‘Watch the Rock.’ How NKU plans to respond to on-campus white supremacist vandalism
After a campus landmark was twice tagged with graffiti from a white supremacist group, Northern Kentucky University officials said Tuesday that the university will host a 24/7 livestream of the rock so that the entire community can “help us protect our campus.”
The “Watch the Rock” campaign and website should be up and running over the “next couple of days,” Eddie Howard, NKU’s vice president for student affairs, wrote in an email to the campus. Additionally, university police will increase patrols and surveillance coverage of the Housing rock.
“If you see something, say something,” Howard wrote in the email.
Typically, the Housing rock functions as a sort of public message board that students can paint to promote events, Howard said in an interview. The rock has been tagged twice — first in January and again this past weekend — with logos from “Patriot Front,” which the Southern Poverty Law Center categorizes as a white nationalist hate group that established itself in the wake of the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va.
“People that advocate and teach hate are not the types of folks that we want on our campus,” Howard said, adding that since they’re a public university, it can make it hard to monitor who comes and goes.
After the rock was first vandalized in January, students painted over the rock with the faces of Black students and the names of several Black student organizations, according to a report from The Northerner, NKU’s student newspaper. On Saturday, students discovered that the faces were crossed out and Patriot Front logos were again painted on the rock. The rock was quickly covered by maintenance. Related stickers placed across the campus were also quickly removed.
The university is hoping the added cameras and security measures will deter the incident from happening again or identify the individuals who are painting the graffiti, Howard said. Xavier University in Cincinnati has experienced similar incidents as well at nearly the same time, WCPO reported, and Howard said NKU was working with Xavier where police were also doing an investigation.
Students have expressed that “that they don’t want those types of people on our campus,” Howard said. “I agree with them, they don’t have a place on campus.”
In addition to the increased surveillance of the rock, the university, in partnership with student government, will be hosting townhall meetings where a university office that supports minority students will be present and will hear recommendations for more concrete university responses in the future.
“I am tired. I understand that you are tired. We are tired of the disrespect, of the hate, of all of the hate crimes that continue to go on at our campus unnoticed,” said Aliya Cannon, the student government’s president-elect, in a video posted online on Saturday.
Cannon encouraged students to attend the townhalls because “it takes a village to get that change to come.”
“Change is going to come,” Cannon said. “Let’s focus on getting that rock cleaned up. Let’s claim our campus back and let’s not allow these people to come in and create some dysfunction while they’re sitting on their couch, just chilling. Because that’s not what we’re going to do. It’s time to uplift each other, unify and take back our campus.”
This story was originally published April 6, 2021 at 3:07 PM.