CALIFORNIA CAMPUS TROUBLES – AT 10:07 A.M. ET:  Shades of the 1960s, there is trouble on the campuses of the University of California.  The New York Times reports:

SAN DIEGO — It began, as so many racial flare-ups on campus do, with a prank that some called malicious, others insensitive.

Students at the University of California, San Diego, held an off-campus “Compton Cookout” Feb. 15 to mock Black History Month, with guests invited to don gold teeth in the style of rappers from the Los Angeles suburb of Compton, eat watermelon, and dress in baggy athletic wear.

Outrage ensued from the relatively small black student population here and their supporters, who grew more inflamed when a satirical campus television program broadcast a segment on the party and used a racial epithet to denounce black students.

On Thursday night, a third incident, a student’s hanging a noose from a bookcase in the main library, spurred a large, multicultural mass of chanting and drumming students to occupy the chancellor’s office for several hours on Friday and fed a simmering, some say much-needed, debate over race relations.

That's the tip of the proverbial iceberg.  At Berkeley, demonstrations against tuition hikes have turned violent.  In one recent incident, someone tried to set fire to the chancellor's house.

And just a few weeks ago, in an incident that got national attention, Muslim students at the University of California at Irvine, and from surrounding areas, tried so vigorously to prevent the Israeli ambassador to the United States from speaking that 11 were arrested.  Irvine has been a tinderbox for years.

California campuses often influence colleges throughout the country, and we wonder if we're seeing the start of new campus unrest.

However, let me note this:  One thing we see, as we've seen since the 1960s, is that various groups on campus are treated quite differently, depending on their popularity with the political left.  If African-Americans express a concern, as black students have, appropriately and correctly, at San Diego, it's addressed immediately.  But other groups, like Christians, Jews, conservatives, and those less favored by the academic establishment, often see their protests ignored or even ridiculed.  The arrests at Irvine represented the first serious response to years of intimidating behavior by some Muslim students there. 

If there is a new period of campus unrest before us, college leaders would be well advised to treat grievances equally.  There is a backlash building against colleges in this time of economic stress, and how student groups are treated will play a role in whether that backlash grows.

February 27, 2010