• printer friendly
• mail this article
• iPod format
• digg

If you ask Chancellor Ralph J. Cicerone, he’ll tell you there was an “incident” at UC Irvine last Thursday night.

If you ask anyone else, it was a hate crime – no qualifications.

But I guess if you’re Cicerone, an investigation by the UCI police department and the FBI spells “incident” – an “incident,” he finally wrote in an e-mail to the student body on Monday evening, “which is now being classified as a hate crime.”

A wall made of cardboard boxes, constructed by the Society of Arab Students and intended to represent the security fence in Israel, was set on fire sometime around midnight. It burned to the ground.

By Friday, the Southern California office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations was calling for an investigation. By Saturday, the Associated Press was covering it, with the national networks just behind. On Monday, the news vans were on campus – and Cicerone was compelled to issue a statement.

But aside from the requisite response to media attention, there hasn’t been any campus reaction.

I was on campus that Thursday night. And Friday. And again on Sunday. Nothing.

“Our campus is really, really, really dead on Friday,” explains Muzzammil Ahussain, a third-year economics student at UCI and a member of the Muslim Student Union. He said police informed the Society of Arab Students and the Muslim Student Union of the fire after it was reported, and that members knew by Friday morning.

But he was right: Friday morning on campus was, well, dead. It felt like a Sunday morning at UCLA.

Someone on Friday strung up a sign reading “hate crimes will not silence us” in place of the wall. The New University, the weekly campus newspaper, says it has received some letters to the editor. (The paper’s editorial board ignored the crime, writing instead on Monday about the Los Angeles Lakers.)

And that’s about it.

Oh, there’s a student rally planned for Thursday.

So to get this straight: A symbolic wall burns to the ground during a week called “Tragedy in the Holy Land,” the university doesn’t release information about it until two days later and students are silent – except to plan a rally set for a week later.

Asked how the university is responding, aside from Cicerone’s statement, the head of media relations says, well, we’re investigating it.

There ends the university’s responsibility.

For what it’s worth, the chancellor’s remark in his Monday e-mail that “events such as these are, unfortunately, becoming more common in our society and on university campuses” doesn’t fly with the statistics UCI and other campuses have reported over the past several years, pursuant to the Clery Act. Those records suggest that arson attacks have been generally declining since 1999. UCI has seen none.

As general campus response to this “incident” straddles the line between silence and contrived disapproval, Cicerone left students with some words of wisdom: “The recent incident at UCI stimulates us to renew our commitment to mutual respect.”

I guess he, and the rest of campus, are humming Kumbaya.

E-mail Jenkins at cjenkins@media.ucla.edu.