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Rise Up

Howard K. Clery III, executive director of the nonprofit Security on Campus Inc., (see Resources) says multiply by a factor of four. That means every day of the year, between three and five hate crimes occur on U.S. college campuses.

More common than hate crimes are bias incidents, situations that aren't crimes but still can have the same negative and divisive effects.

The Prejudice Institute in Baltimore has studied what it calls campus ethno-violence for more than 15 years on more than 40 college campuses. Ethno-violence includes racially and ethnically motivated name-calling, threatening emails and telephone calls, verbal aggression and other forms of psychological intimidation.

Institute Director Howard J. Ehrlich estimates that between 850,000 and 1 million students — fully one-quarter of the minority community and up to 5 percent of the white community — are targets of ethno-violence in any given year on the nation's college campuses.

"And those are conservative estimates," Ehrlich said, adding that his numbers don't include bias incidents targeting gays and lesbians or people with disabilities.

So prevalent are such slurs that Stephen L. Wessler, director of the Center for Prevention of Hate Violence, (see Resources) calls them "the background noise" of students' lives.

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