From today's Daily Pennsylvanian:

On January 13, 1993, a College freshman's cry of "water buffalo" became a shout that echoed throughout the University -- eventually spawning what would become the infamous Water Buffalo affair.

That April, an entire press run of the Daily Pennsylvanian was stolen by a group of students in order to protest the publication of a controversial columnist's work.

Now, ten years later, the DP has decided to take a weeklong, in-depth look at that tense year, its participants, causes and effects.

From the start, 1993 was an atypical year. Then-University President Sheldon Hackney had just been nominated to head the National Endowment for the Humanities under the Clinton administration and was on his way out. The school was about to resettle itself after his 12-year term.

The scandal began when Eden Jacobowitz, then a first-year resident of High Rise East, became frustrated by the clamorous Founders' Day celebrations of 15 Delta Sigma Theta sisters outside his room. He and other students began yelling out their windows, urging the girls to quiet down.

"Shut up, you water buffalo -- if you want to party go to the zoo," Jacobowitz famously yelled, after a period of frustration at what he claimed was incessant noise.

He was not the only student to scream out to the sisters. Still, Jacobowitz was the only one who came forward when Penn Police, spurred on by five infuriated sisters of the traditionally black sorority, who felt the shouts had violated the University's racial harassment codes, searched the dorm for perpetrators of the offense.

Jacobowitz was also the only student who admitted that he had seen that the sisters were black when he was questioned by the police the following day.

It was an easy choice, then, for Penn's administrative judicial inquiry officer Robin Read, to charge him with having violated Penn's newly rewritten harassment codes.

If you are interested in the history of campus PC, in the mechanics of administrative repression in higher ed, and in the measures a highly motivated few have taken to protect civil liberties on our increasingly illiberal campuses, the DP's series is one you won't want to miss.