A group of students at the University of California San Diego held a racist “Compton Cookout” last weekend, billed as a commemoration of Black History Month. The party’s invitation promised “chicken, coolade, and of course Watermelon,” and encouraged partygoers to dress and act “ghetto.” (The full invitation, even more repulsive than these excerpts indicate, can be found here.)

Members of the Pi Kappa Alpha (Pike) fraternity were allegedly involved in planning the party, which took place off campus. Local and national officers in the fraternity have since condemned the party, and denied that it was an officially sponsored frat event.

The university is investigating the incident, and planning a teach-in on “mutual respect and civility” to be held next Wednesday.

More than 70% of UCSD’s student body is of color, but only 2% is black.

February 21 Update | The UCSD Black Student Union has presented the university’s chancellor with a statement on the party and its aftermath, saying that a “toxic environment” exists “for African-American students on this campus.” The statement claims that on Friday night a group of students on the campus’s student-run television statement defended the party and used a racial epithet to describe those who have criticized it.

The BSU’s statement notes that the incidents surrounding the party have “has marked UC San Diego as a racist university,” hampering efforts to recruit and retain students of color. It calls for “those students involved in the shameful racist acts” to be suspended from the university, and presents a list of other demands. (I received the BSU’s statement through a friend’s Facebook post, but will link to it directly when it is made publicly available.)

The UCSD BSU will be holding a general meeting tomorrow evening, and members of the group are calling on campuses across California to hold solidarity actions in conjunction with UCSD’s planned Wednesday teach-in.

I’ll update this post further when I have more details — if you have information on the situation at UCSD, relevant links, or news about solidarity actions, post them here or email me directly.

Yesterday Gregory Cendana, president of the United States Student Association, made a speech billed as a State of the Student Union, posting it as video and text on USSA’s website and promoting it heavily on Facebook and Twitter. The speech describes American student life as “on the brink of fundamental change,” and pledges USSA to taking a leading role in making the 2010s a “decade of student power.”

The US Student Association, founded in 1947 as a federation of American student governments, has played many roles in its six-decade history, from service work to radical activism to federal lobbying. With this speech Cendana articulates a vision of an Association that bridges the divide between the legislative politics of Washington and the grassroots activism of America’s campuses.

Cendana’s speech is longer on federal policy positions than on specific plans for supporting America’s current wave of activism, and it tends to view that activism through the lens of electoral organizing, USSA’s primary focus. But with the March 4 national day of action just two weeks away, the speech amounts to a timely and high-profile embrace of that organizing project.

Earlier this month, USSA announced that their next National Student Congress will be held at UCLA this July. As students in California and beyond work in the coming weeks and months to build that state’s recent uprising into a sustained national movement, the role that USSA chooses to play will be well worth watching.

Well, this is annoying. Last April, HBO announced that it was creating a series set in a college Women’s Studies department. It was pitched as a feminist comedy, and it was going to star Julie White, who was fantastic as the funeral home chain executive on Six Feet Under. The co-creators were a veteran woman television writer and an executive producer for the Daily Show and Colbert Report.

But now it’s apparently not happening.

Jezebel has a story up today about how guy-oriented HBO’s post-Sex and the City lineup is, and down in the seventh paragraph it mentions that a flack told their reporter that Women’s Studies “is no longer in development,” which is TV-speak for dead. Oh well.

At least David Simon‘s Treme is coming to HBO this spring. And on the higher-education-sitcom front, I’m glad I turned out to be wrong about Community, which hardly sucks at all.

At the University of Alabama at Huntsville this afternoon, biology professor Amy Bishop apparently opened fire at a meeting at which she was told that she would not be granted tenure. Three of her colleagues were killed, including the chair of her department, and three more were wounded.

Bloggers started weighing in on the meaning of the incident almost immediately, of course, as they always do. And as always, their posts said much more about them than about the incident itself.

The Blog Prof took a tack that I suspect we’re going to be seeing a lot of at academic blogs — blaming the stressfulness of the tenure process. There’s already been plenty of gun control posting too, of course, both pro and con.

But it’s the right wing that has burst from the gate biggest and hardest … and weirdest.

At the anti-feminist site antimisandry.com, one poster suggests that women rarely commit this kind of violence because they don’t need to — “the law sides with [women] irrespective of facts and evidence,” he says, so they’re never driven to murder.

Even that, though, pales in comparison to this weirdo, who calls the alleged shooter an “Ivy League bitchess” and an “affirmative actioned flooz[y].” Oh, and a Maoist.

Morning Update | Someone got around to checking Bishop’s reviews at Rate My Professor, and discovered that one student characterized her as a “liberal.” Now the conservative blogosphere is lighting up with posts like this one calling Bishop a “Harvard-trained Left-wing Professor.”

City police in Hanover, New Hampshire, home of Dartmouth College, have come up with plans to send undercover cops into campus parties. The plans have been shelved temporarily in response to campus opposition, but remain a possibility for the near future.

The department announced the initiative, designed to curb underage drinking, last week, but it met with overwhelming disapproval from Dartmouth administrators, faculty, students, and alumni.

The plan calls for teams of two people — an officer and an underage plant — to go to the parties. If the under-21 operative was served alcohol, the officer would arrest the person who served the drink and issue a summons to the house’s owner. Fines for homeowners could be in the tens of thousands of dollars.

In announcing that there would be no raids for the time being, police warned the college to conduct its own crackdown. If they didn’t see a significant drop in alcohol-related issues “in a fairly short time frame,” the chief of police said, the department would begin conducting undercover operations as originally planned.