Conscience on Campus.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Criticism of Berkeley student David Cash

At last, Berkeley students have found an issue compelling enough to wake them from their torpor: sophomore David Cash, the moral reprobate who witnessed his friend threaten and commence to molest a seven-year-old girl, Sherrice Iverson, in the stall of a women's restroom in Nevada. Cash simply walked away, tactfully giving his friend a little privacy. The perpetrator, Jeremy Strohmeyer, who was convicted of sexually assaulting Sherrice and then drowning her in the toilet, is now behind bars for life, while Cash is free to pursue his studies of--god help us, nuclear engineering--on the Berkeley campus.

Cash reportedly boasted last summer that his new-found notoriety as Strohmeyer's pal had boosted his ability to score with women. But most Berkeley students, understandably enough, do not want to risk using the same dining hall utensils or handling the same reserve books that may have encountered David Cash's noxious touch. They want him expelled, and since the administration refuses to do so on the grounds that Cash, technically speaking, has committed no crime, they want him shunned.

"Do not sit near him in the dining hall or in class. Refuse to be his roommate or his lab partner. If he talks to you do not hear him," urges one first-year student in the Daily Cal. Fearing vigilante attacks, the administration has assigned a security guard to Cash, and students are complaining about this, too, as if the guard's wages were already showing up on their tuition bills.

So what do you do: salute the sensitivities of today's Berkeley students or bemoan the fact that their target is, in the scheme of things, so tiny?

Affirmative action, for example, which was banned by California's Proposition 209 two years ago, rates only a fraction of the emotional intensity surrounding Cash. There were two days of pro-affirmative action protests in October, but they were organized by U.C. faculty members and generated only a lukewarm response from the now overwhelmingly white and Asian American student body.

It may be that, at some subconscious level, Cash is a coded way of taking up the race debate that Prop. 209 so rudely ended. He is white, as is Strohmeyer, while Sherrice Iverson was black as well as poor. What the state seems to be saying, through its university system, is that it will in no way bestir itself to educate black kids but doesn't mind nurturing the kind of people who so lightheartedly assent to their murders.

Sherrice Iverson, if she had lived so...