Week in Review : MAJOR EVENTS, IMAGES AND PEOPLE IN ORANGE COUNTY NEWS. : MISCELLANY/ NEWSMAKERS AND MILESTONES

For two years he had been quietly recording his cable-television shows at studios located on the Cal State Fullerton campus. But last week the campus newspaper found out. The story created a storm.

Thomas L. Metzger, the show’s star, was an unsuccessful candidate for Congress from San Diego County; he was also, he said, a former grand dragon of the California Ku Klux Klan. He said he left the KKK to form his own group, the White Aryan Resistance. The group seeks “white revolution” through “separation of groups by race and culture.” The cable-TV show, called “Race and Reason,” is recorded in the campus studio used by Group W Cable to produce its local community access programming.

“People were shocked,” campus newspaper editor Joyce Garcia said.

University President Jewell Plummer Cobb, who is black and active in anti-discrimination groups, strongly criticized Metzger and his programs but said he had the right to produced them. Edgar Trotter, chairman of the communications department, said the shows were “despicable” but that free speech and public-access television are not limited to non-controversial topics.

But Carl Jackson, chairman of the Afro-ethnic studies department, said that using university facilities “to produce that kind of garbage is outrageous. I think it should be stopped.” A spokesman for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith seconded the motion.

Metzger said he would keep taping as usual. “You wouldn’t think you would have this problem with a university,” he said. “You would think a university would be a bastion of free speech.”