AMHERST — After a slew of racist and bigoted incidents this semester, tensions are high on campus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
“Too often this semester, I have shared with you a message like this, condemning acts of hate,” was how UMass Amherst Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy responded Tuesday after someone wrote slurs and drew a swastika on a student’s dorm door — one of a handful of times when racist or bigoted graffiti has been found on campus.
UMass Amherst doesn’t appear to be alone. A study from the Anti-Defamation League released early this year, for example, found a threefold increase in the number of racist fliers, banners and stickers found on college campuses from 2016 to 2017. On Tuesday, the FBI released its annual report on reported hate crimes, which found a 9 percent increase in Massachusetts between 2016 and 2017.
On campus there is frustration, fear and uncertainty, but there have also been antiracist protests, teach-ins, classes and workshops, according to interviews with students and faculty.
Students on campus Wednesday rushed between buildings, jackets zipped tight against the whipping wind. Many took shelter indoors, crowding common areas. Inside the Student Union, seniors Ahmad Bakrin and Miranda Donohue, both from New York, were chatting and working on their laptops.
“All we get in reaction to these things are emails from administrators, no action,” Bakrin, a political science major, said. But Bakrin said he understands that reaction; it isn’t like he wants the university to increase surveillance on campus, he added.
Donohue, who studies journalism and political science, said she thought the university’s reaction was largely just an attempt to smooth things over with public relations, “when in reality it’s just scary and not OK.”
The two said that they now live off campus, but when they did live on campus they didn’t see the kind of quick and frequent bigoted incidents now happening. Bakrin said he expects it is a teenager wanting to get a rise out of people in the current political climate.
When asked if there has been any organizing on campus against the racism, Bakrin and Donohue said they haven’t seen much pushback. Donohue said some of her friends didn’t even know what she was talking about when she brought up the incidents.
“Indifference kind of breeds these things in the first place,” Bakrin said.
But some organizing has been going on. Union members in the Graduate Employee Organization, or GEO, have been holding weekly meetings to try to build a coalition between graduate students and undergrads.
“At those meetings we are discussing possible ways of trying to create accountability, actually, for the administration to do something,” Prachi Goyal, one of the union’s co-chairs, said.
Students have been receptive, Goyal said, but organizing both graduate and undergraduate students has been difficult because the two groups often run in separate circles.
Another group doing coalition building on campus is the Labor Center, which has been working to strengthen ties with other departments to work on initiatives, programming and possible protests, according to director Cedric de Leon.
“We’re each doing good work on our own, but we’re isolated from one another,” de Leon said.
Currently, GEO is in the process of formulating demands, and working with various groups across campus, fellow GEO co-chair Alyssa Goldstein said.
“One of the struggles that we have is literally to get them to name the problem,” Goldstein said of the university’s administration.
Goldstein said that when someone wrote a racist threat on a bathroom mirror in Melville Hall, university officials initially told residents and resident assistants in the building not to talk about the incident, which was described as a “bias-related incident” in a university email.
The university’s reaction to hate speech and racism was on the minds of Liz Diamond, a junior, and Nick Cummings, a senior, on Wednesday. The two were eating lunch on the lower level of the Campus Center.
“They’re taking steps,” Cummings said. “They should be running at this point, but they are just taking steps here and there.”
Cummings said he has heard of students staying in hotels or staying at home out of fear after some of the recent incidents. He mentioned the protests that students have organized on campus in response.
For Diamond, who works for Residential Life, the question is what can really be done. Extra security cameras make some people feel unsafe, and it can be hard to find out the culprit is.
In 2016, the university rolled out a plan to replace 500 surveillance cameras in dorms after the 2012 rape of a student in her dorm. After several of the recent racist incidents, the university has said police were reviewing security footage.
“The only remedy to bigotry is education,” Diamond said, suggesting that the university should put on more educational events for students.
Education is obviously the university’s primary endeavor, and some departments are using their classrooms as a place for antiracist teaching. The W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, for example, held a widely attended teach-in on racism early last month.
“Many of our students, when they come to our classes, they get to really study the context for why these things have happened in the past and why they’re still happening,” said Stephanie Shonekan, the chair of the department. “I think those conversations, for black and non-black students, are really important points of epiphany, understanding and awareness.”
Shonekan was chairwoman of the Department of Black Studies at the University of Missouri in 2015 during the well-known series of protests there that were sparked by a chain of racist incidents. It was there that she developed a course, “Race and the American Story,” that she will teach next semester at UMass — one of several courses the department will be teaching in light of the climate on campus.
As for reaching the students who commit racist acts on campus, that is a trickier question, Shonekan said. But education can play a role there, too, she said.
“If we continue to teach these kinds of courses, we can get more students to care about these things,” Shonekan said. “We may not reach the rabid racists, but maybe we will reach their friends.”
Beyond education, however, for some students on campus it’s unclear what exactly can be done to address open racism. For those students, the feeling is one of uncertainty.
“Most of the football team is black, so we see it as an attack,” said Darian Green, a freshman football player for the Minutemen.
Green said students of different races had united in protest to show the university that these kinds of attacks can’t happen. But beyond that, he said he was unsure what could be done to prevent racist incidents like the ones seen this semester.
Originally from Los Angeles, Green said he didn’t see many incidents like this back home.
“It’s kind of crazy to me coming over here, being exposed to all this,” he said on his way into the dining commons to eat.
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.