Customer-service personnel were dispatched Thursday and Friday to 15 sites where offending messages had been sighted and reported following a Sept. 30 Student Association-sponsored forum to air the graffiti issue.

Dennis Black, interim vice president for student affairs, and John Grela, director of the Department of Public Safety, apologized for the lack of sufficient follow-through on the initial incident, and asked for students' help in reporting the location of other racist graffiti.

"We want them gone," Black told the audience of 100-plus students, faculty and staff at the forum. "They don't belong in our community."

Grela said public safety sent an officer immediately to investigate the Knox Hall complaint, but the officer didn't find the offending graffiti on initial inspection. A second inspection turned up the racist slogan and it was removed, he said.

Hoping to streamline the reporting process, Black distributed a new "Bias-Related Graffiti Immediate Response Form" that he said will be reproduced in the Spectrum and will be available widely on campus to report exact locations of racist slogans. Reports submitted to his office will go immediately to public safety for documentation and then to customer service for removal, he said. Students also can report graffiti sightings via e-mail to Rice@buffalo.edu

Although quick removal of existing graffiti was the most pressing issue, student leaders asked for an airing of a broader question: How to deal with the issue of racism in general on campus and discourage its expression?

Student comments about the graffiti ranged from the pragmatic, to the hopeful, to a call for more education on diversity:

- "This is a large university where you get a little bit of everything. Learn to cope with it."

- "We're not going to get people to stop writing this stuff, but we can't let what they write divide us."

- "People come here to be educated. When this [racist graffiti] happens, they are not learning. Faculty can help by teaching us what's important."

Several students asked for more discussion of racism in their classes and for the required "American Pluralism" course to include the UB experience. They also asked for faculty to take a more active role in discouraging racism.

The question of student involvement also was raised: "We need to take responsibility for what is ours and protect it," one student speaker commented. "We need to speak up as a community against racism." She suggested that some type of rally at homecoming might be effective.

Michael Stokes, co-chair of the UB Committee for the Promotion of Tolerance and Diversity, pointed out that his committee published guidelines for reporting bias-related incidents in 1995. The committee meets regularly to discuss issues such as these, he said, noting that the meetings are not well attended by students.

Following the forum, Black said the upcoming meeting of the Committee for the Promotion of Tolerance and Diversity would be devoted to reviewing the 1995 guidelines and making recommendations for including sections on education and response to reports.