By MATT EPSTEIN
Staff Writer
 

According to Meg MacDougal '00, "I put them up at 4:00, and by 5:30 p.m., they were all down or scribbled on."

This marks the first hate crime of the semester. As was evidenced in the Chase Hall mail room after dinner on Friday, many students read this information and promptly recycled the letter. Once again an overt act of racism was met with silence by the College community.

A similar incident occurred this past spring.

Early last week, MacDougal took this incident to the administration, which convened the Hate Crimes/Bias Incident Committee. The committee agreed to send a letter to inform the community, as has been the procedure completed after incidents happened in the past.

As there are no known suspects in this case, there has been little new information this week.

MacDougal's belief is that "they [the administration] are waiting for something else to happen, if one more sign is taken down there will be a strong response." MacDougal said that there was little else that could be done at this time on the case until a suspect becomes known.

In the past 12 months, several hate crimes were committed on the Bates campus. One of those was an e-mail incident that happened last spring, whereby a student of color directed a derogatory message toward white students.

There was a resolution in one of the anti-Semitic cases, in which a student claimed he had been unaware of the possible offensiveness of his actions.

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In 1996 there were eight reported hate crimes on campus, an alltime high.