Racism. Gay bashing. Contempt for another culture.

These acts of intolerance struck UC Davis in the first two weeks of the new academic year, after the swastikas and anti-gay graffiti of last spring.

As Chancellor Linda Katehi said in her convocation address Sept. 22: “Clearly, this campus is not beyond discrimination. Society at large may never be. But we can never stop working to change that.”

Indeed, in the wake of last spring’s incidents, Katehi launched the Hate-Free Campus Initiative. It began quickly with a speakers series, while planning got under way for a much larger effort in 2010-11.

Now, as the initiative picks up steam with the start of fall quarter, UC Davis finds itself dealing with these new incidents:

• Sept. 29 — One or more unidentified people defaced the Third World Mural, on an outside wall on the south side of the Memorial Union, adding the Star of David to a depiction of the Palestinian flag (rendered as a dove).

• Oct. 3 — At about 9:30 p.m. on the Quad, two unidentified men pushed and grabbed two people while yelling abusive comments having to do with race and sexual orientation. Police are investigating the incident as a hate crime.

Hate-free outline for the year

Last spring, in the wake of the intolerance at UC Davis and elsewhere in the UC system, the Board of Regents directed each campus to develop a course of action for responding to incidents of hate and bias. At UC Davis, this task fell to the Campus Council on Community and Diversity — which has come out not onlwith a Campus Action Plan but an outline for the Hate-Free Campus Initiative.

Fliers describing the plan and the initiative outline are due to be distributed during next week’s Activities Fair, scheduled from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Oct. 13 on the Quad. Associate Executive Vice Chancellor Rahim Reed, who heads the Office of Campus Community Relations, said he will address the crowd.
Reed planned to attend an ASUCD meeting the night of Oct. 7, to present the plan and initiative outline, and to ask for student government’s input, support and collaboration in co-sponsoring activities throughout the year. He said he plans to hold similar meetings with fraternity and sorority leadership, and staff and student leaders in the athletics community.

“The Hate-Free Campus Initiative is an effort to proactively engage the entire campus community in activities, programs, trainings and forums designed to confront and stop acts of hate, foster a greater awareness and appreciation of the diversity on our campus, promote civility and respect in our human interactions, and build a more inclusive campus community,” Reed told Dateline by e-mail.

The initiative is in outline form, Reed said, “because we want to invite all members of the various constituent groups in our campus community to contribute ideas, suggestions and proposals for programming under this initiative umbrella.”

The outline already includes the following:

• A Conversation with Moises Kaufman: The State of Hate Crimes and Identity — Kaufman is a co-author of The Laramie Project, about reaction to the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay man killed in 1998 outside Laramie, Wyo. Kaufman’s visit is sponsored by the Hate-Free Campus Initiative and the Campus Community Book Project. Free (no tickets necessary). Noon-2 p.m. Oct. 20, Jackson Hall, Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts. (Bring your lunch, drinks provided.)

• The Said and Unsaid: Reclaiming Civility on Campus — A yearlong effort, thanks to a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, in which four graduate students will use history and art in individual projects that are intended to illuminate the power of the “said” and the “unsaid” in uncivil exchange, while inspiring alternative engagement in the future.

• Hate-Free Campus Distinguished Speakers Series — A continuation of the series that began last spring. The series began April 8 with Jim Leach, chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, who broiught his 50-state "civility tour" to UC Davis; and continued May 5 with Tim Wise, nationally known for his speeches, books and training programs against racism.

The initiative also calls for extensive collaboration with Los Angeles’ Museum of Tolerance on campus workshops, forums and other programs. For example, the university wants the museum to bring its Point of View Café to the Davis and Sacramento campuses.

Other elements of the initiative include the Davis campus’s annual cultural weeks and the Principles of Community Celebration.

Additionally, the university will call upon faculty and staff constituent groups to ask each of them to sponsor a Hate-Free Campus activity or program during the 2010-11 academic year, with funding support from the Office of Campus Community Relations.

Campus Action Plan

The Hate-Free Campus Initiative is but one part of the Campus Action Plan, described as being responsive to incidents of hate and bias, while supporting educational opportunities in furtherance of the Principles of Community.

The plan also calls for the creation of a Rapid Response Team with established protocols for addressing future incidents of hate and bias on the Davis and Sacramento campuses.

Officials said team members will include representatives from Campus Community Relations, Student Affairs and the student community, as well as the health system, Human Resources, campus counsel, Police Department, Administrative and Resource Management, and University Communications.

The team will be responsible for the campus’s initial response, including the preliminary assessment of whether an incident is a hate crime as defined by law and subject to direct referral to police, facilitating and coordinating communications (internal and external), security and safety issues, and building and maintenance concerns.

Reed co-chairs the Rapid Response Team with Griselda Castro, assistant vice chancellor for Student Affairs.

‘A very positive meeting’

Additionally, Reed and Castro are UC Davis’ points of contact for the UC Office of the President’s new Hate and Bias Reporting System. In that capacity, they sent a letter to the campus community last week, after the mural incident.

“As we begin another academic year of promise and challenges, our campus community unfortunately experienced another incident of hate, this time directed at our Arab-Muslim community,” they wrote.

“The UC Davis community prides itself in living our Principles of Community, where freedom of expression is both valued and respected. We will not allow these assaults against our community to go unchallenged.”

Reed and Castro wrote in their letter that they would meet soon with the student community — and that meeting took place Oct. 4 with a group of Palestinian students, at their request.

“It was a very positive meeting and they expressed a desire to work collaboratively with the Jewish community in proactive, educational, collaborative programs throughout the year,” Castro said.