The Badger Herald: Opinion: Students must speak out against hate

Opinion

Students must speak out against hate

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By Badger Herald Editorial Board
Tuesday, October 22, 2002 12:00 a.m.

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Campus climate at the University of Wisconsin is far from perfect. The latest evidence: last week’s news that racial slurs were written on a Witte hallway and the subsequent reaction.

In the middle of the week, a student came forth and said he had been the target of racial slurs. To alert the other students in Witte, he sent an e-mail explaining the incident. A series of student forums followed, organized by Witte residents, discussing diversity on campus and how students can work toward providing a more welcoming campus for people of every background.

The university, meanwhile, took a limited role in dealing with the incident, meeting with the student and a multicultural student group after a professor alerted provost Peter Spear to what had happened. Spear said when he met with the group of students they told him this incident is definitely not isolated. On the contrary; harassment happens more often than students think — it just goes unreported.

Spear and the administration are ill-equipped to handle racially incited conflicts. One consequence of harassment can be the silence commonly associated with sexual assault: Victims become too subjugated by fear and insecurity to seek official redress. Naturally, this puts the institutional authority in a difficult spot — in this case, an unreliable one — so students ought to take the initiative to combat incidence of racial animosity when and where it occurs.

A current university program called Speak Up, designed as a means to enable students to alert authorities to racial harassment and other disturbing circumstances, accomplishes little. Callers are allowed to remain anonymous, leaving the university virtually powerless to investigate further without that contact information or more evidence.

Many victims are too embarrassed or intimidated to reveal their names, but students and faculty should also be free from extraneous anonymous allegations. It would hard to imagine administrators instituting a more thorough and effective program at the same time as they ensure that both victim and accused retain their rights.

That leaves students with the responsibility of promoting tolerance and reproaching insular behavior. Confront those who demonstrate racial ignorance. Take time to educate and learn about one another.

But the best thing students can do to combat the climate of divisiveness that exists is speak openly about these issues. Constant public discourse serves as a reminder and reprimand about racial conflicts at large. Be vocal about incidents of discrimination, harassment, hatred, violence or whatever form those conflicts assume, so that the community can tackle a climate of racial intolerance with a climate of popular understanding.

The Dean of Students office, potentially the most effective authority in addressing incidents and providing programming to facilitate student mobilization, has been vacant for months and in disarray for several years. Hopefully, the Nov. 1 arrival of new dean Luoluo Hong will provide students this kind of leadership on a fundamental climate concern.

In the meantime, students should accept the obligation and power of leading the campus body in a responsible direction toward building a welcoming diversity.