In a speech I gave to a group of student activists yesterday, I said that part of how the culture moves from seeing campuses as quiet to seeing them as hotbeds of student protest is by simply beginning to pay attention to what’s been happening all along.

Student protest has always been a feature of American college life. There’s always something going on. Sometimes there’s more stuff going on, definitely, but there’s always something. Always quite a lot, actually. So when you start to pay attention, when you start looking, you’re bound to see stuff you weren’t expecting to see.

Which makes it hard to know how to interpret the stories that have been coming to my attention today.

Anyone who’s been following this blog recently knows about the string of racist incidents at UC San Diego over the last couple of weeks. First there was the “Compton Cookout” party invitation, urging attendees to dress and act as caricatures of black America, then there was the vile defense of that party presented on student-run campus television, and then there was the noose that was hung from a light fixture in the campus library late Thursday night.

Yesterday I heard of another bias incident on a California campus — a swastika drawn on a Jewish student’s dorm room door at UC Davis, earlier this week. This morning I learned that the LGBT center at Davis had been vandalized with anti-gay slogans. And just an hour or so ago, I found out that someone dumped a bunch of cotton balls in front of the Black Culture Center at the University of Missouri on Friday morning.

Are all of these incidents related? Probably not. Are they just coincidence? Maybe.

Maybe.

But maybe I’m just seeing them because I’m looking. Maybe this isn’t a weird coincidence at all, but just a slightly-more-disgusting-than-average week in campus hate crimes.

Or maybe it’s somewhere in between.

I don’t know.

In the same week that students at the University of California San Diego found a noose hanging in their campus library, two acts of bias-related vandalism were perpetrated at the system’s Davis campus five hundred miles north.

On Friday, university officials revealed that a two-inch swastika had been carved in the dorm-room door of a Jewish student earlier in the week. That same night, the door of the campus Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) Resource Center was defaced with spray-painted anti-gay words and slogans.

The LGBT Resource Center will be holding a town hall meeting to discuss the incident on Monday at 5:30 pm.

In his Friday statement on the noose incident at the University of California San Diego, UC President Mark Yudof said that “a student has come forward and claimed she and two others were responsible.”

But in a press conference that afternoon UC San Diego Chancellor Marye Anne Fox refused to comment on the other students involved, and as of today it appears that only the student who came forward voluntarily has been suspended.

Campus and police investigations of the incident are apparently continuing, but with the UCSD Black Student Union calling for the campus to be closed because of safety concerns, it is startling that so little has been made known about these alleged accomplices. Have they been identified? Have they been questioned? Are they still on campus? Will they be attending classes tomorrow?

It’s not surprising that the university is keeping quiet about the details of an ongoing investigation, particularly in its early stages, but administrators will soon face strong pressure to be more forthcoming.

Update | Students engaged in peaceful, nonviolent protests at campuses across the University of California system have faced serious criminal and disciplinary consequences for their actions in the last six months. More such protests — and more such arrests and disciplinary actions — are likely coming this week.

In this time of crisis, the university needs to demonstrate that all students caught up in its disciplinary machinery will receive fair and appropriate treatment.

Monday update | The UCSD student newspaper has run a statement that it claims was written by the student who hung the noose in the library. In it, the student claims that a friend of hers made the noose from a piece of discarded rope “without thinking of any of its connotations or the current racial climate at UCSD,” and that she hung it at the desk unthinkingly days before it was discovered. “As a minority student who sympathizes with the students that have been affected by recent issues on campus,” she writes, “I am distraught to know that I have unintentionally added to their pain.”

Have you written something worth reading recently? Conducted an action we should know about? Started a blog, or just posted to one? Or maybe you’ve got something coming up that you want to clue us into?

If so, say it here! Include a short description, so we know what we’re clicking through to, and feel free to post links to other folks’ great stuff as well.

Last week’s Shameless Self-Promotion Sunday, which drew some really exciting responses, can be found here.

I’m speaking at the Center for American Progress this morning, then having lunch with a friend and catching a train back to NYC. I may get a chance to post at some point, but I may not.

If there’s anything going on you want me to know about, feel free to leave a comment. (I’ll be updating both the regular and the March 4 Monday Maps this week, so …)