War-related animosities are running high on campuses across the country.

At Yale, a string of incidents aimed at anti-war protesters has prompted Dean Richard Brodhead to issue a campus-wide email reminding students of Yale's commitment to free expression and tolerance. First there was the case of Katherine Lo, who said a group of men bearing a wooden plank tried to break into her room after she hung an upside-down flag out her window. When they failed to break into her room, they left a threatening message containing anti-Muslim slurs on her message board (there is skepticism among some bloggers about this event, but others claim to have verified its credibility).

Then there was the student who said he was spat on for participating in an anti-war vigil in a Yale dining hall.

Then there was the student who tore down the upside-down flag hung by a group of protesters because it offended him.

And there was the threatening note found on the ground outside Yale's Afro-American Cultural Center Wednesday night: "I hope you protesters and your children are killed in the next terrorist attack," it read. The note was scrawled on an anti-war flyer, and was signed "F--- you." Though it may sound like a stretch to read the flyer's threatening message as a racist one simply because of its physical proximity to the Afro-American Cultural Center, some are doing just that: "It's very clear this is the same tactic of using hate speech or hate crime to try to silence people," Afro-American Cultural Center staff member Christopher Jordan '04 said. "It's targeting a specific group based on their race, ethnicity and religion."

At Berkeley, there have been similar outbreaks of hostility against protesters. On Wednesday, a group of students were conducting a die-in on Sproul Plaza as part of the annual Students for Justice in Palestine rally. A woman who is also a member of the pro-Israel student group DAFKA arrived on the scene dressed in a Muslim headscarf and wearing fake dynamite strapped to her body. Chanting "Free Palestine" in a mocking way, she attempted to walk through the prone students participating in the die-in. One of them spread his arms to prevent her--at which point she spat in his face. Police told her to leave campus for the rest of the day; she said she only spat because she felt threatened by the man who had spread his arms. Police are trying to determine if this is a hate crime, and if so, who committed it (the woman claims her headscarf was pulled off by another student).

Yesterday also marked the first episode of "hate graffiti" on Berkeley's campus. On the outside of the campus gym, the following messages were scrawled in thick black marker: "Mohammed is an asshole!" and "All people named Mohammed need to die!" This one is being treated as a hate crime.

Last week at Berkeley, a Sikh student was attacked as he walked to class. Students are demanding that the student code of conduct be amended to say that it is not acceptable for students to commit hate crimes. Such an amendment would in turn require the school to define what constitutes a hate crime.

These are just a few examples from just two campuses. And the unsolved episodes among them should all be taken with grains of salt: faking hate crimes is a popular pastime on campuses, where self-appointed victims can garner loads of attention and sympathy for the oppression they have allegedly experienced and where activists are so eager for the validation such crimes give to their causes that they have been known both to fake such crimes themselves and to argue, when faked crimes are exposed, that they nonetheless prove that hate is a terrible and defining problem on campus (I've provided some examples and discussion here).

Regardless of the ambiguity that inevitably surrounds such events, it's clear that something is going desperately wrong on campuses across the country. The students involved are some of the most intelligent in the world, getting some of the best education that the world has to offer--or so conventional wisdom would have us believe. Moreover, the schools these students attend are among the most vocal, active supporters of diversity and multiculturalism around. These students are wise to the ways of tolerance and inclusion, proud celebrants of difference all--or so the conventional wisdom would have us believe. But they are also wise in the ways of victimhood, and very, very savvy politicians. They know how to exploit situations and how to promote themselves. At the same time, they don't know much at all about settling differences in a civil way: We don't have to determine which hate crimes are real and which are faked to be able to determine this much. We can also learn from these otherwise ambiguous events a great deal about how some of America's most elite college students think about conflict and personal expression. With all the emphasis on today's campuses on protesting, demonstrating, rallying, taking sides, making signs, and holding vigils, there is comparatively little emphasis on learning to move beyond melodramatic theatrics, beyond shock and sound bites, and toward reasoned, measured, articulate self-expression and its interactive corollaries, reasoned, measured, articulate debate and the mutual respect and tolerance that arises from it.

