Did you feel frightened for your safety when attending Wake County school board meetings during the period of protests and arrests in 2010?

That's the charge that former Wake County school board chairman Ron Margiotta made during an interview Monday on the Bill LuMaye Show on WPTF to explain why he feels the protesters should go to trial instead of getting mediation.

Margiotta linked the protesters to Students for a Democratic Society, the leftist activist group that dates back to the 1960s. Some of the SDS members formed the Weather Underground, which was linked to bombings in the 1970s.

A higher education trade journal has parachuted into the UNC Chapel Hill/Tom Tancredo/tuition-for-illegal-immigrants/student protestors brouhaha with a story about Youth for Western Civilization, the student organization that brought the controversial congressman to campus last week.

If you recall, Tancredo's planned speaking engagement didn't go so well. He barely got started before student protesters essentially drove him from the room amid the sound of a shattered window pane.

Youth for Western Civilization is a small student group. It has less than 10 chapters nationally and on the Chapel Hill campus, it has about that many members. But it certainly got people's eye last week bringing Tancredo in.

As Riley Matheson, the head of the local chapter, put it in this Inside Higher Ed article: "We're still considered probably by most students to be sort of a rogue group right now."

It was a little tense in the Bingham Hall classroom as former congressman Tom Tancredo was attempting to discuss his opposition to in-state tuition benefits for illegal immigrants. Students were hissing, and a couple stretched a broad banner across the front of the room, blocking him.

But the event Tuesday night at UNC Chapel Hill still might have continued, had not a window broken. In that moment, the university got its black eye. Murmurs grew louder, people rose from their seats and Tancredo bolted.

The broken window, incidentally, is valued at $50.

This from the official UNC police report on the incident, which you can view for yourself by clicking on the attachment to this blog entry. 

The report tells one story. Student protesters tell a different one, claiming police roughed some of them up and shot pepper spray at them. 

Read more about that here.

The national leader for Youth for Western Civilization, whose UNC chapter brought Tancredo to campus, would like the university to pay to bring Tancredo back and try it all again.

To that, UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp told me yesterday: "If a student group comes to me and wants to do that, I'll listen."

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