Reporters Deborah Ziff and Doug Erickson write about the rise in hate crimes on some state campuses. They note how standards for cataloguing incidents vary between schools —
Even on UW campuses, there is variance in what officials interpret as a hate crime.
At UW-Eau Claire, racist graffiti in four bathroom stalls in March, including a threat to kill black people, will be reported as a hate crime, said David Sprick, UW-Eau Claire police chief. Yet an arguably similar instance of graffiti at UW-Stout this fall — “Faggots must die” on a residence hall whiteboard — is so far being classified by the university not as a hate crime, but as a bias incident.
“I think you’ll find some inconsistencies in what people consider a crime and what people consider an incident,” Joan Thomas, UW-Stout dean of students, said adding that the university’s classification on the graffiti incident could change upon further review.
The fluidity is evident at UW-Whitewater, where officials initially called a November incident a hate crime. A female student was shoved and called a derogatory name for a lesbian. Upon further investigation, the incident is not being considered an assault, and, therefore, does not meet the hate crime definition, said Mary Beth Mackin, assistant dean of student life.
And then there’s the case of Meyer, the UW-Whitewater student who was punched. While the act was indeed a hate crime and has been a source of much campus concern, the university will not be reporting it to the federal government because it occurred a couple of blocks off campus, Mackin said.
There’s no obvious answer why these incidents are occurring more frequently —
Campus officials voice puzzlement over what’s driving the outbreak. UW-Stout leaders say they’ve been left to wonder if the poor economy and the nastiness of election-year politics have something to do with it.
That theory — that vitriolic political discourse is giving unstable people a license to lash out violently — doesn’t fly with [director of the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino Brian] Levin. If that were the case, the national numbers would likely reflect it by now, he said.
Sometimes hate crimes follow a period of greater visibility for a particular campus group, such as gay students, said Jack McDevitt, a criminology professor who studies hate crimes at Northeastern University in Boston. Other students, who may be seeing diversity for the first time in their lives, may feel threatened, he said.
It’s nearly impossible to see how the poor economy’s directly to blame, as there would be incidents like this off campus, in other parts of life, far more severely affected by the recession than college campuses (towns that lose factories, etc.). In any event, bad economic times are no excuse for violence, and most people eschew violence even in desperate times.
(Alternatively, one would have to suppose that the recession drove some increment of people who otherwise would have sought work immediately into college programs instead, and that this increment was less socialized than others, and less willing to adjust to a diverse environment. There’s no way to be sure, though, apart from a school’s own review of admissions data. Even then, a clear answer might not be forthcoming.)
Via Questions abound after uptick in hate crimes at university campuses.