Fighting Words

As students at Guilford College try to make sense of a campus brawl, administrators urge them to withhold judgment

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By ERIC HOOVER

Greensboro, N.C.

The fight at Guilford College lasted about five minutes. The argument about what to call the incident has continued for weeks.

Three Palestinian students say that on January 20, several of the college's football players attacked them, calling them "terrorists" and "sand niggers." Some students refuse to describe the event as anything more than a "fight" or a "scrap." Others, including some witnesses, have called the incident a "hate crime" and decried "hate speech."

Kent J. Chabotar, Guilford's president, has repeatedly urged students and others not to use those words. "To call what happened ... either of those things, we must find facts that meet the precise legal definitions of those terms," he said during one of his recent talks on the campus. "We cannot just throw them around because they sound good or reflect our emotions."

In their appeals for patience, officials have cited the college's Quaker traditions, including the "testimony of integrity," which is associated with honesty, fairness, and the search for truth. And this particular search is continuing: After an internal investigation, Guilford has charged five students who participated in the fight with violating its conduct code, but the college is still preparing for a judicial hearing. A local district attorney has said he will await the outcome of that proceeding before deciding whether to pursue the criminal complaints that the injured students have filed against their alleged attackers.

Some students believe that, in their caution, Guilford's leaders have failed to condemn the incident, which left the Palestinian students with three concussions, a broken jaw, and a fractured nose among them. The altercation shook those who embrace another tenet of Quakerism — "the testimony of peace."

"I grew up in a Quaker house, where violence was never acceptable," says Laura Herman, a freshman. "I was really shocked and sickened that people going to this school could do such a thing to one another."

The fight has severed friendships among students and deepened social rifts at this diverse liberal-arts college. Just 60 miles from Durham, Guilford is operating under what one official here calls "the long shadow of Duke." On that university's campus, many are still debating the implications of last spring's lacrosse scandal, which prompted Duke to temporarily suspend the team and two of its players, and had some students and faculty members implying the guilt of the accused.

For all their differences, the incidents share some similarities. Each heightened existing tensions between athletes and their peers, as well as among students from different backgrounds. Both underscored the challenge of withholding judgment after an incendiary incident. And neither case seems likely to evaporate anytime soon.

Early last week, police officers chased away three unidentified intruders who had entered a dormitory at Guilford, saying they were looking for the football players who participated in last month's fight. One Guilford freshman had a word for that development: "Unsettling." On that description, at least, everyone could agree.

'Puffing Out Their Chests'

As with many campus fights, this one apparently began in a bottle: Guilford officials say at least some of the combatants had been drinking before the incident.

Some of the students were neighbors in Bryan Hall, a large dorm near Guilford's main quad. Bryan is known as a place where students are likely to play beer pong in between discussions of social change. One student who does not drink calls the building "the cesspool of Guilford's social life." Others say it is usually home to harmless fun.

Several witnesses describe a typical Friday night at Bryan, with friends lounging together throughout the building. In one suite, some members of Guilford's football team were throwing a large party where beer was flowing, according to several residents. Around midnight, a large circle of students formed in Bryan's courtyard. Inside it, six or seven young men, including football players from the party, were yelling at the three Palestinian students.

"They were puffing out their chests," says one of the dorm's residents of the football players, "like animals when they're trying to show their superiority."

Someone threw a punch, and the circle collapsed into a tangle of swinging arms. After a few minutes, students managed to separate the combatants. Accounts of what happened next vary. Some witnesses say the brawl continued moments later, only with fewer spectators. One student describes seeing two or more football players repeatedly kick one of the Palestinians students as he lay on the ground.

In court documents, the injured students said as many as 15 football players them, kicked them, and struck them with brass knuckles while uttering racial slurs before campus police officers stopped the fight.

Two of those accusers are among a handful of Palestinian students on the campus. Both Faris Khader and Osama Sabbah had attended a Quaker high school in Ramallah, in the West Bank, before enrolling at the college. The third, Omar Awartani, is enrolled at North Carolina State University, in Raleigh.

The following week, after the three injured students made statements to a local magistrate, Greensboro police officers arrested six football players — Christopher Barnette, Michael Bates, Jazz Favors, Micah Rushing, Michael Six, and Jonathan Underwood — who were later released on bond. Each faces assault charges, and all but one face charges of ethnic intimidation.

In its own investigation, Guilford has charged five students for violating its conduct code, which bars violence and verbal abuse. Two of those students are the accusers Mr. Khader and Mr. Sabbah. Guilford officials say they typically charge all students involved in a fight.

The college has temporarily moved the students who fought to off-campus housing, but has suspended none of them. A judicial panel of faculty members and students plans to hear the case within the next few weeks. If found guilty, the students could be permanently expelled.

