Sunday, I posed a quasi-rhetorical question about double standards in campus hate crimes. My examples were drawn from recent incidents at California's Claremont colleges, where the world essentially stopped turning last week after racial slurs were written on a professor's car, and Cornell, where authorities refuse to classify the brutal November beating of a white student by six black Ithaca residents as a hate crime, despite her reports that they cursed her for being white as they punched and kicked her in the face.

The question gains additional point in light of the new information that the Claremont professor--who has a two-year contract to teach at the school--vandalized her own car, thus faking the hate crime that brought the campus to its knees last week. Claremont McKenna's official statement on the matter notes that the college is "conducting a further investigation into the professorís employment relationship with the College for the remainder of this academic year. No decision has been made at this time." Kudos to the college for publicizing the fact that this was a hoax. Too often, college administrations muffle such news, especially when it comes after an uproar as loud at the one that took place in Claremont last week.

For more on faked hate on campus, see this John Leo column.

Thanks to Amber Taylor for the alert.

UPDATE: More at Class Maledictorian, including pictures of the crime scene and the victim perp.

UPDATE: David Bernstein and John Rosenberg have much more, including the information that before she was caught, Kerri Dunn called the vandalism of her car a "well planned-out act of terrorism." Rosenberg links to an article in today's L.A. Times reporting that Dunn may be charged with a felony for lying to federal investigators. The Times also interviews Stanford sociologist Lee Ross, who offers a chilling rationalization for Dunn's behavior:

Lee Ross, a social psychologist on the faculty at Stanford University, said that if Dunn is proven to have committed the vandalism, the professor may still have raised people's awareness about racism. "One ironic thing is that doing this may actually have accomplished some of her goals, if her goal was to make people feel that racism was present and that there was danger of white backlash," Ross said.

Ross also discussed the possible motive of someone perpetrating a hoax.

"Sometimes people invent facts because they believe that the conclusion that it would lead people to is true," he said. "So they convince themselves that, in some deep way, they're not really lying or they're not really being dishonest because the message they're conveying is one that's true."