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UND looks into ‘hate incidents’

Joseph Marks Grand Forks Herald
Published Thursday, April 24, 2008

A Jewish UND student moved out of his dorm room in West Residence Hall on
Friday, fearing for his safety after a series of racially-charged
incidents, including a swastika drawn in February with magic marker on the
stairwell of his dorm floor, the student told the Herald on Wednesday.

Fellow students taunted the student for several months with anti-Semitic
slurs and stereotypes, sometimes fueled by alcohol, the student said. And
about a month after the swastika was drawn in the stairwell, someone wrote
“(the student’s name) is a Jew” with ice cream on the steel doors of a
nearby elevator, he said.

“The meaning behind it is strong,” the student said, recounting when he
first saw the swastika. “I’m fortunate that I have all four of my
grandparents. I have friends whose grandparents survived (the Holocaust),
but they still have numbers on their arms. It’s real to me because I’ve
seen it. All those emotions went through me.”

The Herald agreed not to identify the student by name because he said he
feared being singled out on campus.

UND Residence Services along with UND police agreed to investigate the
student’s complaints, he said, but the investigation dragged on for several
weeks, and he wasn’t helped to leave the dorm. Residence Services has told
the student he will have to pay for his dorm room through the remainder of
the semester, he said, because he moved out so late.

In conversations with the student’s father, he said, residence services
staff have called the graffiti a personal dispute because the student
periodically socialized with the students he believes were responsible
earlier in the year. They’ve also said the student partially was at fault
for making self-mocking references to Jewish stereotypes, the student said,
though he denied that he’d made such comments, saying he believes it would
be inappropriate to make such jokes in a majority-gentile environment.

After the ice cream incident, the student said, he spent most of his
remaining month in the dorm holed up in his single room with the door’s
deadbolt locked. On the evening of April 11, several students shot at his
door with a pellet gun, and a student he described as the ringleader
followed him out of his dorm room and shouted obscenities and slurs at him
when he left to take an alcohol compliance test required by a fraternity he
was pledging.

The student has been living in that fraternity’s house since Friday, he
said. The day he left West Hall, he said, he brought along a muscular
friend to help him move and to ward off taunts or attacks.

“They went from words to actions with the swastika and the next step
obviously would be violence,” he said. “They already used the most terrible
symbol and the most terrible words. It was obviously escalating. I felt
terrified to leave my room because what are they going to do to me next.”

Still investigating

UND Police haven’t completed their investigation of the swastika and ice
cream incidents yet, Chief Duane Czapiewski said, but have forwarded a
preliminary report to the Dean of Students Office. Campus police haven’t
determined yet whether there is enough evidence in the case to forward to
the state’s attorney’s office for possible criminal prosecution, he said.

Associate Dean of Students Cara Goodin said Wednesday that the swastika
investigation is still in the hands of Residence Services. A Herald phone
call to Judy Sargent, UND director of residence services, was not returned.

In a statement Wednesday, UND President Charles Kupchella said the “hate
incidents” were “mindless and abhorrent” and that they violated UND’s
community standards.

“These incidents are especially disappointing because such things happen so
rarely on our campus,” he wrote. “Any hurt felt by the targets of these
incidents is shared by all of us who care about each other and UND.”

UND Police are investigating two other hate crime reports, which they don’t
believe are related to the West Hall incidents, Czapiewski said.

The first incident, reported Feb. 25, involved a series of racial slurs,
(none of them directed at Jewish people) written in the elevator in Brannon
Residence Hall. In the third incident, reported Saturday, two swastikas
were drawn with magic marker in Noren Residence Hall, one on a wall and
another beneath an exit sign.

Campus police have interviewed about 200 residence hall students in
connection with those two reports, but have “basically no leads,”
Czapiewski said.

Jack Weinstein, a UND philosophy professor and advisor to the school’s
Jewish Student Organization, said Wednesday he believes the Noren Hall
incident was directed at a JSO member and is related to the West Hall
incident. He said it’s possible Jewish students on campus are being
identified through Facebook and other online networking sites and being
targeted.

Racially-charged events

These incidents also come on the heels of a string of racially-charged
events at UND and other nearby schools.

The UND chapter of the Gamma Phi Beta sorority was put on a yearlong
probation last week for hosting a party where sorority members and guests
dressed in caricatured American Indian clothing and painted their faces and
bodies red.

In late March, less than a week after news of the Gamma Phi party first
became public, North Dakota State University’s Saddle and Sirloin
agriculture club was roundly criticized for a skit they performed at the
school’s Mr. NDSU pageant. In that skit, a white student wore blackface and
an afro wig, portraying Illinois senator and Democratic presidential
candidate Barack Obama, while a female student, dressed as the Web video
personality Obama Girl, gave him a lap dance.

More than 20 swastikas and other racist symbols have been found on the
campus of St. Cloud (Minn.) State University since mid-November.

In a letter to UND administrators, Weinstein linked the West Hall and Noren
Hall swastikas with the Gamma Phi Indian party, suggesting that the UND
administration had compromised its moral authority by defending for so long
the school’s Fighting Sioux nickname and Indian head logo, viewed by many
as a symbol of prejudice.

“This is just the latest of a long series of incidents that makes me ask
whether UND is capable of being a positive and moral force for the future,”
he said in a statement.

“After years and years of creating media-friendly defenses of the logo, it
has become obvious that the institution’s sense of right and wrong has been
warped, its ability to distinguish between victim and perpetrator is
nonexistent, and its sense of what is safe and proper is only defined in
terms of public perceptions.”

UND’s logo was one of about 20 that the NCAA said created a “hostile and
abusive” campus environment in a 2005 policy that required most of those
logos to be retired. UND sued the NCAA over that policy and a November
settlement requires the school to retire the logo in three years if it
cannot win the approval of both of the state’s two Sioux tribes.

Bob Boyd, UND vice president for student and outreach services, said he was
concerned by the string of racially-charged events, but disputed
Weinstein’s claim that university administrators are to blame, or that the
controversy surrounding the school’s logo creates an atmosphere permissive
of racism.

“I find it difficult to relate cause and effect in some of these
circumstances as directly as some people do,” he said. “After
investigation, I’ve generally not seen a direct connection.”

Reach Marks at (701) 780-1105; (800) 477-6572, ext. 105; or send e-mail to
jmarks@....