The heated ideological discussions that enrich college life degenerated this year into a campaign of cruel harassment at the University of Chicago.
The actions–including threatening phone calls and letters, damaging posters, a phony ad and vandalism–although not unique to the university, are among the most extreme examples of a trend of intolerance at many campuses across the country.
As a result of the harassment, two U. of C. students–one four days from graduation–were suspended by the university for two years.
Targets of the campaign at the Hyde Park campus–mostly gay students but also including liberal and conservative activists–say it has made them anxious and fearful for their safety and disrupted their families.
Family members of students received anonymous phone calls saying that their sons and daughters were gay and had AIDS. Students received ugly parodies of Christmas cards warning they would ”rot in hell.” Phony posters appeared on campus advertising a ”Kiddie Porn” show sponsored by gays and listed names and phone numbers of gay activists.
The viciousness has hurt the accusers and the accused.
”It is a matter of emotional damage more than anything else,” said the father of Irwin Keller, a gay activist and one of the students harassed.
”It caused many sleepless nights,” the student`s father said. ”We were most concerned about the well-being of our son because that`s what was threatened.”
Gerald Miller, dean of undergraduate students at the University of Maryland, is the father of Russell Miller, who confirmed that he was suspended for his alleged involvement in the harassment.
”I`m saddened both for my son and the university,” the elder Miller said. ”When the final story is played out, my son will be vindicated.”
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Observers find it difficult to pinpoint the reason for increasingly virulent intolerance on U.S. campuses.
John Coatsworth, a history professor at the U. of C., speculates that some conservative students have grown frustrated with their failure to further their cause through responsible journals and have ”become much more activist and provocative.”
This has been aggravated, Coatsworth said, by the campus re-emergence of the Left, particularly in highly visible anti-apartheid activities. Yet, he said, most students are ”apathetic and not politically involved.”
Leonard Zeskind, director of the Center for Democratic Renewal in Atlanta, a group that tracks ”hate activity around the country,” says he saw ”5 to 10 times” as many antiblack and antigay incidents on U.S. campuses during the 1986-87 school year as he did in the year before.
Besides Miller, who was to have received his bachelor`s degree in physics, the university suspended David White, a senior chemistry major.
Miller said he was suspended ”because they said I had knowledge of the harassment.”
Miller and White are also named as defendants in a lawsuit filed May 29 in Cook County Circuit Court by Keller; his roommate, Jonathan Katz; three other students; and Keller`s parents. The suit seeks $10.1 million in damages and alleges infliction of emotional distress by the two suspended seniors and their roommate, Jeffrey Benner, 25, a former university graduate student.
Miller, White and Benner–who write for the Midway Review, an ultra-conservative student newspaper that is one of several such papers on U.S. campuses–deny involvement in the harassment. They have said they were targets and victims, not the instigators, of harassment.
Guy Hoch, an attorney for the Midway Review who represented Miller and White in their university disciplinary hearings, criticized the university proceedings.
”How the university arrived at the certainty they did is a mystery to me,” Hoch said. ”The evidence would not have been sufficient in any court in Cook County.” Hoch said Miller`s appeal of his suspension was denied and White`s appeal is pending.
David Rosen, assistant vice president for public affairs at the university, said the school does not comment on the identities of students involved in disciplinary hearings. He would say only that two new cases had been initiated this spring.
Students say the harassment began in 1984 and that little action was taken by the university until this spring, when it spread off campus.
This is common, said Kevin Berrill, a researcher with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. ”The response of universities to antigay incidents is much more tepid than to incidents triggered by racial or religious bigotry,” Berrill said.
But Rosen denied this, saying that an investigation of the complaints began last October and that President Hanna Gray and the dean of students had met with the ”victims of harassment.” Gray has issued two statements denouncing the harassment, and the dean has set up a 24-hour hot line to assist victims and obtain information for the investigation.
Among the incidents being investigated is a phony personal ad placed in the Reader, a Chicago weekly newspaper, to elicit responses from gay men. After the responses were received, letters exposing the respondents` sexual orientation were sent to their associates.
