Thomas MacMillan Photo
Deborah Savage felt frightened after someone sprayed a swastika by her office door. A month later, she said, she felt “victimized” again — by her university’s mishandling of the incident.
Savage has taught economics at Southern Connecticut State University for the past 15 years. She also serves on a Judaic Studies committee, and has taught Judaics courses and advised SCSU’s Jewish student group in the past.
On July 26 Savage got a call from SCSU’s dean of arts and sciences. The dean warned her that when she arrived later in the day she would find the bulletin board next to her office door in the C Wing of Engleman Hall gouged. Some of the materials she’d placed on the board would now be on her office desk. A custodian that morning had discovered a swastika sprayed over Savage’s board; the police were investigating.
Savage had had a star of David on the board, a “gift from a Muslim professor,” containing the English translation for Birkat ha-Bayit, a Jewish blessing said upon a home. The board also had a flyer advertising a new modern Hebrew class.
The swastika spraying was part of a graffiti spree that included the “n‑word” on a different bulletin board.
“Obviously I felt a bit frightened,” Savage recalled in a conversation Monday. “It’s always meant to intimidate and frighten.” That night she was teaching her intermediate micro-economics course. The class ended at 10 p.m. “My students decided they were going to walk me back to my car for the rest of the semester.” And they did, she said.
The public found out about the graffiti spraying last week, when SCSU Interim President Stanley F. Battle sent out a community-wide email message. “University police have reported that two bulletin boards in the hallway were defaced, one with a swastika and the other with a racial epithet,” Battle wrote. He asked anyone with information about the incidents to contact SCSU police (at 203 – 392-5375).
By that point, Savage said, “I felt worse.”
She contacted Battle’s office with questions and concerns. She wanted to know why the university waited almost a month to alert the public “if they were serious” about wanting the public’s help to solve the crime. “Anybody who was there for a summer program and may have seen something is long gone,” she argued. She also took exception to Battle’s email description of the incident. “It certainly made it look like it was just something that happened generally on some bulletin board down the hall somewhere, as opposed to in an enclosed alcove. You have to enter an alcove to get to my door.”
Savage said she was further frustrated by her attempts to report the incident as a bias crime and seek an investigation. She said SCSU’s Office of Diversity & Equity discouraged her from filing a complaint. She said after repeated attempts she finally received the forms to file a complaint the other day — around the time Battle issued his email message. She said she is in the process of filing a request for the school to investigate the incident as a bias crime.
Since the incident, “there was no reaching out to help me from the university,” Savage remarked. “I was just left all to myself for a month until it served somebody’s purposes to finally make this announcement. … I felt a little bit like it was because somebody was going to force them to investigate this as a bias crime.
“[SCSU] has a history of getting this wrong … Southern has the ability to be a place where the American dream is best served. We have a diverse school of immigrants and children of immigrants and people who probably go back to the Mayflower. It doesn’t take much to destroy trust in the community.”
The head of SCSU’s diversity office did not respond to a call for comment. Nor did President Battle.
SCSU spokesman Patrick Dilger said the university took the incident seriously from the moment it was reported.
Police immediately started investigating the incident and conducting interviews, Dilger said. “Once the president was made aware of it, he issued a statement.”
The incident remains under investigation, Dilger said. “We haven’t made any determination at this stage whether anyone was targeted. It was at random locations.” Besides the racist and anti-Semitic sprays, the cops came across other non-bias-related tags.
This was a terribly offensive thing to happen. I was shocked and angered when this was made public last week. But by the impression of news crews present on campus, not to mention the content of their stories, it seemed that the incident happened just the night before.
Why would the school wait so long to make this known? It is an injustice to Prof. Savage and to the community for this to have been kept hush-hush for such a long time.
We should be way past the time of pretending society's worst sentiments don't exist by ignoring them, and instead should be acknowledging and criticizing them openly, so that everyone, young people especially, is made aware this sort of thing is not tolerated.