John Leo

About the author: John Leo is a columnist for the U.S. News and World Report.

The recent frenzy of press and political rhetoric surrounding hate crimes has led some college students to fake hate-based incidents. For example, two weeks after the fatal beating of gay student Matthew Shepard in 1998, a lesbian student in St. Cloud, Minnesota, claimed that two men harassed her with antigay remarks and slashed her face. Before she confessed to faking the crime, students raised $12,000 as a reward for information about her assailants. People commit such hoaxes to prove that college life is a hostile environment for minority students and women and to forward the agendas of campus interest groups.

For three weeks in the spring of 2000, minority students at the University of Iowa's College of Dentistry were the targets of menacing...