Los Angeles City College

A classroom dispute at Los Angeles City College in the emotional aftermath of Proposition 8 has given rise to a lawsuit testing the balance between 1st Amendment rights and school codes on offensive speech. Student Jonathan Lopez says his professor called him a "fascist bastard" and refused to let him finish his speech against same-sex marriage during a public speaking class last November, weeks after California voters approved the ban on such unions.

Two Los Angeles community colleges have been placed on probation by a regional accrediting commission, which faulted L.A. City and Trade-Technical colleges for inadequate planning and evaluation of the effectiveness of student programs. The sanction is the second of four increasingly serious actions that can be brought by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, which has jurisdiction over institutions in California, Hawaii and elsewhere.

To prepare us for the ironies in "A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler's Emigres and Exiles in Southern California," Dorothy Lamb Crawford first calls our attention to the intellectual pretensions of the Nazi elite. Adolf Hitler and his inner circle may have been thugs and murderers, but they imagined themselves to be the saviors of high civilization. Hitler, of course, was a failed artist and a devoted fan of Wagner. Josef Goebbels was the author of an unpublished novel.

Los Angeles Community College District trustees agreed Wednesday to lease part of the historic Van de Kamp's Bakery property to a charter high school, amid protests that officials broke a promise by dropping plans for a satellite campus at the site. The Glassell Park property, the subject of a ferocious preservationist fight a decade ago, underwent a $50-million to $60-million rehabilitation that saved the bakery's landmark 16th century Dutch town house facade in preparation for a campus.

Bakery site: A California Briefing item in Section A on May 7 said the Los Angeles Community College District was planning to turn over the Van de Kamp's bakery site in Glassell Park to a charter high school, and that Los Angeles City College could revive plans to place a satellite campus at the site after five years. The brief should have said the charter high school will lease the property.

Los Angeles City College has suspended most sports programs for at least a year to deal with a multimillion-dollar deficit. College President Jamillah Moore told trustees Wednesday that the move would save $700,000 and prevent academic programs from being cut. Women's volleyball was spared because its season is about to start, but six other programs, including men's and women's basketball, are off. Several former basketball players said...

Inner-City Filmmakers: A story in Tuesday's Calendar section about the Inner-City Filmmakers summer program said that one of the students became interested in moviemaking while working on a project her Sunday-school teacher was creating for a class at Los Angeles Community College. It was at Los Angeles City College.

The championship banners dating to the 1940s were already removed for safekeeping, the glass backboards already torn down. Still, the Los Angeles City College men's basketball team gathered recently for one last practice in the school's Art Deco gym. Before the fall semester begins, the gym, built in 1935 and home to one of the most successful community college basketball programs in the state, will be demolished to make way for a library.