The letters were signed by a group calling itself The Great White Brotherhood of the Iron Fist. Similar letters signed by the Iron Fist had been sent to associates of more than 150 students and faculty members.
Under court order, the Reader released the phone number and the name Max Wagner, which were used to place the ad. The name was fictitious. According to Robert Dachis, the attorney who brought the suit, the phone number was listed in the name of Benner, who then lived in an apartment with Miller and White.
Benner said in an interview that he and his roommates did not place the Reader ad or receive responses to it. He said the ads were placed by someone trying to frame them. He said residents of the apartment building signed affidavits saying that the name Max Wagner was not on Benner, Miller and White`s mailbox.
But Lynwood Vaughter, a mail carrier who has been assigned to the same Hyde Park route since 1975, told a Tribune reporter that the name Max Wagner was taped to the mailbox for Benner, Miller, and White and that he delivered mail addressed to Wagner to that box.
The name ”just went up there with tape,” Vaughter said, adding that he couldn`t remember when the name first appeared. ”One day it was up and one day it was down. I never thought anything of it. Students come and go.”
Earlier in the school year, gay activists on campus and staff members of the left-leaning Grey City Journal, an arts and politics insert in the Maroon, the official U. of C. student newspaper, began receiving unwanted magazine subscriptions and threatening phone calls.
University officials confirm that they received numerous complaints about harassment from Gideon D`Arcangelo and Stephanie Bacon, Grey City Journal staff members. The incidents included a small fire started with newspapers in their apartment lobby, paint thrown on a Maroon-owned car, crude antigay notices posted in their apartment building and the word ”Die!” scrawled across their mailbox, D`Arcangelo said.
At Christmas, scores of students and faculty members received parodies of holiday cards festooned with skulls and crossbones that read ”Happy Death.” The cards were mailed with no postage and addressed to the Great White Brotherhood of the Iron Fist on a nonexistent street. The intended recipients were listed in the return address.
In April, swastikas were painted on the doors of two campus ministries, including one where a gay student organization met.
In May, Midway Review staff members accused several Maroon writers of making harassing phone calls to their homes. The Maroon staffers were interviewed by university and Chicago police. There was no official action.
Fallout from the harassment included divided families.
One mother, informed by an Iron Fist letter that her daughter was a lesbian, was so upset that she went into seclusion. Another family broke all ties with their gay son.
D`Arcangelo said the harassment against him and Bacon ”made me feel like I had a disease that was making my life miserable and wouldn`t go away.”
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Keller says he has become fearful that he or his roommate, Katz, would be harmed after he received a note with his picture superimposed on a bull`s-eye and his parents received a threatening letter.
”I didn`t leave the house after dark,” Keller said. ”I jumped whenever I heard noise on the porch. I made my lover call before he left work and sat at the window waiting for him to get home safely.”
On the other side, John Hey, the editor of the Midway Review who has written articles in which he states that he is opposed to homosexuality on religious grounds, says that his ”strong stand for traditional morality” has made him the target of several death threats.
”They say they will rape me, and I will get AIDS and die,” Hey said.
”How do I feel? Well, a lot of us conservatives have gotten these threats for years. If you know that all your friends are getting death threats, you don`t take them seriously in terms of fearing for your life. But they are still emotionally disturbing.”
The conservative Midway Review for which Hey, Benner, Miller and White write has received funding from the Washington-based Institute for Educational Affairs. The institute provides money and training for about 40 conservative college newspapers nationwide. It also sells advertising for the group of papers to national advertisers.
But Leslie Lenkowsky, institute president, said the group has not given money to the Midway Review for 18 months. ”A proposal for more funding has been pending for some time,” he said. ”We have been hearing stories about something going on. The paper could lose its funding if its editors were part of the campaign of harassment.”
The Midway Review is not the only such paper embroiled in problems.
On Martin Luther King Day in 1986, Dartmouth College students who were writers and editors of the Dartmouth Review smashed a shantytown that had been set up as part of an anti-apartheid protest on campus. Ten students were suspended for maliciously damaging property and disorderly conduct.