Anti-Semitic vandalism and white-nationalist propaganda are on the rise at colleges nationally, according to a recent report by the Anti-Defamation League. And in recent weeks, bomb threats at Jewish community centers and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries have been followed by a series of culture-war clashes on college campuses. Here is a collection of the latest reports detailing such incidents.
This roundup continues coverage begun in November, after the presidential election. Organizations that track hate crimes, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, have seen a rise in reports of hate crimes since then.
Some of the episodes, on campuses and off, involved references to President Trump, who in a speech last month to the U.S. Congress denounced such incidents. “While we may be a nation divided on policies,” he said, “we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all of its very ugly forms.”
Here’s the latest report:
March 15, 2017
A police dispatcher at the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse asserted on Tuesday that she had been fired for supporting President Trump. The university’s chancellor, Joe Gow, denied letting the employee go based on her politics.
At Barnard College, in New York, unknown vandals last week defaced signs promoting a visit to its affiliated campus, Columbia University, by the controversial sociologist Charles A. Murray. Alli Cooke, a spokeswoman for Barnard, confirmed the posters had been defaced. The College Fix posted images of what it said were the defaced posters. In one image, someone wrote “White Supremacist” across Mr. Murray’s forehead. His appearance earlier this month at Middlebury College drew a violent reaction.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that someone had posted “white supremacist” signs at George Washington University. The signs, which featured white people and stated that “America is a white nation,” angered some people on the campus.
More white-supremacist posters were also reported, on Monday, at the University of Maryland at College Park. Campus police officers said they were reviewing security-camera footage in search of the perpetrators, according to The Washington Post.
The police arrested a man on Monday in California in connection to swastikas and the N-words that were carved into Orange Coast College security vehicles, reports the Los Angeles Times. Meanwhile, The Orange County Register reported that someone had vandalized several of the college’s buildings with graffiti that described some members of the campus’ chapter of the College Republicans as “fascists.”
Students at another Southern California institution, Pitzer College, recently suffered “harassment and threats from people off campus,” the Associated Press reported on Monday. The harassment was tied to an art exhibit by Latino students that touched on the cultural appropriation with the statement “White Girl, Take OFF your hoops.” That referred to Latina students’ fondness for hoop earrings and the idea that white students were perhaps unfairly coopting the style.
Meanwhile, at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law, a Jewish symbol on a student’s front door was partly burned by a vandal, reports the San Francisco Chronicle, and police officers are investigating. The campus’s chancellor said the incident appeared to be “a cowardly act of anti-Semitism.”
March 7, 2017
The San Diego Union-Tribune reported on Monday that University of San Diego personnel in the past month had discovered swastikas posted in a campus bathroom. And a Jewish professor at the university recently told the newspaper that someone had left human feces on his front lawn following the election of President Trump.
Officials at Texas State University on Friday found and removed a collection of white-nationalist posters found on the San Marcos campus, according to the Austin American-Statesman. After the election, a series of pro-Trump signs popped up around the university that threatened the “arrest and torture” of “deviant university leaders.”
Also on Friday, Middlebury College saw a protest over a controversial speaker — Charles A. Murray, whose 1994 book suggested that genetics could at least in part explain the achievement gap between black and white students — turn violent. That scuffle left one professor injured and created a slew of headlines for the Vermont college.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported on March 2 that the police had arrested a University of California at Berkeley student in connection with the vandalism of a Republican student group’s sign. The same group posted video on March 1 of someone destroying their promotional material on the campus.
In the City of Berkeley, a pro-Trump rally on Saturday turned violent following conflict between protesters and supporters of the president, according to The Washington Post. At least 10 people were arrested, and seven were injured, according to the police. The month before, a protest of the controversial speaker Milo Yiannopoulos was canceled following riotous protests on the campus.
On February 27, the police at the University of Missouri at Columbia arrested two students in connection with harassing anti-Semitic comments made toward another student, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