These are the students of the Nicholas De Genova school of civic engagement. To call what is happening on Berkeley's and Yale's campuses a "rash of hate crimes" is to mask a far more central truth: what we see on both coasts is the sad and frightening spectacle of students putting theory into practice, of young adults applying the ideological lessons of the politicized classroom to their daily lives.

"Moreover, the schools these students attend are among the most vocal, active supporters of diversity and multiculturalism around."

For those incidents that are not faked, this is the explanation: it's backlash. There's a limit to the tolerance people have for being scolded and accused of harboring hate when they haven't done anything. This is the perception that many people have of mandatory sensitivity training, among other things. I'm not saying this to excuse such actions - they're inexcusable of course - but to offer an explanation of why they happen where they happen.

Absolutely! They're intelligent and so forth, but they're still immature, so in response to the steady drumbeat of indoctrination, they take refuge in doing very stupid things.

I infer that these acts of stupidity mostly occur because (a) the perpetrators know this will drive the nanny-demics wild and (b) they know it's impossible to have any sort of rational debate with them on the issues.

It takes a great deal of maturity to be able to shrug when faced with the relentless Stalinist yammering of the professorate and simply walk away.

These incidents, like blackface shows at frats, come from a group of people who have been forcefed with "diversity" and "tolerance" since they were in kindergarten. Gee--I guess it didn't work. More, more re-education is needed. Maybe they should be placed in special camps.

I think Erin has the best explanation. Students have learned that "acting out" is acceptable and even laudable. And a lot easier than actually dealing with the other side's arguments. Here's another illustration. I agree with much of the substance of what David Horowitz says but am ofen embarassed and put off by his techniques and approach. Well, where did he learn those? As a Berkeley radical.

As usual, the Yale Daily News was completely wrong. On Thrusday it issued a correction stating that the Yale Police Department did not confirm that the alleged incident occurred byt only that it had been alleged. Given that it's been two weeks and they can't even confirm that the events actually happened, and that a crime like this in a Yale residential college should be ridiculously easy to solve, I really think it's a hoax.

Even if it did happen, why is it the "message" behind the incident that matters more than the fact that third-degree burglary (a one to five felony) occurred? If this happened to me, I would be screaming for arrests, charges and prison time, not about how people tried to "silence" me.

How much of this arises because of the campaign against "binge drinking"? Could some of the excess energy or uncomfortable emotions involved have been worked off around a keg?

How attributable is all this to the cult of "cultural relativity" and "tolerance?" If ideas are culturally-determined and are only tools for the expansion of power, there is not much point in debating about things. So in this worldview, the only way to settle disagreements, finally, must be violence. This is never explicitly said; indeed it would be greeted with shrill horror, but it is strongly implied.

This is what happens when students are not "allowed" to vent their "politically incorrect" feelings in the classroom or even in society. It's also a response to these PC-hatemongers--I was at the Berkeley "Palestinian" protests last year--when the Arabs and their sympathizers were yelling that Hitler should have finished the job, that Jews are Nazis, etc.

You're not allowed to be critical of Islam. Ever.
Talk about the abuse of women embedded in the Koran? Riiiight. You'll be shouted down faster than someone who points out that maybe, just maybe, suicide bombing is reprehensible (or, worse yet, MURDER).

You're not allowed to be critical of affirmative action. Ever. If you are, you're racist.

You're not allowed to be critical of a black society/culture that has 70% illegitimacy rate. That rate is the most direct correlation ever seen between a societal trait and criminality.

So, instead of being allowed to quietly, reasonably bring up criticisms of Mohammed (gee, he really wasn't a peaceful guy, was he?)...you put up with it.....until you just can't take it anymore. Sure, maybe these students should just "take it".

But then again, maybe the "liberal" students should look into their suppression of dissent.