unaware of that when they admitted him because the Wisconsin system doesn’t allow a student’s criminal history to be considered as part of the admissions process.

“I’m sure you want to know why this person is here, what we’re doing about his recent activity and how we keep our community safe,” Rebecca Blank, Madison’s chancellor, wrote in a January email to the campus community. She said she would ask the Wisconsin Board of Regents to review the admissions policy, and she acknowledged that Mr. Dropik’s attempts to recruit students to join a hate group were “concerning.”

“But handing out political information and expressing objectionable, even hateful, viewpoints is not illegal nor a violation of any campus policy,” she said.

If officials discover that a student is involved with a hate group, Mr. Carter said, they have to determine whether the group’s offensive activities are “just talk” — which would be protected speech — or rise to the level of a potential threat to the campus.

Responding With Education

Administrators said they try to turn situations where students express hateful views into teaching moments. Colleges have an obligation, Mr. Carter said, “to teach students to exercise these freedoms responsibly.”

If a student group “sparks concern or does not match our values of inclusion,” Ms. Shaw said, her office will start by reaching out to its leaders to have a discussion about their purpose and goals. “If somebody came to our attention who was spewing hate, especially if they seemed aggressive, we’d do a threat assessment,” she said.

Administrators might also start a campaign to counter that activity, she said. Once, a religious cult came to Florida to try to recruit students, she said, so officials did outreach and programming focused on how students could make smart, careful decisions about the organizations they joined.

Many recent campus-climate incidents have involved white-supremacist fliers appearing across a campus. If a student put up the fliers, that could be a policy violation, if he or she didn’t follow the code of conduct’s rules for how fliers could be posted, Ms. Creighton said. But the expression on the fliers is usually protected, she said.

In that case, conduct officers might talk with the person, she said, and “hopefully expose the student to what the impact was on that community.” Administrators might also encourage a broader dialogue among students about the incident and help them understand how best to express dissent, she said.

Creating spaces for students to air opposing views is critical, Mr. Kruger, of Naspa, said. He conceded that students with extreme views might not participate in such conversations. But that’s no reason not to try, he said. “It’s better than sitting back, throwing your hands up, and saying, There’s nothing we can do about it.”

Broadly, hate groups still appear to have relatively little influence on campuses. Mr. Burba said he and other campus police chiefs have observed “alt-right hate and vitriol” causing concern in recent months, but they haven’t seen a noticeable uptick in such activity. His association is more worried about violent protests of controversial speakers and how such events might affect the campus climate.

There’s no question that the current polarized moment will continue to present challenges for administrators when they’re dealing with student expression, bias incidents, and safety concerns, Mr. Carter said.

“In some respects it’s a new form of tension,” he said. “I think a lot of people, including myself, are still trying to better understand it.”

The University of Maryland, still reeling from the fatal attack on Mr. Collins, appeared on Wednesday to be seeking to both understand the tension, and to stop hate crimes in their tracks. The Baltimore Sun reported that President Wallace D. Loh had announced a series of steps to fight the problem, including a rapid-response team to aid people who are subjected to hate crimes, a $100,000 diversity-education campaign, and an annual report on campus hate-bias incidents.

“These are fraught times, on our campus, across the nation, and the world,” Mr. Loh wrote in his statement. “It is on all of us to stand up and fight the racism, extremism, and hate that are cancers in our body politic.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.

Correction (5/25/2017, 9:40 a.m.): This article originally misstated the name of an association of campus conduct officers. It is the Association for Student Conduct Administration, not the Association of Student Conduct Administrators. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.