White Student Unions Add to Campus Divisions

Another hot night is closing in on Mark Wright. Outside his apartment at a complex for married students at the University of Florida, black parents are coaxing their children indoors from the swimming pool. He can hear neighbors bid good night in Spanish.

Mark Wright lives here, but he is not one of them.

“I guess we’re the last group to say we’re a victim,” said Wright, a 23-year-old engineering student who is inching his way out of the working class. Apart from the worry that pinches his face and a stomach ache that could be the start of an ulcer, Wright appears to have nothing to complain about. But he does.

His problem, he says, is that he is white.

That’s why he formed the White Student Union.

“Americans are notorious for their shortsightedness. When we (whites) become minorities, the belief systems will be entrenched for discriminating against whites,” said Wright, fingering a white and blue bumper sticker from the U.S. Senate campaign of David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader turned Louisiana legislator.

“A lot of whites like me don’t make it here,” he said. “We’re fighting for white civil rights.”

A small but growing movement, white student unions are another sliver in the fragmenting of campus life in the United States.

The backdrop to the movement is the contemporary college campus, no longer dominated by white men. It reflects the nation’s racial and ethnic mix. In California, for instance, it’s easy to find four-year colleges where Caucasian describes just half the student body, if that. Among such schools are UCLA, UC Berkeley and Cal Poly Pomona.

One result is an array of student unions and associations formed along racial and ethnic lines. African Americans, American Indians, Latinos, Asian-Americans, Filipinos and Pacific Asians are some who find strength by banding together. Besides the social benefits of such unions, students who align themselves this way find a new identity, asking for more instructors and a curriculum that teaches them about their particular heritage.

It is the first time many stop feeling like an invisible minority and start taking pride in an identity.

These groups follow an older tradition of students forming religious alliances, such as Newman centers for Roman Catholics and Hillel clubs for Jews.

The current fragmenting alarms educators. But there is good news on campus, too. Many college students of all colors and backgrounds are finding common ground in a new enthusiasm for volunteer projects. Students are finding that, in helping others, they are helping each other scale high social walls.

Though white student unions so far have raised more derision than members, the groups are staking a claim in the collegiate mainstream. At least two unions, at the University of Florida and at Temple University in Philadelphia, are officially registered as student activities, though the Temple group seems to have disappeared from campus.

White unions are also forming at Suffolk University in Boston, the University of Southwestern Louisiana, Tulane University and the University of New Orleans. The would-be founder at New Orleans is Howie Farrell Jr., the son of David Duke’s campaign manager.

Their stated purpose is opposing affirmative-action policies as unfair and unnecessary, and saving what they call “white culture.”

Whites are the new losers, they say.

Critics call them racist. Others find their claims of anti-white oppression ludicrous.

But if they are chastised as bigots, white student unions should not be dismissed as some silly fringe, observers and educators say, since they express resentment of quotas, financial aid and scholarships they claim favor blacks and other minorities.

“White student unions are indicative of a larger problem,” said Leonard Zeskind, research director for the Center for Democratic Renewal, which tracks and responds to hate groups.

“The real cause for concern is that certain elements of the next generation of young whites will not have a commitment to racial justice and political pluralism and democratic values,” he said.

It is worrisome, Zeskind added, that the founders of white student unions are those who will be in the professional ranks.

Take Stephen Heaslip, a 20-year-old junior at Suffolk University who is considering a law career. He is organizing a white student union at the private Boston school.

“I got the idea from reading our school newspaper, which had a lot of racially based articles,” Heaslip said. “Black this, black that. I’d see in the paper, you’d have to be a minority to get (certain) scholarships. That brought about feelings I was being discriminated against because I’m white.

“There’s been discrimination against blacks and Jews and Irish,” Heaslip said. “But this is government-mandated racism.”

Mutual aid and comfort has another side to it, said Reginald Wilson, senior scholar at the American Council on Education and an expert on minorities in higher education.

“It serves a purpose of raising pride, and then it can reach a xenophobic point,” he said. “Not a pride in who you are, but rejecting who you ain’t.”

He pointed out that the present course of equal opportunity was set in a time of economic optimism.

“In the ‘60s the economy was expanding and colleges were opening up and more spaces were created in universities. Nearly 800 campuses were built in a 20-year span. Higher education was bursting all over the place,” Wilson said.

New laws demanded an end to bias in admissions and in the hiring of minorities when they graduated.

Today, higher education costs more. No one is building colleges, and competition for existing places in college is fierce.

“We could be heading back into an era where there would be very serious conflict on campus,” Wilson said.

That conflict sometimes evolves into violence.

A black fraternity is burned to the ground at the University of Mississippi; the American Indian community council president at Macalester College in Minnesota receives hate mail; the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor is the scene of protests and violence between Arabs and Jews over the issues of Zionism, anti-Semitism and Palestinian rights; a laundry ticket is tacked to the bulletin board used by a club for Asian-Pacific law students at New York University.

Even at its most benign, today’s campus is a place of cliques and special-interest groups.

Noting this trend, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching issued a special report this year about the growing ethnic and racial fragmentation on campuses.

“Communication is frequently breaking down, and prejudices are reinforced,” said foundation President Ernest Boyer from his office in Princeton, N.J. “This is an ominous trend in the society at large. If the university can’t define itself higher, you don’t have much hope for the city streets.”

Some of the white student unions being formed are trying to find a faculty adviser. Others are awaiting official recognition or increased membership.

So far they are attracting few active members--Wright’s has about 10 since its founding last December. In a developing pattern, the unions and are either squelched or forced underground.

The unions, which are connected by an informal network, keep their distance from white supremacists, at least publicly. Open association with hate groups could cost them the credibility they covet.

But the Ku Klux Klan has shown interest and already has caused trouble for the Florida group. When a former Klan leader asked Wright for a copy of the union’s constitution, he got it. The faculty adviser promptly resigned, and the union must find a replacement to maintain official status.

A respected state institution, the University of Florida was once a preserve of the state’s white Establishment. Now there are unwelcome sentiments and tensions on the campus where, under shade trees hung with Spanish moss, the 34,000 students, 7,000 minority members among them, usually mingle with a polite civility.

The White Student Union’s first meeting in January attracted 60 protesters, white and black, who wrangled with Wright and his supporters in emotional debate. The second meeting ended early when a similar scene occurred.

The next month, the Campus Coalition Against Bigotry regrouped and staged an anti-racist protest.

Black students react with puzzlement and dismay.

“To me, it was kind of funny,” said Brian Coe, a 21-year-old senior planning to teach special education. But he was disappointed it gained official status. “I thought, if they can let something like that form, what’s next?”