SC and Its Neighbors--Tension

Terry Bayliss said it was a day of awakening for an 18-year-old boy out of Springfield, Ore. He caught his first glimpse of the University of Southern California from the window of an airport shuttle bus. And when he got off the shuttle, he got his first glimpse of South-Central Los Angeles.

“The first day I got here, I was dropped off at the University Hilton across the street and I was immediately accosted by two men asking me for money,” said Bayliss, now a 20-year-old junior at the university. “And I remember walking through the (school) gate--and feeling safe.”

It was different for John Singleton, a USC student who grew up in the shadow of the university. He remembers wearing the Trojan emblem on his jacket, attending the school’s camp for underprivileged youth, even taking classes at the Museum of Science and Industry right across the street--but he never dared walk through that gate.

‘Out of Reach’

“When I used to hang around the museum . . . I would look across and see USC,” said Singleton, 21. “But I never set foot on the campus until I started going here. I thought it was too far out of my reach. It was alien . . . like an island.”

In the midst of modest homes, graffiti-scarred storefronts and run-down apartment houses sits USC--an imposing 150-acre anomaly with 30,000 students.

In the best of times the low-income largely minority area and the wealthy university are neighbors who coexist peacefully, looking at one another with a mixture of interest and indifference.

But in the wake of such incidents as a string of campus rapes last fall and the shooting of a 21-year-old USC student last month, the relationship between the university and its neighbors has often become strained.

Students hear rumors floating down fraternity row that gangs are targeting students, and taunts from friends that they go to college in a crime-filled ghetto.

The neighbors have their own worries, fears of crime, anger that the picture of violence in the area is blown out of proportion, and the feeling by many that whenever a USC student is the victim of a crime, the whole community becomes suspect.

For the last two years, the university has been implementing programs that Alvin Rudisill, the school’s associate vice president for community relations, calls “the most substantial, significant and serious steps” it has ever taken to improve relations between the community and the university. For example, members of the university and community started a United Neighborhood Council last year to improve communications.

Security measures on the inner-city campus are already stringent. Besides 131 security officers, the university has 40 escorts to walk and drive students on and off campus. In fact, violent crimes committed against students have decreased since 1987, according to campus security; robberies declined 44% and assaults with deadly weapons dropped 15%.

Last month’s attack was the first shooting of a USC student in nearly a decade, according to police.

Other Problems

The tensions between the university and its neighbors extend beyond crime and race. Some longtime residents fear that the university is taking over the community through expansion and that more attention is paid to its concerns than to the community’s.

Last week, not long after Kimberly Warfield was shot in the back as she entered her university-owned apartment house, students could be seen riding their bikes down Jefferson Boulevard at night and dining with community residents at yogurt shops and restaurants along Figueroa.

“You can’t go to school everyday and be scared to death,” said Alan Hoffman, 20, who lives with Bayliss in the apartment building in which Warfield was shot.

Some students say there is an unofficially designated safety zone, beyond which they do not dare venture alone. “Between 28th Street and the campus is basically where you stay,” said Julie Pritchess, a 20-year-old sophomore at the university. “Any other time you’re off campus, you’re headed for the freeway.”

Says Hoffman: “You could say I’m afraid (of the community). . . . This university is an island in the middle of crime and poverty. . . . They (recruiters) said USC is in a downtown area and you had to be careful. What they didn’t say is you have to walk around looking over your shoulder, that if you’re a female you (can’t) go out at night, that your downstairs neighbor is going to be shot.”

However, despite the fact that USC is located in the police division with the third highest crime rate in the city, people who live nearby, including gang members, are not necessarily the culprits in crimes committed against students, according to university security officials. “With any university, whether it’s UCLA, Cal State L.A. or USC, you’re concentrating victims in one area and people who commit crimes are going to be attracted to those areas,” said Lt. Jim Kenady, who added that gang members usually target each other and not students.

But according to some of those living near the university, the actions of law enforcement officials speak for themselves. After serious crimes, they said they feel suspect.

“Some people feel a little resentment toward the school because whenever there is a problem at the college, most of the time the perpetrator is (believed to be) black,” said Ann Hudson, who has lived in an apartment near the university for 14 years. “Well you’ve got a lot of black people in this community and when something happens, the whole community is scrutinized.”

“You’re stigmatized,” Lucille B. Romain said, adding that she believes such generalizations result because the university and its students have not tried to get to know their neighbors. In short, she said, “the campus is not part of the community.”

“The students could care less because their future is not here,” said Romain, who has lived six blocks from the university for 17 years, and is part of a joint USC-community council designed to improve relations. “They have the attitude, ‘I may live near you but I don’t have to like you, I don’t have to be your friend.’ ”

She says she sees that attitude every time she goes on campus. “They just don’t welcome you. When I walk the track they stare like ‘what are you doing here.’ You just don’t feel you belong there.”

Hoffman agreed. “I think students from the university tend to look through the people in the community, like they’re not even there. They try to ignore anybody who is not obviously an affluent USC student.”

University officials, citing various student volunteer groups and activities, contend that the students who look down upon and fear the community are the exception. “Many in our society are afraid of differences in people, and in part we are talking about differences that relate to race and socioeconomic experience that some USC students are having for the first time,” said Dr. Jim Dennis, USC’s vice president of student affairs. “But most find our neighbors have many of the same concerns, anxieties and aspirations that they do and (want to) work hard with the community to make it better.”

Source of Inspiration

And sometimes, the students and their neighbors even find inspiration in one another.

“Some of the most intense and valued friendships I’ve made are with my neighbors,” said Philip Clement, 23, Student Senate president who lives six blocks away from campus in housing that is not university owned. “I’ve met first-generation immigrants from El Salvador and Mexico and they’ve been inspiring to me in what they’ve done and what they are trying to do.”

Ricardo Martinez, a 41-year-old unemployed caterer, lives a five-minute walk away from the university and walks there often.

“I see what USC gives to us (in the community) if we want to get it,” says Martinez, who sends two of his children to the 32nd Street-USC magnet school. “I go there and the students are friendly. . . . They treat me like I’m somebody. The school is an inspiration.”

There are complaints by some that it is hard to grow up near a university where many community residents could never afford to send their children. “That’s a hell of a thing,” said neighborhood activist Leon Watkins. Neighborhood children “go to the football games. They identify with the Trojans and (many) want to go there.” But not many do.

Martinez says the fact that the university is there is what can make neighborhood children, like his own, even more determined to go to college.

Many a day, said Martinez, he dons his USC cap, walks down the middle of the campus, and dreams. “I think to myself, if I could be born again, renew my life, I’d be one of these students. . . . I’m glad to live in this neighborhood, near this university. I hope one day my kids are going to be there.”