A Lesson in Intolerance and the Freedom of Expression : When Jewish students at CSUN planned an alternative event during a speech by Louis Farrakhan, CSUN’s Black Student Union played the racist card.

There’s a television commercial I see now and then about prejudice. It starts off in a hospital nursery with babies of different races lying next to one another and concludes with a cemetery overview. The message? Here are two places where prejudice doesn’t matter. My observation? Prejudice matters too much in many areas of American life.

Although I would like to think otherwise, college students are not exempt from this disease of the mind. Look at the vehement events of a few weeks ago at the Cal State Northridge campus.

The university’s Black Student Union invited controversial Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan to speak as part of a 25th anniversary celebrating the creation of the school’s Pan African Studies program and BSU’s founding.

Given Farrakhan’s deserved reputation for anti-Semitic remarks, it is no surprise that Jewish students on campus were shocked. The response of Hillel, the campus Jewish student group, was to plan an alternative event during the Farrakhan speech, a “Gathering of People for Understanding.”

What followed was a lesson in intolerance and an example of an increasing problem on U.S. campuses.

BSU President Leslie Small responded to the Hillel event by circulating a letter entitled “The Jews Attempt a Coup.” It referred to Hillel’s action as “Hitlerian tactics” and went on to say: “ . . . These are the same wasicus (sic) that participated in the vicious murder of 250 million Africans in the middle passages, partakers in the genocide of our indigenous American brothers, participants in the massacre of Chinese during the ‘Bomber Rebellion,’ supporters of the vicious system of apartheid in South Africa, murderers and robbers of the Palestinians and their land, and now because they do not approve of their former slave’s program they seek to divide you and I.”

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Hillel students were outraged. So was Blenda Wilson, the CSUN president (who is black), who called the BSU statement “insulting and disrespectful to Jews.”

What Wilson went on to say, however, is most important. Citing the two concurrent campus events sponsored by two different groups, she concluded: “Never has one event or one speaker been so important or so correct that it would cause us to prevent or stop another speaker or event.”

Trying to obstruct dissenting voices is the Hitlerian tactic. The Hillel students could have picketed Farrakhan--after all, he calls Judaism a “dirty religion”--but chose to turn a negative into a positive and planned an alternative event. Jewish students were willing to tolerate Farrakhan’s visit, but BSU would not tolerate the mildest form of dissent, instead playing the racist card.

“Once the discussion turns into who’s the most oppressed, it’s a tricky game between blacks and Jews, and rarely is there a winner,” said Grant Ingle, director of human relations at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst. I consulted with Ingle because he helped mediate student tensions at that campus before a speech by Farrakhan.

Ingle says such events have a dramatic effect on non-Jewish white students who observe from the sidelines and come away with confirmed stereotypes about people they understand less and less. If polarization is the end result, who benefits? Is anything really learned when students believe being strident is equal to earning respect for a differing point of view?

Many of us outside the university, looking in, hope today’s college men and women will emerge more tolerant.

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Events like those at CSUN, along with research by the Anti-Defamation League, make me pessimistic.

“Traditionally, we believe colleges and universities are places where society is healed,” says Jeffrey Ross, ADL’s director of campus affairs/higher education. “But that is no longer true. There is an increasing proliferation of anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses, every year since 1987, while the number of incidents in society at large has gone down during that time. I’m very concerned about what that says about our present and our future.”

Ross says 1992 was the worst year yet for campus anti-Semitism, with 114 reported incidents, 12% more than in 1991.

One of the most disturbing findings, according to the ADL, is that anti-Semitic acts typically are not triggered by specific Jewish behavior or programs. They happen just because Jews exist.

If the ADL is correct, the actions of CSUN’s Black Student Union and those at 60 other universities in 1992 are indeed problematic. If college students harbor anti-Semitic or racist attitudes, how much better will they react to real life in urban America? What is our future if dialogue caused by a controversial speaker turns into diatribe laced with venom and hate?