Virginia exposes threat for college campuses
BOSTON — On college campuses, white supremacists and other far-right extremist groups see fertile ground to spread their messages and recruit followers. But for many colleges, last weekend’s deadly attack at a rally near the University of Virginia exposed a new threat.
The rally in Charlottesville left universities across the U.S. bracing for more clashes between extremists and the protesters who oppose them. It also left schools in an increasingly tight bind as they try to ensure campus safety in the face of recruiting efforts by white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups that have escalated beyond campus flyers and online messages, and to balance that with freedom of speech.
“People are getting more and more willing to go to the streets,” said Sue Riseling, a former police chief at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is executive director of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators. “It seems like what might have been a little in the shadows has come into full sun, and now it’s out there and exposed for everyone to see.”
On the eve of Saturday’s rally, young white men wearing khakis and white polo shirts marched through the University of Virginia’s campus, holding torches as they chanted racist and antiSemitic slogans. The next morning, many donned helmets and shields and clashed with counterprotesters before a car drove into the crowd, killing a 32-year-old woman and injuring 19 others.
Far-right groups have promised that more rallies will follow. On Monday, Texas A&M University canceled plans for a “White Lives Matter” rally in September. Two days later, the University of Florida denied a request for white nationalist Richard Spencer to rent space on campus for a September event. Spencer and his supporters are promising court challenges.
As colleges wonder which campus will be next, Riseling’s group is organizing a series of training events in October to help campus police prepare.
“If you’re sitting on a campus where this hasn’t happened, consider this your wake-up call that it might,” she said.
Last school year, racist flyers popped up on college campuses at a rate that experts called unprecedented. The AntiDefamation League counted 161 white supremacist “flyering incidents” on 110 college campuses between September and June. Oren Segal, director of the group’s Center on Extremism, said the culprits can’t be dismissed as harmless trolls.
“You might have a few that don’t take it seriously. But those that do, those are the ones we’re concerned about,” Segal said.
Matthew Heimbach, the 26-year-old leader of the white nationalist Traditionalist Worker Party, admits that dropping leaflets on campuses is a cheap way to generate media coverage.
“A dollar worth of paper, if it triggers the right person, can become $100,000 in media attention,” he said.
As a student at Towson University in Maryland, Heimbach made headlines for forming a “White Student Union” — a group the school refused to formally recognize — and for scrawling messages like “white pride” in chalk on campus sidewalks. His college years are behind him, but Heimbach still views colleges as promising venues to expand his group’s ranks. College students are running four of his group’s chapters, he said.