Guilford officials say the combatants were acquaintances with no known conflicts. Friends and relatives of the Palestinian students have said publicly that the football players attacked the students for no apparent reason, and that the three tried to defend themselves with belts.

Although the students involved in the fight are not talking, the father of one football player says the accusers provoked the fight. He has also circulated photographs that, he says, show the injuries the football players sustained during the fray. One shows a bruise that he believes was made by a belt buckle.

Reading Meanings

In 1998 another incident chilled Guilford. It was an attack that may never have happened at all.

That year, Molly Martin, then president of the college's student government, reported that someone had knocked her unconscious in her office and scrawled "nigger lover" on her chest. The news devastated students and alarmed some of the state's black leaders.

Local police halted their investigation because they could find no evidence to support her accounts. Ms. Martin, who is white, withdrew from Guilford that summer. In a cryptic letter to the community, she apologized for "acts that were inappropriate and that were injurious to them and to the college." Although she did not recant her account of the attack, many here concluded that she had made up the story. The saga reminded Guilford that facts are often elusive.

Some faculty members here have tried to apply that lesson to last month's fight. Jim Hood, an associate professor of English, has encouraged his students to consider how their preconceived notions of campus subcultures may have shaped their understanding of what happened — and why. "I'm fascinated by the way people's perceptions affect what truth is for them," Mr. Hood says, "how categories like 'football player' and 'Palestinian' back us into how we see reality."

Mr. Hood has been teaching Thoreau's Walden in his "American Nature Writing" course. In one recent class, he asked students to consider the resonances between a chapter called "The Village" — in which the author describes getting lost in the woods at night — and the hurt and confusion many of them have experienced since the fight. He hopes his students, like Thoreau, can find meaning in that feeling of "lostness."

One possible meaning is the importance of reserving judgment. A Quaker who earned his undergraduate degree from Guilford in 1979, Mr. Hood is one of many faculty members who praise the college's tempered reaction to the fight.

"The administration's response was seen by some students as overly cautious, but it is in line with the Quaker value of not rushing to judgment, and of seeking all facts," Mr. Hood says. "It's a deliberate process, and people have often accused Quakers of taking too long to get things done, but it's a good deliberateness that waits for data."

Not everyone decided to wait. Last month, Sekinah M. Hamlin, Guilford's director of multicultural education, sent an e-mail message to all minority and international students. In it, she stated plainly that the altercation was a hate crime, and urged concerned students to contact her. "We must be united as people of color more than ever," she wrote. "What happened to these three young men could have happened to any of us."

The message angered some students, who say it further roiled the campus. Ms. Hamlin, who did not respond to The Chronicle's requests for an interview, wrote in the message that she was concerned about the safety and well-being of minority students. Guilford officials say the message did not speak for the college.

Tristan Wilson, a senior majoring in philosophy, does not call the fight a hate crime, but says he understands why Ms. Hamlin and others have used the term. "People need that language to get others to stand up and listen," Mr. Wilson says. "Violence is violence, so the language we use to describe it is very important. Racism is alive here in this idyllic Quaker community, and people need to use this language."

Nonetheless, Mr. Wilson and other students say the social tensions at Guilford — where nearly 70 percent of the 2,500 students are white — generally have less to do with race and ethnicity than with geography. About 35 percent of students come from North Carolina, and many out-of-state students come from the suburbs or cities in the mid-Atlantic.

Mr. Wilson, who is from Philadelphia, says that when he first enrolled at Guilford, he perceived that he was far more liberal than students who had grown up in rural parts of the South. He now counts some conservative Christians among his friends, but says not all students here learn to accept their peers' political and social views.

"That's where the divisions lie," he says. "Students associate with like people."

The same often goes for athletes, one in four students at Guilford. As at most colleges, students who compete together form tight bonds. "We're a group of 70 guys — a team," says Troy Smith, a football player. "We live, eat, and sleep together. ... We get out there, we beat up on each other, it brings you together."

At Guilford, which has no fraternities or sororities, many students are keenly suspicious of exclusivity. And the fight has rekindled negative perceptions of athletes that go back years. "It's hypocritical when students express their disdain for football players simply because they are football players," wrote one columnist in the student newspaper, The Guilfordian, in 2005. "It's the type of prejudice Guilford works so hard to combat."

Yet the tensions between athletes and other students here are more subtle than those at other colleges. Guilford has Division III athletics, meaning that none of its athletes receive scholarships. Unlike players at big-time sports programs, athletes here use the same facilities as other students, and they receive few accommodations from professors. At Guilford the term "athlete" has a different meaning than at Division I colleges, where many players study in state-of-the-art tutoring centers, compete in nationally televised games, and possess an air of royalty.

