Cwu Looks For Author Of Racial Letter
Officials at Central Washington University are searching for the author of a letter that warned of “resistance” to events that focus on race relations.
School officials are trying to match the writing style of the unsigned letter to the writing style of current students, a technique they say was used to catch the Unabomber suspect.
But the American Civil Liberties Union contends the university is acting inappropriately, given that no crime has been committed.
Portions of the letter, sent to the student newspaper, “The Observer,” were excerpted in an editorial on Feb. 27.
The letter contended school officials focus too much on race relations, including last month’s Black History Month.
The letter was signed “A Large Contingent of Everyday, Normal Students Enrolled at CWU.”
Sarah Shumate, vice president for student affairs, ordered the formal investigation last week in response to a student group’s request.
Officials are concerned about two sentences they see as threatening.
The sentences read: “Keep it up, and you will start to see resistance in many ways. Think about that for a while.”
“I don’t have a problem with the letter because whoever wrote it was within their First Amendment, free-speech rights,” Keith Champagne, a vice president heading the investigation, said last week.
“The thing that concerns us is that the student or students were issuing threats in the letter.”
But Doug Honig, public education director for the ACLU in Seattle, said the university may be overstepping its bounds.
“Unless there is evidence this letter is tied into an unsolved crime on campus, then it’s none of the business of the college to find out who wrote the letter,” Honig said.
“Those two sentences do not constitute grounds for a formal investigation.”
Champagne is working with teachers in the English department to match the contents of the letter to a student or students who have gone through the writing program.
“We’re using the syntax, word uses and semantics in the letter to see if that’s a particular writing style of someone who was in the program,” Champagne said.
“Each person has their own writing style, and uses syntax and semantics in a certain way; that’s how they caught the Unabomber.”
Champagne said he hopes to have “some answers” in the next two to three weeks.
Honig said asking teachers to match the writing style of the letter to that of students was “definitely inappropriate.”
Lila Harper, an English instructor who is not part of the investigation, said student work should be kept confidential between the instructor and student.
“If there was something like a bomb threat where someone’s life was endangered, then I would have to break that confidentiality code,” Harper said.
“But in this situation, it would be a difficult, ethical question.”
School officials launched the investigation at the request of students in the MEChA group, an organization for Hispanics.