Fullerton : CSUF Students Protest Metzger’s Use of Center

Several hundred Cal State Fullerton students staged a noontime rally Wednesday, protesting former Ku Klux Klan leader Thomas L. Metzger’s taping of race-oriented cable television programs at a campus media center.

During the hourlong protest, students gathered in front of the library and then marched to the campus administration building.

More than half a dozen persons, including faculty members and students, spoke at the rally, demanding that the Metzger, now head of a San Diego-based group advocating worldwide separation of races, not be allowed back on campus.

For the past two years, Metzger, 47, of Fallbrook has been recording his “Race and Reason” programs at the university’s Instructional Media Center in the library, which is a main production site for public-access programs of Group W Cable in northern Orange County.

Under federal law, groups or individuals from wide ranges of viewpoints are allowed access to cable television. Metzger has been using Group W’s public access Channel 38 and its Cal State Fullerton recording facilities to tape his programs.

The university agreed in 1981 to allow the campus media center to be the recording site for Group W’s public access programs. In return, Group W provided $200,000 worth of equipment that is also used by students.

University spokesman Jerry Keating said Wednesday that no tapings are going on at present nor are any scheduled because the equipment is not working.