Racist Incidents at Syracuse U. Spun Into a Crisis. The Way Its Leaders Communicated Didn’t Help.

The spark that led to a conflagration here started on November 7, when racial slurs and graffiti against African Americans and Asians were found in bathrooms in Day Hall. Other incidents followed: More racist graffiti. A swastika scrawled in the snow. Fraternity members yelling racist epithets at a black student.

By the time word started spreading that a white-supremacist manifesto had been sent to students’ cellphones in the library via AirDrop, the campus was in a full crisis. Students of color hunkered down in their dorms, fearful for their safety. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York slammed the chancellor, Kent D. Syverud, for what he called an ineffective response. Before long, Democratic presidential candidates started to weigh in.

The former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr., a graduate of Syracuse’s law school, wrote on Twitter that he was “deeply disturbed” by events on the campus. “We are truly in a battle for the soul of this nation,” he wrote, echoing a broader theme of his campaign. “We must give hate no safe harbor.” Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California tweeted: “Syracuse’s faculty and staff must listen to students protesting for more counselors and a safe and inclusive learning environment free from hate.”

The provost gave permission on Thursday for students to skip classes without penalty. The chancellor agreed to most of the demands of student protesters. But that wasn’t enough to quell calls for his resignation. Activists said they were fed up at what they viewed as Syverud’s ineffectual, passionless denunciations of hate.

“The conduct is deeply harmful and contrary to the values and community standards we expect of our students” — that’s what Syverud had said in April 2018, in a statement responding to the video of Theta Tau fraternity members making racist remarks. “There is absolutely no place at Syracuse University for behavior or language that degrades any individual or group’s race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity, disability, or religious beliefs.”

Syverud had been making promises since 2014, when protests over the campus climate erupted early in his tenure. But activists weren’t buying the pledges anymore. #NotAgainSU became a rallying cry on social media and on signs posted everywhere on the campus.

“It doesn’t matter what program students are in, or what class they’re in, or what their ethnicity is — students expect to be heard and listened to, as well as to know that something is being dealt with,” said Franklin Harris, a student in the university’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, over a lunch of jerk-chicken tacos on Friday at a Mexican restaurant near the campus. “The platitudes don’t feel genuine.”

Years in the Making

After years of grievances about the campus’s racial climate and the inadequacy of support services provided to minority and underrepresented students, the moment was ripe for revolt.

Early Friday evening, Alexander Colon, a senior majoring in neuroscience, sat alone in the Barnes Center, where he had joined fellow students a few days earlier in a protest. There was a familiarity to the protest and the administration’s response, he said.

Colon, who is president of Lambda Alpha Upsilon, a Latino fraternity, joined in protests against the offensive video in 2018. The incident had thrown the campus into turmoil. Theta Tau members said the video was satirical, private, and taken out of context.

Now, Colon said, many of his friends don’t feel safe. They didn’t go to class last week. Administrators were putting the university’s image over the welfare of students, he said.

Like many other activists, Colon has lost faith in the chancellor’s ability to respond forcefully to racial incidents on the campus. “I don’t think he’s a bad guy,” Colon said, “but a leader? That’s not Kent.”

In 2018 and again last week the university acted swiftly but fell short of activists’ expectations. Administrators banned Theta Tau and suspended many of its members for up to two years. But many, including Colon, felt the university had acted only because it was forced to do so by activists.

This time, the “verbal assault” on the black student spurred an immediate investigation. Syverud said the assault had occurred as 14 people, including four Syracuse students, were leaving an Alpha Chi Rho fraternity party on the night of November 16. Before dawn the next day, the university suspended Alpha Chi Rho and all social activities for all fraternities for the rest of the semester. The four students are on “interim suspension.”

Struggling to Communicate

Yet by that time, the university was already under fire for not responding quickly enough to the graffiti. Then matters got worse. The AirDropped white-supremacist manifesto, allegedly copied from the writing of a terrorist who killed dozens of people in March at two mosques in New Zealand, reached The New York Times before the university could argue that it was probably a hoax — an explanation that many students don’t believe.

The incident “took place in the middle of the night, and we did not have a team in place who could deal with it effectively,” said Syverud in remarks to the University Senate on Wednesday night. “We now have such a team ready at all times, and we already have started more properly communicating about hateful incidents such as threatening graffiti.”

Syverud also said that the word of the first instances of graffiti was “not communicated well enough.”

The mea culpa didn’t quiet the uproar. The administration’s messages lacked transparency and didn’t hit the right note, said Mona Lisa Faz, a graduate student in the communications school with an expertise in corporate crisis communications. For example, the university called the incidents “bias incidents” instead of using more-direct language to make clear that they were racist.

“Since when did calling someone the n-word or creating a swastika in the snow ever count as bias?” she wrote in an email to The Chronicle. She called Syverud’s response “a whitewashing and playing down of what is really happening. I get you don’t want to alarm people, but I’m a Latina, and when you play down a hate crime, THAT is alarming to me and my community.”

Franklin Harris, the student at the Mexican restaurant, said administrators should have updated how they communicate to the campus about such incidents. Students have a right to know as soon as possible if, say, racist graffiti appears in their dorm.

“Even with the manifesto freakout, people are saying it wasn’t real,” he says. “I get that. But why did it get that far? It’s because no one heard anything. So what do people do? They start asking each other. That’s how rumors start. So you can’t be shocked that your silence created chatter in the group that’s concerned. They’re going to keep looking for an answer, whether you give it to them or not.”

On Sunday night the university issued a statement delineating its “response to serious and troubling events” of recent days. A university spokeswoman also emailed The Chronicle, acknowledging that Syverud would have preferred that word of the initial graffiti incident be communicated sooner, but pointing out that later notices “compounded the perception of fear and concern” and may have been seized on by the perpetrators or copycats to further fear. The spokeswoman also said the university would catalog future incidents on a webpage accessible to students, parents, and the public.

“If one of these events happened in isolation, it would have been challenging for any university,” she wrote. “We were dealing with a rapid series of events unfolding in real time and misinformation spreading faster than facts.”

A Reputational Hit

The national attention Syracuse is receiving may have lasting consequences.

On Saturday morning, with many students headed home for Thanksgiving, the campus was sparsely populated. In the lobby of the Barnes Center, which two days earlier had been dominated by protesters, Nathan Shnaider sat slumped in a chair after a campus tour with his father.

The high-school senior from the Boston area has friends who are no longer considering Syracuse because of the racial incidents and the administration’s response. He hasn’t crossed the university off his list, but said it had moved down “in the mental hierarchy of colleges” he’s considering, which also includes Babson College, Bentley University, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Shnaider, who is white, said a sense of community is a big factor as he considers a college. The protests showed a strong and supportive student body, he said, but also revealed fears and frustrations among students of color. Like Harris, he said the administration’s communication and its overall response were lacking. “It went on longer than it should have,” he said.

Sitting across from Nathan was his father, Anatoly Shnaider, clad in a puffy Syracuse-orange jacket. He’s an alumnus who put the university on his son’s radar, but now isn’t so sure it would be the best fit.

Among his primary concerns, said the elder Shnaider, who graduated in 1993 with a double major in international relations and Russian, is that his son be in an inclusive and safe environment. News of school shootings weigh heavy on his mind. He read with anxiety the Times story on the reported AirDrop incident.

“I’m glad to hear the manifesto is a hoax,” he said. “That notwithstanding, it doesn’t make me feel comfortable as a parent to hear all these things going on. So Syracuse has dropped on the list. Is it a ‘no’ at this point? No. But we have a lot more to think about than before this hit.”

Vimal Patel covers student life, social mobility and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.