Education: Bigots in The Ivory Tower

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Whoever haunted Sabrina Collins' room in Longstreet Hall had a knack for terror. The black Emory University freshman came home one evening last month to find her teddy bear slashed, her clothes soaked with bleach and NIGGER HANG written in lipstick on the wall. When death threats began arriving in the mail, college officials supplied extra locks and an alarm system. This month, as she got ready to move out, she lifted the rug to find DIE NIGGER DIE written in nail polish on the floor. Sabrina collapsed and was hospitalized for "emotional traumatization."

This naked display of racism is only one example of a general "breakdown in civility" on U.S. campuses. Such is the theme of a report that will be issued this week by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which surveyed American colleges for a year before compiling Campus Life: In Search of Community. Though the report's language is muted and scholarly, its message is loud and clear: the "idyllic vision" of college life "often masks disturbing realities," including racism, sexism, homophobia and anti- Semitism.

Fractured civility, in fact, seems a tepid description of campus behavior that sometimes borders on the barbarous. This past fall, frat members at the University of Mississippi scrawled KKK and WE HATE NIGGERS on the naked bodies of two white pledges and dumped them on the campus of Rust College, a mostly black school nearby. At Bryn Mawr, freshman Christine Rivera found an anonymous note slipped under her door. "Hey Spic," it said, "if you and your kind can't handle the work here, don't blame it on the racial thing . . . why don't you just get out. We'd all be a lot happier." Members of the Hillel Foundation at the University of Kansas found a letter taped to the door. "Jew-Boy get out," it said. "I'm going to burn your Torah."

In the heat of such boiling hatreds, it is hard to sustain any notion of the university as a protected enclave devoted to opening minds and nurturing tolerance. Instead, many campuses seem to distill the free-floating bigotries of American society into a lethal brew. Since 1986, according to the Baltimore-based National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence, more than 250 colleges and universities, including top schools such as Brown, Smith and Stanford, have reported racist incidents ranging from swastikas painted on the walls to violent attacks and death threats.

Virtually every minority group finds itself under fire. For blacks, the trigger is often affirmative action: whatever their backgrounds or abilities, black students may find themselves viewed as beneficiaries of lowered standards. Last fall the University of Virginia accepted more than half the blacks who applied but only one-third of the whites, even though the blacks' average Scholastic Aptitude Test scores were 194 points below the whites'. At a time of rising competition, and with no sense of the past injustice that affirmative action seeks to redress, white students use such statistics as battering rams. "Affirmative action is organized governmental racism against white people," charges Temple University student Michael Spletzer, co-founder of the White Student Union. "Individual merit should be the only criterion."