In 1989, Brown, like many peer institutions, tightened its rules about "hate speech" to stanch a waterfall of racism. Feverish worries about rising crime rates in Providence had sparked rumors that white students were defensively forming a Ku Klux Klan Klavern on campus and had appealed to the national KKK for protection. In April, one of Brown's dorms was papered with white supremacist material; "Keep White Supremacy Alive!" one flyer read, "Join the Brown chapter of the KKK today!"
The incident presented an immediate challenge for the university’s newly arrived president, Vartan Gregorian, a passionate defender of the idealized university community. After the defacement of the dorm, Gregorian told an angry crowd of faculty and students that racism had no place at Brown. Despite this declaration, things got worse. As the semester wound down, several Black students received threatening phone calls laced with racial invective. Gregorian responded by threatening "to prosecute vigorously and to expel immediately" anyone who "attempted to inject or promote racism."
The fall of 1989 was no better. During move in, a Black student carrying boxes with her parents reported hearing an intimidating voice call out racial epithets. Two white students claimed to have been jumped by young Black men. Brown’s student newspaper routinely described roving Black gangs on campus, mugging and assaulting white students. University security implemented an ID check for Black men on campus who were "acting suspiciously." On Oct. 20, things reached a high pitch when Brown cancelled a funk night sponsored by a Black fraternity. University officials worried about the potential for racial violence.
Gregorian moved decisively to defuse a racial bomb. A newcomer to Brown, he understood that respectful engagement and intellectual debate required the enactment of new social rules. This was both personal and political. An Armenian born in Iran and an immigrant to the U.S., he felt that he had been denied the presidency at Penn because of his foreign background. He also listened to the campus community, which urged him to put antiracism at the core of these new rules. New student movements like the Coalition Against Racism and Homophobia emerged to push in this direction. The group titled its list of demands “Notes on the Brown University Conscience.” By all accounts, Gregorian took the students seriously, electing to make anti-racism and anti-harassment cornerstones of his leadership.