Skidmore College's Not On Our Campus campaign stickers and pledge card remind students to speak out against intolerance, and to help make their school a model of acceptance and diversity. The campaign was launched in 2006 in response to hate messages and graffiti that were left in campus dorms.
not on our campus
At one of the most diverse campuses in the nation, UC Riverside’s Hate/Bias Response Team has worked for the past three years toward creating a hate-free campus community. Made up of students, faculty, and representatives from a number of student services programs, the HBRT supports victims of hate incidents and hate crimes, and educates the campus about what hate crimes are and what students can do to fight against them.
Started in the summer of 2006, the HBRT convened to develop protocols for campus reporting of hate crimes and hate incidents. Student Development Educator and HBRT member Jen Miller said, “There wasn’t an event that got us started, a lot of people often think that we’re responding to some thing that happened. Instead, we wanted to be proactive and have students be aware of these resources.”
Besides creating and publicizing the protocols for reporting, the HBRT also helps organize to address larger bias incidents at UC-Riverside. One of the more common situations the HBRT deals with is when hate speakers come to campus. Protected under the university’s free speech policies, hate speakers, who mostly come from outside the school, have been allowed to engage in homophobic, sexist, and other intolerant speech. To counter these speakers, the HBRT hands out handbills describing steps students can take to protest, including ways to organize positive campaigns in response.
As a Resident Assistant (RA) at Okada, Stanford’s Asian American ethnic-themed dorm, Takeo Rivera helped raise awareness about campus acts of intolerance after his dorm was the subject of an anti-Asian backlash in the spring of 2007.
Here’s some excerpts from the interview.
These predominantly white fraternities would pass by Okada and would shout various things. They would shout in mock Asian accents things like “F— Okada,” Azia Kim this, Azia Kim that. Each time I would sort of pursue them and tell them to disperse and eventually they would. And in this third incident, someone urinated on the lawn of the dorm and someone shouted, “Put that away, they don’t want to see any non-Asian (expletive) here.” I was able to recognize specific individuals in the group and I knew what fraternity they belonged to, so I was able to pursue that further. The problem, though, was that at Stanford, while we have sort of a working definition for acts of intolerance, there was no protocol to follow at the time, procedurally, to confront these acts of intolerance.
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