Analysis | Extremist groups are increasingly targeting college campuses

College campuses are becoming a target for extremist group advertising and attempts at recruitment. Panther Archives

Chapman University students continue to see or hear of local white supremacist groups actively seeking to recruit new members on campus. As Chapman is a predominantly white institution, this may not be very surprising, as Bill Maurer, the dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), said extremist groups’ target demographic is young white men in their late teens to early 20s.

“In that stage of life when people are discovering, consolidating, beginning to understand their identity, it’s a prime time to say, ‘Here's an option; here’s an identity,’” Maurer told The Panther.

Yet other local universities in Orange County have not been preyed on by white supremacist organizations in a similar capacity to institutions such as Chapman or UCI.

In 2019 and again in 2020, stickers and fliers were discovered on benches, bulletin boards and busts around Chapman’s campus promoting the white supremacist organization Patriot Front. Earlier this year, Public Safety learned of plans made by DesertKreig, a nearby neo-Nazi group, to protest the already-canceled Education and Ethnic Studies Summit. A month later, white supremacist group Folkish Resistance Movement posted its flyers on campus benches April 9.   

These events and programming are ever-present in the surrounding community, as similar groups and radical ideals have been existing in the greater Orange County area for decades. 

“Chapman is in an older part of Orange County,” Maurer said. “The cities of Orange and Anaheim have a history of white supremacy that goes back to the (1920s). Anaheim even had members of the KKK on its city council in the (1920s).” 

The most recent public display of xenophobic sentiment from such organizations was a planned April 11 “White Lives Matter” rally in Huntington Beach, about 18 miles from Chapman’s campus. After fliers were discovered advertising the event, counter-protesters organized in response and greatly outnumbered their dissenters. 

Yet despite the history present in the area, other campuses haven’t felt the presence of white supremacy groups to the same degree. 

Craig Lee, the director of Security at Soka University in Aliso Viejo, told The Panther that its campus has not experienced extremist groups targeting university grounds. Scott Spitzer, an associate professor of political science at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF), reiterated a similar statement, saying that CSUF has not found physical propaganda on their campus in recent years. 

As to why these groups may choose to target Chapman over a university like CSUF, Spitzer, a former Chapman faculty member himself, believes the groups “think there's a better opportunity at a place like Chapman to appeal to white supremacists.” 

“In general, Chapman University has been friendlier in the past to the Republican Party (than other universities),” Spitzer said. “The ‘conservative message’ is more appreciated, I guess. I don’t think that’s the case at (CSUF) or UCI.” 

As examples, Spitzer pointed out the George Bush Conference Center located in Beckman Hall and the 2019 visit by the former president to campus, and in addition university donations from prominent Orange County Republicans.

Spitzer described a three-pronged approach to discourage white supremacist groups from visiting Chapman in the future. First, a “well-crafted and narrow hate speech code” to prohibit discriminatory propaganda from reaching campus in the first place. Second, the promotion of inclusive viewpoints as a university. Third, the monitorization of student organizations by administration to provide support and prevent contact with outside white supremacist groups. 

College campuses, at large, have become a target demographic for white supremacist groups. In 2019, for example, the number of unsolicited propaganda postings reported at universities nearly doubled from 2018. 

Spitzer suggested that the trend is a “new phenomenon” directly tied to the manner in which these groups are emboldened by racist rhetoric.

“There have certainly been conservative voices on college campuses since the late ‘70s that have tried to articulate anti-immigrant messages ... but never really openly white supremacist messages,” Spitzer said. “Beyond that, I think there have been efforts to organize in an underground way on college campuses since the (2016) election.”

At UCI, pursuits of combating extremism have been ongoing. Maurer and a team of graduate students developed an online course called “Confronting Digital Extremism” to provide resources for the surrounding community that want to understand the phenomena and educate themselves on how to address them.

Maurer also attributed the prevalent white supremacist visits at Chapman to the lack of diversity among the student body.  

“I think that Chapman is majority white, and (UCI is) not, and that might make a difference,” Maurer said. “So, if you’re trying to recruit people, you want to go where you know you’ve got potential recruits.”