OXFORD, Miss. — Every seat in the house was sold out for Friday’s performance of “The Laramie Project,” a play staged by the University of Mississippi theater department about an anti-gay hate crime.

Hundreds of miles away, the Ole Miss football team was preparing to take on Auburn.

The two groups of students, about as far apart as any cultural groups on a college campus could be, became linked this week after football players and other freshmen disrupted the play with homophobic heckling.

University officials are investigating the episode, employing a new bias incident response team developed earlier this year.

The university, despite enormous changes, still struggles with the legacy of its integration in 1962 that resulted in two deaths and dozens of injuries.Since then, the university has made inclusion and racial healing a theme, but problems persist.