Brown Harassment Continues

Incidents of racial harassment are continuing to escalate at Brown University, despite President Vartan Gregorian's pledge Saturday to expel students involved in the attacks.

During the past few days, several minority students have received harassing telephone calls in their rooms, said John M. Robinson, Brown's dean of student life. In addition, the parents of one student were called late at night and told their son was a "nigger-lover," Robinson said.

The latest incidents come after a week in which a first-year dormitory was rocked by a wave of racist posters and graffiti, one of which urged students to join the white-supremacist Ku Klux Klan.

"Keep white supremecy [sic] alive!!!" the flyer reads. "Join the Brown chapter of the KKK today."

Although The Brown Daily Herald yesterday reported that a Klan leader claimed to have had several conversations with Brown students over the last three weeks, Robinson said yesterday that he does not believe the Klan is involved.

"If I were in the Ku Klux Klan over in Connecticut and someone called and asked me that, I'd probably say what he said," said Robinson.

But junior John E. Churchville, who said on Sunday that he thought the posters and graffiti were the work of a single student and not the Klan, said yesterday that the string of phone calls had made him less sure.

Churchville, who is Black, said that the type of activities that had occurred seemed to point to a large organization.

"I'm not really caught up in the issue of whether there is actually a chapter of the Klan here," Churchville said. "The issue is that there are Klan-type activities going on here."

According to residents of West Andrews Hall, racist and homophobic graffiti began appearing more than two weeks ago in a freshpreson entryway.

On Saturday, Gregorian made a surprise appearance at a meeting between students and administrators and promised "to prosecute vigorously and to expel immediately such individual or individuals for any attempt to inject or promote racism."

And Saturday night, Robinson and three other Brown deans spent the night in West Andrews to reassure students that the university was taking action.

Brown police Capt. Dennis L. Boucher said that the police were not sure how many people were involved in the postering or the phone calls. Although he said the department has received several reports of telephone harassment, he said that the calls were not all racially motivated.

He added that the calls were not necessarily linked to the posters or the graffitti.