Another Day, Another Hate Crime At Fordham University

Screenshot of the email I received about the incident
I was walking down Amsterdam when I noticed a police car stationed outside Fordham College Lincoln Center. I didn’t think anything of it because when you live in New York City, seeing a cop car in a random place isn’t unusual. What was unusual was when I stepped off the elevator on my floor and noticed two security guards standing outside my dorm.
My heart immediately raced as I jumped to the conclusion that something happened to one of my roommates but as I approached the door, they simply moved aside so I could enter. I thought “Oh, God, they don’t even want to tell me! They want whoever is inside to break the news to me!” but as I entered my apartment, no one was home. There were no signs that anything had occurred, at least, in this dorm.
I continued about my day, getting ready for my next class until I heard a rather loud knock on the door. It was 11:45 in the morning on a Wednesday so yes, it was strange that someone was at my door but I figured one of my roommates forgot a key. Yet, when I opened the door, an older man in a uniform holding a pocket-sized notebook greeted me. He immediately said hello ma’am (you know this is serious when they call a 20-year-old girl ma’am) and asked me if I had been in the trash room lately.
I had only had one cup of coffee that morning and didn’t quite get enough sleep last night so I was in no way a good person to question at the moment. I gave a quick mumble of “the trash room next door to me? Um, not really.” The man went on to inform me that a backwards swastika was found carved into the door earlier this morning and, of course if I had seen it (even though I already stated I hadn’t been in the trash room) or knew anything about the “vandalism,” which I didn’t. After I convinced him that none of my roommates were home at the time, he recorded my name in his handy dandy notebook and left.
I texted everyone around to a) inform them that they may be interviewed too and b) wanted to know if anyone knew anything about this yet again hate crime on my campus. I found out that a kid on our floor found the carving and reported it to the security office who immediately phoned NYPD. I listened in my dorm as the janitor painted the door literally adjacent to me.
By the time I left for class, we had a newly painted door that didn’t match the color theme of the floor. The sad thing about this incident is no one was really surprised at this moment, including myself. This is the third anti-Semitic bias crime to happen at Fordham during the 2015-2016 school year (second one at the Lincoln Center campus and the other one at the Rosehill campus) but this doesn’t even include the racial crimes committed at Fordham’s Bronx campus. It is considered a felony to draw a swastika in New York state but, according to Fordham, the “NYPD has yet to classify it as such.”

Photo taken of the “crime scene” after the door was painted.
The night after the Swastika was found, residents of that floor (note: only these residents) were required to attend to a meeting to discuss the incident.
Junior Caroline Eng described it as, “Very few of us had anything to say in response to Reslife’s report of what had happened, so it was a very short and unsettling meeting. It’s difficult to know what to say when we have so few details about something so serious. There is no closure, just anger and fear with nowhere to go.”
It is that fear and anger that has been lingering around campus and let me tell you, it isn’t a good feeling. Fortunately, there have been no physical acts of hate crime, but that doesn’t mean we should wait until that happens to take action.
The tensions between minority groups at Fordham have been growing, as these hate crimes (or bias incidents as the school calls them) become more and more frequent. A month after the two hate crimes were committed at Rosehill, which included racist chanting and racial slurs carved into a black student’s door, Fordham required resident students to attend an “incidents of hate” meeting. All that this meeting accomplished is getting the students angry over the fact that these crimes keep happening and Fordham isn’t doing much about it.
Even more so, we aren’t getting the answers we want, nothing is being solved. We still don’t know who drew the swastikas (or even if it is the same person) or who carved the n-word on a dormitory door. Fordham, however, does know who the chanters are, as security knocked on their door to tell them to stop, but their names were never released to us and we don’t know what kind of punishment (if any) they received. To me, this is telling those who committed these acts they can get away with it because Fordham doesn’t have a zero tolerance policy.

@fustudentsunite via Twitter
As a white, agnostic girl I have never been targeted but, as a student at this university, I don’t think it is just that only some of my fellow friends and classmates can walk around campus feeling safe. College brings about enough stress and worries — racism shouldn’t be added to their list. Students should feel safe on campus but, lately, that’s not how Fordham Students have been feeling.
Junior Carolyn Guerrero agrees, saying, “It’s unsettling and upsetting to know that these types of things can keep happening on campus with little repercussions and little to no effective involvement by the school.”
Because of the University’s lack of response, juniors, Mackenzie Harte and Kyndal Jackson took the initiative by creating a task force in November, after the first swastika was found on the Lincoln Center campus (overall, the third hate crime). The co-chairs felt that Fordham hasn’t been handling the situation in the best way possible.
They stated:
“We find that these poor responses are indicative of larger safety issues at Fordham, which is why we founded Fordham Students for Campus Safety. We personally would like our Public Safety department to use stronger language when discussing these incidents — while they may legally be seen as ‘bias incidents,’ we believe that our administration should be using more focused and strong language. They can start by calling these crimes what they are: ‘hate crimes.’”
Something needs to be done and that starts by acknowledging these crimes for what they are.
I don’t have an answer to what we can do to stop these hate crimes from occurring but the only thing I do know is that silence is definitely not the answer. If the only thing you can do at the moment is speak up, then that is what you must do. Don’t be afraid to speak up because we’re all in this together.