Malcolm Anderson, who helped lead a sit-in by some 200 black students at the University of Rhode Island two weeks ago, says “change is in the air” this semester.
Even he was surprised at how quickly students mobilized to protest when they learned that a Malcolm X quotation newly engraved on the face of the university library had been edited to omit a reference to “fighting the white man.” The truncated quote spoke only of Malcolm X’s love of reading.
“Usually people don’t get restless until the spring,” he says. “Everyone is conscious now, and that’s good.”
Protests centering on racial issues have sprung up this fall at campuses across the country. Minority students have led demonstrations at Georgia State University, Oberlin College, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the University of Massachusetts, among many other campuses.
The protests surprise some observers not only because they seem to be erupting earlier in the academic year than usual, but also because they come at a time when many administrators have announced their near-total agreement with the stated goals of many protesters: recruiting and admitting more minority students and modifying the campus environment to make them more comfortable.
“In some ways this is a classic case of rising expectations,” says Robert L. Carothers, the University of Rhode Island’s president. “Students have the sense change is going to happen, and they want it to move at a faster pace.”
Mr. Carothers, who is in his second year at Rhode Island, issued a detailed plan last spring that outlined steps the university would take to improve the recruitment and retention of minority students and professors.
Many protests have arisen in response to overtly racist acts by white students -- who, coincidentally or not, have often been fraternity members. At UCLA last month, for example, 200 students marched to demand that the student government stop financing fraternities after the student newspaper printed racist and sexist lyrics from the Theta Xi and Sigma Pi “songbooks.”
Black students at Georgia State staged a sit-in three weeks ago outside the office of President Carl V. Patton after a fraternity member wrote a racial slur on a trash can in the student center.
Frank displays of racism may stun observers acquainted with how multicultural perspectives are being injected into everything from freshman orientation to reading lists. But administrators say that special programs and expanded reading lists often influence only those students already sympathetic to the concerns of minority students.
Leslie K. Bates, director of the department of minority services and programs at the University of Georgia, says: “There are just some entrenched conservative groups we haven’t had the opportunity to reach.”
Mr. Bates may yet be able to reach the members of Pi Kappa Phi on his campus, who are appealing a suspension they received for distributing to pledges a guidebook that included this tip: “no niggers.” As a condition of their suspension, the members may have to work with the department of minority services.
“To many people, `diversity’ and `sensitivity’ are just words, with no effect on them,” Mr. Bates says.
At George Washington University, about 3,000 students turned out for a campus-wide convocation after the student-body president admitted using a racial slur in a private conversation. Another student politician had brought the comment to light in a newspaper editorial.
And at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, several weeks of havoc followed an incident in late September in which a black resident adviser was punched by a visitor of a white student. The adviser later found racist graffiti outside his room.
During a vigil to protest the incident outside the high-rise dorm where it happened, a group of angry students broke away and entered the hall, banging on doors and shouting anti-white epithets.
Other protests find their roots in a general sense of dissatisfaction that seems intensified this year. The Rhode Island students were enraged by the sanitized Malcolm X quote, but their list of demands -- for more minority advisers, for a refurbished Multicultural Student Center, for curriculum reform -- bespoke more fundamental concerns.
Protests at Oberlin College and Missouri Valley College also had many causes, but no single spark. Twenty-five Oberlin students silently occupied the admissions office to protest what they said was a lack of effort in recruiting black students. The Missouri Valley students held their sit-in to protest long-standing grievances about the campus police, “insensitive” faculty members, and housing facilities.
“This year is the first time anyone ever took any action,” says Claude Rhone, president of the Minority Student Union at Missouri Valley. “People just decided they weren’t taking it lying down any longer.”
But why are these campuses boiling over this year?
The economy may be one reason, says Rhode Island’s Mr. Anderson. “People don’t have jobs, they can’t get jobs when they graduate,” he says. “It’s unrest, that’s what it is. People are fed up.”
Grant M. Ingle, who as human-relations director at Massachusetts has seen some of the edgiest confrontations in the country, says: “The economy certainly gives things a different tone.” Budget cuts on his campus and on many others have meant that programs for minority students have not expanded at the same rate as the minority population.
But many observers of campus life, including Mr. Ingle, say that economic discontent is only one ingredient in the new activism. The Presidential campaign may have been another. It, and then President-elect Bill Clinton’s victory, may have raised students’ expectations for change.
“The election has surfaced very different views of what America could be, different ideas about the role of race in our society,” Mr. Ingle says.
Others say students are just frustrated by a long-lasting era of student apathy.
“I don’t think Clinton represents any changing of the guard,” says Chris Jenkins, who helped lead the Oberlin protests. “This is a backlash against conservatism.”
And some say that it is not the rise of Mr. Clinton that has fired students up, but the ascendancy of another icon -- symbolized by the “X” on thousands of baseball hats, T-shirts, and posters promoting Spike Lee’s new movie about Malcolm X. Combine Malcolm X’s militant rhetoric with such national incidents as the Rodney G. King beating and the recent killing of Malice Green in Detroit, and you have a recipe for student activism.
“Ninety-two has been a year of black consciousness,” says Tim Smith, a co-president of the Black Awareness Council at the University of North Carolina. “People are becoming more aware of who they are. They’re even showing that they’re Afrocentric in what they wear.”
North Carolina was the site of perhaps the seminal protest of the year. In September, thousands of students agitated for -- and finally received the administration’s endorsement of -- a freestanding black cultural center. Spike Lee himself showed up for one of the rallies.
Many students don’t realize that protests are echoing each other around the country. Mr. Smith has helped rally students at North Carolina State University, and North Carolina A&T, but hadn’t heard of protests in other parts of the country. Neither had Mr. Jenkins of Oberlin.
But the protest at Missouri Valley College probably wouldn’t have happened if Mr. Rhone hadn’t seen footage of the North Carolina protest on television, taped it, and played it for his friends. “I had to get people believing they could make a change. I said, `Here’s a model. It was successful.”’
At Rhode Island, Mr. Anderson says he couldn’t believe it when he opened his morning paper and read about the protests at the University of Massachusetts. “It seems like a phase,” he says."Everybody is doing it.”
Some observers caution against making too much of the wave of unrest. Racist comments that leak out of fraternities are no measure of the climate on the campuses, they say.
Also, it may be that the incidents are just receiving more scrutiny in the press than before. “For a while I think the explosion in coverage of `political correctness’ and the supposed attempt to create a campus orthodoxy diverted attention from students,” says Howard J. Ehrlich, research director for the National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence. “My sense is that the incidents have reached a plateau.”
There are also indications that students as a whole are moving away from the conservatism that they displayed in the 1980’s. Students voted by a large margin for Mr. Clinton, who promised a more tolerant approach to race relations.
“In visiting college campuses I don’t get the sense there is unusual hostility,” says Reginald Wilson, a senior scholar with the American Council on Education and co-author of an annual report entitled “Minorities in Higher Education.” Nor does Mr. Wilson think colleges are apathetic about the issues that exercise students. “The colleges I know have been making serious efforts to diversify the student body,” he says.
Still, he cautions against complacency: “People think diversity will mean harmony. But it means conflict, and people should expect that.”
Or, as Stephen J. Trachtenberg, president of George Washington University, says: “You never know when you’re going to get blind-sided by a 19-year-old kid who says something stupid.”