In The News

January 30, 2003

Racial harassment persists on campus

By Paul May
Norwich Guidon Staff Writer

"One night I was sitting in my room playing a video game when the phone rang," Roy Rose said. "I pick up the phone, and on the other end of it I heard words and saying what I thought I would never have heard from a place like this."

Down the hall, in another building, about 20 minutes before this phone call, another student was sitting in his room with a friend.

"We were just talking and studying some when the phone rang," Edward Sulton'El said. "Not thinking anything of it, I answer it and said hello. At the other end of the phone came this voice stating that he was with a group that hates my family."

Rose is an 18-year-old freshman business major from San Antonio, Tex. Sulton'El is a 20-year-old junior communication major from Newtonville, NJ. Why were both men targeted for harassment? Simply because they are black.

According to Karin Pelletier, Title IX and equal opportunity coordinator at Norwich, every semester two or three minority students at Norwich receive harassing phone calls, e-mail, and letters.

"Remember that these numbers are the ones that have been reported to this office," Pelletier said.

President Richard W. Schneider stated that these crimes would not be tolerated at the university.

"Harassing phone calls, letters, and e-mail have no place at Norwich," Schneider said. "We will prosecute to the fullest extend of the law and administratively anybody caught doing this. It is absolutely against what our guiding values of Norwich are."

For Sulton'El, the phone call was the first time he had been the target of racial harassment since coming to Noriwch.

"I have been here for three years, and I have never got a phone call like this before," Sulton'El said, "Nor have I ever been in a position like this here at Norwich."

Rose found it hard to believe something like this could happen.

"I find it hard to believe that people in this day and age still have these feelings about minorities," Rose said.

"RESPECT for others is a corner stone of this place," Schneider said. "American military people died to defend our freedoms, and that's the freedoms of everyone. I'm just so heartsick for these students. First, it's not fair to them. Second, the people who made these harassing phone calls do not represent any of us as far as I am concerned."

Several faculty members were outraged to hear about the harassment.

One, Prof. Michel Kabay of the Information Assurance department, sympathized with the target minority students. Kabay, a native of Montreal, Canada, said he had faced some harassment when he was a student, as well, for being a French-speaking student at an all English-speaking school.

Now a professor, Kabay is a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, NAACP, despite the fact that he is white. Kabay said it is because, regardless of skin color, he nonetheless considers himself a minority.

"When I think of black folks, Chicanos, and Vietnamese immigrants and First Nations people and Irish immigrants and Latvians and Poles, Indonesians and Indians (from India) who live in America, I think of 'us,' not 'them.'" Kabay said.

"We need to support all of our students," Schneider said. "Both our minority students and women. This is an issue that we need to be constantly vigilant about. It only takes one person to really upset everyone, but this behavior does not show an intellectual community in America in the year 2003."

Professor Kabay said he is pushing for the establishment of a student-run chapter of the NAACP at Norwich. He said he feels that the best way to fight racism and harassment is to bring it out in the open.

"This is a cowardly act done by a coward or a group of cowards who don't want to be known," Schneider said. "If they are known, they will be disciplined. They have a warped view of life, warped values. Not Norwich values. And we don't want any part of them here and won't tolerate it."

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