Campus ethnoviolence

Ethnoviolence is defined by sociologists Fred Pincus and Howard Ehrlich as the intent to harm another individual because of that person’s membership in a racial or ethnic group. Prejudiced views of that group—views that may range from subscribing to negative stereotypes to group hatred—must be a motivating force in ethnoviolence. Historically, researchers have used the term “ethnicity” to describe race, nationality/national origin, and religion. 

The harm inflicted through ethnoviolence may be psychological or physical, ranging from insults and hate-inspired graffiti to harassment, property damage, and assault. The conditions that breed this particular aggressive discriminatory behavior are summed up by social psychologists John F. Dovidio and Samuel L. Gaertner as simple extensions of commonpractices. First, in a world much too complex to consider every stimulus as a novel, people impose structure by grouping and categorizing their experiences, including other people they encounter. In this process, people sometimes draw large conclusions from small bits of evidence, and bias begins. Second, motivation for control and power over limited resources prompts action. Third, the rules of a culture tell its members what behaviors are acceptable in expressing this bias.

One particular institutional “subculture” where such conditions for bias are especially problematic is a college or university campus. Most research indicates that the number of reported ethnoviolent events and racial tension on campuses increased during the late 1980s and the 1990s. These included an incident at the Citadelwhere cadets dressed in Ku Klux Klan garb entered the room of a sleeping African American cadet, engaged in racially oriented taunting, and burned a newspaper cross in front of him. In another incident, a campus radio station disc jockey at the University of Michigan allowed and encouraged the broadcast of racist jokes. At the University of Mississippi, the first Black fraternity house on a previously all-White fraternity row was gutted by arson. At Stanford University, an initially peaceful protest yielded scrawled racial epithets in a Black student’s dorm room. A series of fliers proclaiming it to be “open season” on numerous minority groups was slipped under doors at Northern Illinois University.

Empirical studies support such anecdotal evidence. Sociologist Susan Hippensteele of the University of Hawaii indicated in a 1998 study that ethnic harassment, reported by 15 percent of a college population at large, was reported by 60 percent of LGBTQ students. Fischer and Hartmann’s 1996 study reported that 44 percent of Black students at Southern Missouri State Universityas opposed to 7.5 percent of White studentshad experienced either racial slurs, written/graphic ethnic insults, or violent activity on campus.

In the twenty-first century, rates of ethnoviolence continued to rise, especially amidst increasingly contentious periods like the Black Lives Matter movement that began in the 2010s and called attention to racism at every level of society, including on college campuses. Data from the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) released in early 2024 revealed that over 4,300 offenses of hate crimes were reported in educational settings, including college campuses, between 2018 and 2022. While 700 hate crimes were reported in 2018, that figure nearly doubled to more than 1,300 in 2022. The report further showed that the groups most affected by hate crimes were Black, LGBTQ, and Jewish students. Though the reporting ended in 2022, many university administrators and campus police reported increases in ethnoviolence against Jewish, Muslim, and Arab students the following year after the breakout of the Israel-Gaza War in October 2023 and speculated that numbers affecting those populations would continue to rise.

Some people suggest that increases in campus ethnoviolence have been the result of a backlash by non-minority students who perceived that students of color received preferential treatment through affirmative action and other programs. Others suggested the number of reports was increasing, not the number of incidents, which could reflect an improvement or greater openness in the campus culture. Some speculated that the rise in reporting was due to high-profile events like when police murdered George Floyda Black manin 2020, which brought increased attention to police brutality and acts of racism and also created a backlash that may have served as motivation for hate crimes. 

The problem of campus ethnoviolence requires a response on at least two levelsthe personal and the institutional level. On an individual level, colleges instituted programs that attend to those directly affected by ethnoviolence. Many, if not most, colleges in North America have created victim advocacy programs. These programs provide considerable assistance to victims who come forward—from arranging access to medical or counseling facilities to making victims aware of their rights and recourses to social support. Hippensteele reports that in their early years, such programs were hampered by perceptions of limited legitimacy by college administrations and that these programs remain limited by low reporting rates.

At the institutional level, the conditions that prompt ethnoviolence need to change. Sociologist Thomas F. Pettigrew outlined several steps that institutions such as colleges may use to promote policies that help defuse the conditions that breed ethnoviolence. First, promoting an attitude of seeing change as inevitable rather than acceptable or desirable seems to foster institutional cooperation and willingness to adopt unfamiliar behaviors. Second, it is necessary to accept that changing behaviors will change attitudes and that behavioral changes must precede attitudinal changes. This process may evolve slowly, but the evidence is clear that strictly enforced socio-behavioral rules, whether formal or informal, not only foster compliance but also have the power to dispel myths—a goal poorly attained by “quick-fix” educational overviews of the cultures of others aimed at changing attitudes first in the expectation that behavioral changes will follow. Third, institutions need to engineer intergroup contact under optimal conditions. This entails, among other things, getting beyond tokenism in student and faculty recruitment and retention and encouraging equal access to campus resources, both formalsuch as librariesand less formalsuch as clubs and fraternities. Finally, of the many emotional mechanisms that foster prejudicial aggressive behaviors, fear may be the most productive emotion to target. Many intergroup fears are born of deliberate or nondeliberate misinformation, lack of contact in conjoint activity, and simple ignorance. Dispelling such fears may help to lessen ethnoviolence by reducing the prejudice and discriminatory behaviors that breed it.

Indeed, colleges cannot be singled out as the predominant source of prejudicial attitudes. They draw students, faculty, and staff from the population at large and are subject to negative societal influences. They are, however, in a unique position to effect change in a society in a microcosm. Such a goal is in keeping with the perception of universities as architects of an improved social future rather than recapitulators of a tarnished past. 

Bibliography

Ehrlich, Howard J. Campus Ethnoviolence and the Policy Options. National Inst. Against Prejudice and Violence, 1990.

Ehrlich, Howard J. Hate Crimes and Ethnoviolence: The History, Current Affairs, and Future of Discrimination in America. Westview, 2009.

Karp, David R., and Thom Allena. Restorative Justice on the College Campus: Promoting Student Growth and Responsibility, and Reawakening the Spirit of Campus Community. C. C. Thomas, 2004.

Leal, Isabela Espadas. "Schools Are Increasingly Locations for Hate Crimes, FBI Data Shows." NBC News, 30 Jan. 2024, www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/schools-are-increasingly-location-hate-crimes-fbi-data-shows-rcna136341. Accessed 2 May 2024.

Levin, Jack, and Jack McDevitt. Hate Crimes Revisited: America's War against Those Who Are Different. Westview, 2002.

Wessler, Stephen, and Margaret Moss. Hate Crimes on Campus: The Problem and Efforts to Confront It. US Dept. of Justice, 2001.