Chapman to Hire Officer to Tackle Campus Bigotry

Chapman College President Allen E. Koenig, expressing concern Friday about incidents of ethnic and religious bigotry on campus in recent months, said the college plans to hire an affirmative-action officer later this year to deal with intolerance toward minority groups.

Chapman College is a private, four-year institution affiliated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). It has about 2,200 students on its Orange campus and about 5,000 students at off-campus centers in 11 states and several foreign countries.

A breakdown of Chapman students’ racial and religious backgrounds was not immediately available Friday, but the Orange campus is predominantly white and Protestant.

Koenig, who is a Roman Catholic, declined to give many specifics about the incidents on the Orange campus.

“They involved matters of color and anti-Semitism,” he said. He added that none of the incidents involved confrontations, threats or clashes.

“There have been some remarks made, and some things that have been posted, such as signs and posters, that are bigoted,” he said. “There have been enough of these incidents to become of concern to me and to a number of faculty members. Further, we can’t look at this in isolation. This is a general problem of higher education on a national basis. Therefore, I want us to be on top of this and not wait until we get into a serious incident.”

Koenig recently wrote an open letter addressed to the “campus community” in which he said he wanted to discuss “racism on campus.”

In that letter, Koenig said: “Over the past year or so, Chapman College, like colleges and universities across the country, has been quietly undergoing a slowly rising tide of racial incidents. . . . I must state that when violations involve bias on the basis of skin color, religion, national origin, gender or sexual orientation, I find them to be particularly vile.”

Koenig said in his open letter that he was taking three actions to combat racial and religious incidents.

“First, I will be asking the chairs and members of all review boards--faculty, student and staff--to take the strongest possible actions when proven violations of this sort are determined,” Koenig said.

The second action, he said, would be to hire an affirmative-action officer. That new administrator, who will be hired this summer, will “serve as ombudsman for the entire Chapman community on matters of social justice, with full power to investigate violations, in letter and in spirit, of the rules and ideals of this school,” Koenig’s letter said.

Koenig said the new administrator also will help with minority recruitment, both for new faculty and incoming students.

A third step, Koenig said, was to appoint an Interim Affirmative Action Committee of faculty members pending the hiring of the affirmative-action administrator.

Koenig, who formerly headed Emerson College in Boston, Mass., became president of Chapman on Oct. 1.