Here's a corker from Victor Davis Hanson of The National Review on why and how support for Palestinians has taken off amongst the European and American left since 9/11.

Pay special attention to number five in Hanson's list of reasons why so many people suddenly hate Israel: "Aristocratic Guilt and the Cult of the Underdog." The section pretty much says it all about what's going on on U.S. campuses, if nothing else. Take an insulated, affluent, largely white and largely young student population; add the influence of an insulated, overwhelmingly left-leaning faculty; stir in the omnipresent guilt-inducing leavening of "diversity" and "multiculturalism;" and what do you get? Not an educated opinion on the situation in the Middle East, nor a measured, respectful discussion about policy and the prospects for peace, but a dangerously naive radicalism on the part of students who are better schooled in the pseudo-sensitive machinations of multiculturalism than in actual history or actual political science or actual economics or actual ethics, along with a dangerously disingenuous radicalism on the part of a professoriate that feeds (very well) off America at the same time that it makes contempt for this country the very fabric of radical intellectual chic. If nothing else is being proven by the current wave of campus unrest, it is that radical thought can become fundamentalist dogma on American campuses just as readily as it can elsewhere. Especially when it never has to explain itself, or encounter opposition.

On a related note: The University of Michigan has successfully defended itself (barely) in the discrimination lawsuit filed in 1997 by Barbara Grutter, who claimed that the law school unfairly denied her admission in order to make room for less-qualified black and Hispanic students. The decision, which overturned a previous ruling and conflicts with related rulings in other states, was tight (5-4) and contentious. An appeal is expected to be heard before the Supreme Court in what will certainly be a landmark ruling on the constitutionality of race-based admissions policies.

Different people have covered this decision different ways, depending on how they feel about affirmative action. Here are links to articles:

The New York Times
The Washington Times
Washington Post
The Chronicle of Higher Education (with lots of deep links to earlier stories)
The Michigan Review, conservative campus paper
The Michigan Daily, liberal student paper, with many additional related stories and editorials

The ruling gets depicted a bit differently from one article to the next. Form your own opinion by reading the full text of the court's decision.