READER PIETER K WRITES:

I’ve been following the mounting hate on the campus of SFSU with alarm. I graduated from SFSU in 1991.

What I read today via you is horrifying.

I’m saddened and repulsed that this campus which provided me and many others with a sterling academic experience should be a home to such vile extremism.

I’d like to concur with your reader Allen Thorpe and here’s the place to start perhaps:

This page explicitly defines “Hate Incidents” and makes clear and precise distinctions between Hate Incidents and 1st Amendment protected free speech. By anyone’s definition I think, what occurred on campus as described by Laurie Zoloth falls under the former. This page on SFSU’s site (and other pages on the SFSU Human Relations department ) clearly says that hate incidents will not be permitted:

1.Speech or actions directed at inciting or producing imminent violence will not be permitted.

2.Speech likely to incite or produce violence will not be permitted.

3.Fighting words-those by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace will not be permitted.

4.Communication, which creates, an immediate danger of uncontrollable violence is not permitted.

5.Threats of violence, assaults, phone harassment and any criminal conduct will not be permitted.

6.Conduct that targets a particular individual and is so disruptive that the behavior interferes with a student’s ability to exercise his/her right to fully participate in the life of the university.

Also, this: “Behaviors which are intolerant, insensitive or discriminatory are deemed unacceptable. As such, they shall be addressed openly, promptly and constructively by the University, its administrators, faculty, staff and students” from the Principles of Conduct for a Multi-Cultural University, contained here.

[At] the very least, this sounds like grounds for immediate expulsion of any student who assailed the Hillel group from the entire Cal State system, were it possible to accurately document who did what when. Arrests might do the trick (big wake-up call to the Department of Public Safety). Would full-blown criminal or at least civil prosecution be an option?

I know next to nothing about law. You of course would have valuable insight into this. Any chance of it working, given that it could be established that it’s an actual crime?

Also, as a semi-related correlative, there’s this page on their site which is either part of the problem or part of the solution…or is it both? Either way, a terribly muddled affair which helps illustrate how academic environments can be fertile ground for stupidity and hate under the guise of sensitivity.

Check the “First-Aid Skills and Resources” list and I think you’ll see what I mean.

Finally, at the bottom of the page are contact phone numbers and email for relevant SFSU authorities that should probably be hearing about this.

Yes, they need to hear from everyone, and especially from alumni.

And I do think that if SFSU fails to enforce its own rules, and if students’ civil rights are denied as a result, it’s vulnerable to a lawsuit.

UPDATE: Pieter K must be a bigshot alumnus, as well as a cool record producer and DJ. SFSU’s President Robert Corrigan has posted a letter promising prosecution of the offenders:

The demonstrators’ behavior is not passing unchallenged. The University’s code of student discipline and event policy allow for individual and group sanctions ranging from warning to suspension to expulsion for certain violations, and some of what took place on Tuesday may well fall within that area. Our videotaped record of the event is being reviewed now by SFSU Public Safety to note violations and identify violators so that the University’s disciplinary procedures can begin. In one instance, that of a protestor who seized and stamped on an Israeli flag, the case has already gone forward. I fully expect to see other cases presented. . . .

It is a very few individuals who are fomenting this discord. Yet, as we see, their impact can be profound — if we allow it to be. Despite the claims of some, this is not an anti-Semitic campus. But as history shows us, silence and passivity can at times of crisis be very little different from complicity.

He’s certainly striking the right notes. But a little pressure should help to keep him on the right track.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Meryl Yourish has some thoughts, and some suggestions on how to keep the pressure up.