At Duke University, someone hanged a black doll along with a sign reading "Duke hasn't changed" near a gathering place of the Black Student Alliance, also defacing a granite bench dedicated to the Class of 1948 with black paint. After an agonizing week following the apparent hate crime, the truth came out: the perpetuators were not white racists, but black students seeking to create an impression of racism on campus. Still, many defended the perpetrators, as did Worokya Diomande in Duke's student newspaper, the Chronicle: "The idea behind the act is being overlooked (as is usually the case). The University has not changed. Blacks are allowed to be enrolled here, but the idea is the equivalent of the transition from field slave to house slave."

At Eastern New Mexico University, crude posters started to appear: "Are you sick of queers polluting this great land with there [sic] filth? I thought so. Want to do something? Join the Fist of God. With his might, we can ride [sic] the world of there [sic] sickness. Ask around. We'll find you." Identifying eight homosexuals on campus, the poster concluded: "Take us seriously, or we'll begin executing one queer a week following this list." The four men and four women soon received threatening e-mail and letters. Miranda Prather, a lesbian teaching assistant whose name topped the list, reported that a masked assailant had slashed her cheek with a kitchen knife. But as part of the ensuing investigation, police examined surveillance footage of a laundromat near where one of the threatening fliers had been posted, which revealed Ms. Prather to be the culprit. Police later found a knife in her apartment that matched the wounds on her cheek. An editorialist at the Amarillo Globe-News wrote, after Prather's hoax had been revealed: "Hatred is polluting with filth. Instilling terror is polluting with filth. Bigotry is polluting with filth.... Few of us are as blatant about it as the Fist of God. Yet hatred and intolerance are there."

At the University of Georgia, uncloseted homosexual resident adviser Jerry Kennedy reported that his door, which had been covered with gay-activist literature, was set on fire. The Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Student Union urged the president of the university to create a hate-crime task force and to obtain a faculty adviser for their group, and wrote chalk messages around the student center reading, "Stop burning down our doors," and "Are you next?" Asked what he thought of the group's response, Kennedy commented, "It makes me feel like I'm doing the right thing, and I appreciate the support." But suspicions grew after his door was set on fire two more times. The student newspaper Red & Black reported that of the fifteen hate crimes reported since 1995, Kennedy had been the target of nine of them. The head of the campus police said, "He's certainly had more [harassment] than anyone else I've known of." Police soon arrested Kennedy, charging him with arson and making false crime reports, and a student suspected of setting one of the fires was exonerated. Still, a faculty member dealing in race discrimination told the Red & Black that she "hoped the Kennedy case would not hinder dialogue about homosexuality."

And at North Carolina's Guilford College, Student Senate president Molly Martin reported being assaulted in her office late one night by an assailant who knocked her unconscious, opened her blouse, and wrote "nigger lover" on her chest. The attack occurred a week after anonymous letters and fliers criticized Ms. Martin for appointing two black students to the Senate and for leading the effort to create a full-time director of African-American affairs position the previous semester. Following the incident, the college pledged to hasten its selection process for that position, as well as inaugurate a series of campus dialogues and curriculum changes to address racial issues. But police could not recreate the incident satisfactorily, noting that Ms. Martin did not show anyone the alleged writing on her chest before she erased it, that she said she cleaned up the damage to her office before reporting the incident to campus security, that she refused medical attention and asked security not to report the incident to police, that she showed no signs of the sort of bruising that would have knocked her unconscious, and that it would be highly unusual for such an assailant to unbutton her blouse rather than simply rip it off or pull it down to write on her chest. Martin later withdrew from the school, sending an open letter to the campus apologizing "for acts that were inappropriate and that were injurious," which referred only to her inability to perform her duties properly as Student Senate president, not to any wrongdoing on her part. The college continued its plans to address the issue by revising its curriculum, hiring more minority faculty, and even founding an institute on race relations.

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