History
Hate crimes have been a central aspect of student experiences on this campus since its founding. Racially motivated harassment and violence has an extensive history that only became noteworthy relatively recently in the college’s history due a changing political environment, and largely, student activism in response to on-campus threats of violence. In the past 4 years, two student-compiled reports have documented the limited number of these acts against students based on a wide range of biases that have received attention in student press or been preserved in campus archives ( link coming soon and here). Incidents mentioned in these documents date back as far as 1986.
While recognizing the important achievements of the Diversity Steering Committee, including a revamped non-discrimination policy and a number of statements on diversity that have been adopted as policy, the College to date has not yet adopted protocols for dealing with hate informed incidents in a way that would ensure that they are handled well. Many institutions have such protocols (see for example here, here, here, here, here, here).
In Professor Irene (Tinker) Powell’s report to President Osgood and (then) Dean of the College Jim Swartz from her 1999-2000 Fellowship of the American Council on Education, exactly such a policy was proposed (here, pg 10), yet nothing came of this recommendation.
Hate Crime Response, 2005 and 2008-2009
A turning point came in 2005, when anti-semitic hate crimes on campus. This episode launched the Hate-Free Grinnell movement, whose signs are still a common feature on campus today.
Most recently, in the Spring of 2008 a series of hate crimes targeting students based on their perceived sexual orientation rocked campus (see here, here, and here). Although campus response was overwhelmingly supportive, lasting changes have yet to be implemented. In spite of the unanimous passage by SGA of a community resolution in response to the hate crimes that called for the formation of a student, faculty, staff and administrator committee to address hate and hate informed violence on campus, such a panel was never convened.
At a panel discussion in commemoration of the 1 year anniversary of these events on Monday, March 2nd 2009, Student Affairs administrators stated that writing and implementing hate crime response procedures is a goal that they have for this year.
Our Demands
We demand an official and comprehensive Hate Crimes Response Policy for Grinnell College that includes both response procedures and ongoing preventative action be written with extensive student input, to be implemented by May 1st, 2009.
This should include both response procedures, including such topics as:
- victim rights
- information dissemination
- student safety
- student advocacy
- counseling services
- campus education
As well as ongoing preventative actions such as:
- NSO programming
- support of ongoing peer education like the AJust Grinnell Program
- extensive training for Student Staff, RLC’s, Faculty, Staff and Administrators
Summary
We demand an official and comprehensive Hate Crimes Response Policy for Grinnell College that includes both response procedures and ongoing preventative action
