About 2 dozen Harvard Law School students barged into Dean Martha Minow's Constitutional Law class and demanded that their issue be talked about immediately.

The NYT reports in an article about the aftermath of finding black tape on the glass of framed photographs of black law professors at the law school. It's not known who put the tape on the photographs or why, but the incident brought — as the Times puts it —"a new sense of urgency to discussions about race and racial discrimination that have spread across this campus as well as universities and graduate schools around the country."

Was it "a pretty clear act of intolerance, racism," as the student government president said, or was it an effort to create a new sense of urgency to discussions about race? Does anyone want to know the truth or is the idea to not let a sense of urgency go to waste? I suppose the student activists would say the source of the tape is a side issue, a distraction, and the general questions of racism are worthy of discussion even if the tape was some anti-racism activist's trick to ramp up the agitation.

Would a real racist just put gaffer's tape on the glass? Gaffer's tape "leaves little or no residue and will generally not damage most surfaces when it is removed." Wouldn't someone who really hated those black professors do something more destructive, like break the glass or try to get at the photographs?

Ah, but the tape has a history. The NYT reveals that black tape was used earlier by anti-racism activists a few weeks ago to cover up the Harvard Law School crest on various mats. (As blogged on November 4th, the crest was protested because of its connection to a slave-owning family.) Maybe someone who didn't like the tape on the mats felt motivated to protest the protest by moving the tape from the crest to the portraits, perhaps more of a lightweight tit for tat than deep-seated racism.

Anyway, it troubles me that students would disrupt and end a class that other students have prepared for and have put the time into attending. It troubles me that students would disrespect a professor and dean who has no connection to racism other than her position of leadership in an institution that (they think) has not done enough. Minow did respond, it seems, immediately:

Shortly after noon, hundreds of students — as well as faculty members and administrators, including Ms. Minow — gathered for what the law school called a community meeting, filling one large room and much of another. Ms. Minow acknowledged that racism was an issue at Harvard as it was around the country. “Racism exists in America and in the United States and in Harvard and in Harvard Law School,” said Ms. Minow, who has written extensively on topics like school desegregation.

But some students said the administration had not done enough to make the school fully inclusive of minority students and faculty members and voiced an array of concerns that ranged from the relatively low number of black professors — there are 12 black permanent full-time faculty members out of 125 — to the way the school taught law.

I'd like to see more detail about what the "array of concerns" was (other than the ratio of black to nonblack professors). As to the way law is taught, that's a perennial subject of complaints among law students, but the argument that it's a racial problem needs some explication. The Times quotes a student claiming that Harvard lawprofs have "just forced [students] to regurgitate" the cases, but I find that extremely hard to believe.