UCI Official Will Address Racism Incident

A top UC Irvine official will meet with students at the campus Cross-Cultural Center on Monday to try and ease tensions over racial epithets that were typed on a library computer, a campus spokeswoman said Saturday.

Horace Mitchell, vice chancellor of student affairs, will discuss Friday’s incident in which an unknown person added extra phrases to a computerized book search and then left a computer printout of the transaction behind.

The library’s Melville computer system is available to anyone, and no trace of the computer user has been found, officials said. Computer terminals are located throughout the facility, on several floors.

Campus spokeswoman Linda Grannell said she did not know who found the printout, which used a racial slur and suggested that blacks were inferior to whites.

Colleen Bentley-Adler, another spokeswoman, said the printout consisted of three pages of recorded book searches.

“Whoever did it just typed in the extra phrases, printed out a record of it, and then either deliberately or accidentally left it behind.”

Grannell and Adler said they knew of no other similar incidents at UCI, even though there are easily accessed computer bulletin boards available.

Stanford University and colleges on the East Coast have had major controversies involving the use of racial epithets via computer bulletin boards, telephone calls and in personal confrontations.