"Being an athlete is something I do in the afternoons," says Jeremiah Bante, a senior and president of Guilford's student-athlete advisory committee. "Guilford's the kind of place where doing one thing is not all-consuming." Mr. Bante runs for the cross-country team, and is also a double major in mathematics and music, the managing editor of The Guilfordian, and an avid piano player.

"The rift between students and athletes does exist here, but people's perceptions [of the fight] have inflated it," Mr. Bante says. "There's the same rift between math and theater majors."

He says some students have been giving athletes cold shoulders and dirty looks in the cafeteria, but that others have reached out to players. He believes one athlete's recent proposal to hold a "Do What You Don't Day" at Guilford — in which nonathletes would attend practices and athletes would participate in some other activity — might help one group better relate to the other.

But Mr. Bante says he is frustrated by the number of students who have, in their minds, convicted the football players of a hate crime.

"Calling it that is ridiculous," he says. "Some students are talking about how they feel unsafe since the fight, but safety is not a core value of Guilford College — justice is. And some people are trying to rush it."

'Hydraulic Pressure'

On a recent Wednesday, Aaron Fetrow, Guilford's dean of campus life, is trying to slow down. This afternoon he did an hourlong interview with Al Jazeera, the Arab television network, then met with administrators, gobbled his lunch, raced to a meeting with a reporter, and huddled with a trustee. It's only 2:30. Tomorrow he must meet with some of the accused students' parents, who plan to come with their lawyers.

But working at Guilford has taught him patience. Mr. Fetrow has learned that little here happens without long, long talks. Last summer Guilford administrators announced their intentions to build a new dorm to help ease overcrowding. On most campuses, high-level officials would decide the when, where, and how of a new project. Here the discussion has also included students, parents, alumni, and trustees. Should the college buy the land? Or lease it? These continuing discussions should eventually lead to some sort of consensus.

Mr. Fetrow believes the college should proceed just as deliberately with its investigation of the fight. He says he was never tempted to suspend the football players or the team. Generally, he says, athletes have the same number of judicial infractions as other students, if not fewer.

Mr. Fetrow has already received 1,300 e-mail messages about the incident. Some praised the college's response to the fight, while others demanded swift justice. "There's hydraulic pressure to act instantly, but we're not going to do that," Mr. Fetrow says. "What we've learned is not to jump — to trust the judicial process."

Beneath his window, the pavement bears the marks of two weeks of protests and vigils. On sidewalks, students have written messages in chalk: "Stop Hate" and "Love is all around." By a tree stands a scarecrow on whose bulletin-board chest students have written their definitions of community. One reads, "Recognizes the gifts of others." Another says, "Communication."

Some students describe what has happened here as the growing pains of a small college. Since 2000, Guilford has doubled its enrollment. Its president, the first non-Quaker in Guilford's 119-year history, and other officials have wrestled with how to maintain its identity while appealing to students from a range of backgrounds.

The campus, which was once part of the Underground Railroad, buzzes with discussions of environmentalism, fair trade, and homelessness. Students frequently use the word "comfortable" to describe Guilford, where there has been recent debate over whether the college promotes undesirable cliques by allowing freshmen to divide themselves among an array of themed pre-orientation programs.

Still, Guilford is not one-dimensional. At this Quaker college, only one in 10 students are Quakers. Even though incoming students take a course that includes an introduction to Quakerism, it is possible for a student to graduate without being powerfully affected by the presumed "leavening effects" of studying among Quakers.

Some students come to Guilford because it offered them a good scholarship. Some seek a particular major. Others come to play sports. Although Guilford is a progressive outpost in a conservative state, liberal students here, though loud and prone to peace rallies, do not speak for all students.

One moment, the campus is so quiet that the call of a crow at midday seems impossibly loud. The next, a student suddenly stands atop a crate and announces the commencement of "stump speeches," a spirited Wednesday tradition that allows students to shout their concerns to passers-by.

After this afternoon's classes, students pack an auditorium for yet another discussion of the fight. One student criticizes the college's "businesslike approach" to the incident. Another offers that there is "a sense of self-segregation in each person."

"We keep talking about a sense of community, but it seems like the community turned its back on us," says Mario Paylor, a football player who insists the fight was not racially motivated. "This was about individuals. Fights happen all the time."

"No one's ever going to get the real story," says LaToya Thomas, a member of the Black Unifying Society. "We need to stop talking about what happened, what didn't, and move beyond this."

One student proposes creating a special blog where students could further discuss these issues. Another suggests starting a new campus-diversity committee. A third says Guilford should mark the anniversary of the fight each year with a special forum, perhaps with guest speakers.

But it is Adam Waxman, a senior in Guilford's Quaker Leadership Scholars Program, who condenses the many strongly held opinions here into a simple thought. "You should always consider the possibility," he tells his peers, "that you may be wrong."