For the second time in several years, Colgate is wrestling with racially-charged comments on campus.

On Tuesday, the university held a forum to discuss multicultural and bias issues. The gathering in Memorial Chapel was prompted by some reactions to an opinion piece in the Maroon News written by an African American student and titled If Everyone Were White. Several annoymous comments made on the online version of the student newspaper had strong racist overtones, causing the Maroon News' editors to remove the comments, shut down the commenting feature for a while and then reinstate it with a new policy on its use.

A similar forum was held in November of 2008 after racist graffiti was found in a bathroom on campus following the election of President Barack Obama, and several race-related incidents took place in the village. That led to an "inclusivity festival" and parade in the village and a short-lived, community-wide committee effort to discuss racial issues on campus and in the community.

Here is what Colgate posted on its news blog about the Tuesday forum:

More than 300 students, faculty, and staff members gathered Tuesday at Memorial Chapel for a campuswide forum on the topics of inclusiveness, bias, and multiculturalism.

Spurring the event were stories in the Maroon News student newspaper, specifically an op-ed written by an African American student titled "If only everyone were white." Incendiary anonymous comments were posted to the online commentary before being removed by student editors per newspaper policy.

In his opening remarks Tuesday, President Jeffrey Herbst cited the hurtful nature of the comments and how they affect the entire community.

He also referenced his scholarly research of institutionalized racism in countries such as Zimbabwe and South Africa, and the pain such racist attitudes cause. He urged attendees to "look deep within ourselves to see if we are achieving our highest standards and aspirations."

The forum was moderated by Thomas Cruz-Soto, assistant dean of multicultural affairs; Dawn LaFrance, associate director of counseling and psychological services; and Tennille Haynes, associate director of the Center for Leadership and Student Involvement, who are all members of the campus chapter of the National Coalition Building Institute.

They asked participants to consider the question, "What do you think needs to change for Colgate to be a more inclusive and equitable community?"

Approximately 25 students took to the stage and discussed a wide range of topics, including bias incidents, self-segregation, classism, sexual harassment, and the need to take what is discussed in the classroom about racism and continue the conversation in dorm rooms and around campus.

Students shared personal reflections and urged classmates to be agents of positive change.

One student said, "Home is never perfect, but Colgate is my home."

LaFrance told audience members that NCBI, the ALANA Affairs Committee, and other campus groups will continue to solicit input to include in a report to be delivered to the administration by Dec. 1. The report will include recommendations on ways to improve the campus climate.

The facilitators urged students and other campus community members to email alanaaffairs@colgate.edu with their thoughts and suggestions, and to learn more about NCBI and its extensive programming.

Herbst said that while the university had enacted a strong anti bias/harassment policy in 2009, there is always more the university can do to ensure a welcoming environment for each and every student.

"This has been an enlightening and important conversation," he said. "We must have many more and continue to act collectively."

And, here is what the Maroon News posted about the comments, changes on its website and its new policy on read comments:

Over the past several weeks, the Maroon-News has been enmeshed in a series of events that have become quite the hotbed of issues here on campus. As this year's Editors-in-Chief, we have been in the middle of most of this, but haven't yet had the chance to express to the Colgate community exactly what occurred, why certain decisions were made and the results of the past week's events. We hope that this response will help to clear up some of the confusion that has been surrounding these events and that the policies we are now putting in place will prevent future equally upsetting occurrences.

On the afternoon of Friday, September 23, we became aware that several offensive comments were posted on the Maroon-News website in response to Trinel Torian's commentary article, "If Only Everyone Were White." Upon looking at the website, the decision was made to temporarily disable commenting on the article while the editors identified and removed these posts. This decision was made in accordance with the Maroon-News's online commenting policy at the time, which stated that, "Readers are encouraged to comment on articles in a respectful manner. Comments that are inflammatory, i.e. involve personal attacks or racist, homophobic, ethnic, and/or profane slurs, will be deleted immediately. Furthermore, all comments that include spam or advertisements will be deleted." This comment policy was available on the Maroon-News website at the time of the offensive posts, under the "Information" tab. Since only one of us was on campus and that editor didn't become aware of this issue until late Friday afternoon, we temporarily disabled all comment­ing on the article until the editor who was still on campus could sort through and delete the offensive comments. We in no way intended to censor those who made appropriate and civil comments on the website; our decision was based solely on our responsibility to remove the offensive comments in line with our existing commenting policy. We feel that allowing such hateful comments to remain on the website would have been unacceptable, as they were clearly intended to target specific individuals and groups in a malicious way. Further, our intention was to re-enable commenting as soon as the offensive posts could be identified and removed. However, as members of the Colgate community began to pas­sionately respond to the offensive posts and the removal of the commenting feature from the article, we came to the decision that a new online commenting policy was necessary, one which would more fully map out what comments are considered offensive or inappropriate, stress the Maroon-News's unwillingness to tolerate such comments on the website and clearly express to the Colgate community the Maroon-News's right to remove such posts.

As a result, the Maroon-News editorial staff held an emergency meeting, at which point the need to develop and publicize a more comprehensive online comment policy was discussed. That was when we published our online statement indicating that commenting would be disabled site-wide pending the development of the online commenting policy. Once we were both back on campus, we worked for several days to develop a more comprehensive policy that would clearly establish the types of offensive or inappropriate com­ments that will not be allowed to remain on the website. Considering the campus's lack of understanding as to why the Maroon-News removed (and will remove) such comments, we felt it was imperative to not only expand our commenting policy, but also to make this policy apparent to the public. Thus, we decided to print the comment policy in this week's issue, and also make this policy available on the website. This updated, extensive commenting policy is much more thorough in defining the types of offensive or inappropriate comments the Maroon-News will not allow to remain online. We firmly believe that the comment feature on the Maroon-News.com should be a feature that promotes intellectual discussion and respectful debate, rather than a feature that acts as a platform for users to post hurtful and offensive speech.

Commenting on the Maroon-News website will be reinstated shortly. As part of our new online commenting policy, we are encouraging members of the Colgate community to help monitor the comments being posted on the website and report any instances where online posts appear to be in violation of the policy below. We hope that the Colgate community can help us further our goal of eliminating offensive and inappropriate comments from the website.

We understand the misconceptions and confusions that took hold over the past week, but we hope that this response will help to clear up many of those misunderstandings and help us to move forward. In the future, we hope that commenting on the Maroon-News website will continue to be a place where Colgate community members can have thoughtful, civil discussions about the articles printed each week and that it will never again reach this hateful point. We have pride in our publication and in the Colgate community and believe things can get better from here.

Effective immediately, the new online commenting policy is as follows:

Readers are encouraged to comment on articles in a respectful manner. The Colgate Maroon-News believes that online commenting should promote polite debate and intelligent discussion, and that our website should not become a platform for individuals to post ignorant, offensive or otherwise inappropriate remarks.