Very Current Events : Education: USC, UCLA and Stanford courses focus on riots and Rodney G. King case. ‘I’m always studying the past,’ one student says. ‘But history is occurring now in Los Angeles.’

College courses have sought to be relevant to current events at least since the Vietnam War. Now some classes on California campuses can barely keep up with news bulletins from the federal courthouse in Los Angeles.

For example, Stanford University is offering “The Fire This Time: Los Angeles Riots 1965 and 1992--Why.” USC has “Social Problems and the Context of the Los Angeles Riots.” And at UCLA, the syllabus promises that “Introduction to Asian-American Studies: Contemporary Issues” will examine “the Los Angeles crisis and rebuilding L.A.”

As the nation awaits verdicts in the federal trial of four officers accused of violating Rodney G. King’s civil rights, those and other courses at California universities are tackling difficult issues in the case and all-too-pertinent problems of urban life. Some traditionalists may question the study of unfolding disputes, but professors and students contend that the immediacy gives their readings and discussions special value.

“As a history major, I’m always studying the past. But history is occurring now in Los Angeles,” said Nancy Pirozzi, a sophomore from New York who is taking the USC sociology course on the riots. “It’s a lot more interesting to study what’s going on now and possibly help change history.”

She was among 90 students who heard professor Vern Bengtson lecture Thursday about the possibility of more unrest in reaction to the upcoming verdicts. Giving a scholarly pro and con, Bengtson listed changes since last year that might ease tensions, such as the hiring of Willie L. Williams as Los Angeles’ first African-American police chief. He also pointed to unchanged poverty and racial tensions as fuel for another explosion.

Under the most optimistic of his scenarios, the professor said, “nothing will happen to break that delicate structure of norms we know as civilization, at least not this weekend or next.” Yet, he added, “we’ll just have to wait and see.”

Later in his office, Bengtson recalled how, after watching arson fires destroy shops near the USC campus last year, he decided to weave study of the riots throughout a “social problems” course scheduled for this spring. The class, which meets twice a week, surveys such topics as immigration, drugs, violence, poverty, family structure and the environment.

“The better job (that) I do in teaching sociological principles and theories, the more tools students have to analyze such events in the future,” said Bengtson, who has taught sociology and gerontology at USC since 1967.

Sociology major Richard Hwang said Bengtson’s class has given him broader insights into the turmoil last year that destroyed businesses of many Korean-American relatives and friends. “I had a narrow perspective. I thought the whole world was against us (Koreans),” the senior from Northridge said. “I still don’t think the violence was justified, but I have a better understanding of the deep-rooted causes.”

Across town Wednesday in a UCLA classroom, anthropology professor Kyeyoung Park gave historical perspective to the friction between some Korean immigrant shop owners and inner-city residents. She said many well-educated Korean immigrants started businesses in depressed urban areas in the 1980s because they felt shut out of professions in America. Meanwhile, the same neighborhoods were being ravaged by the loss of high-paying, blue-collar jobs. But shopkeepers and customers shared economic hardships across cultural divides, she stressed.

“It’s a historical moment we have, and Los Angeles is at the center of this critical moment. So we have to be prepared to talk about it,” said Park, a Korean-born anthropologist who began research three years ago on ambivalent relationships between Korean merchants and their customers in African-American and Latino neighborhoods.

It has been difficult to keep tension about the federal trial from dominating the classroom, Park said. Yet those emotions, she added, can focus students’ attention in a way that dispassionate discourse in academia does not.

Anthropology major George Kwon, who is enrolled in Park’s class, agreed. “We might be drawing conclusions that may be proven wrong by historians in the future. But if it makes us better examine what’s going on now, why should we wait for the historians?”

An overwhelming majority of the 90 or so students in the Asian-American studies class are Asian-Americans, including some who said last year’s riots made them realize that they could be targets of racial attacks. Some students wished that the course and others in various ethnic studies programs would attract more students of different ethnic backgrounds.

Park said her mission is to encourage students “to go beyond their personal experience, no matter how difficult it will be. And put it in a structural context, trying to see it from others’ perspectives.”

The thrice-weekly UCLA class spent the first third of the spring quarter on issues surrounding the King case and poverty in Los Angeles. It has moved on to other topics, including immigrants from Southeast Asia and family tensions among Asian-Americans.

In contrast, the Stanford class does not stray far from the issues raised by the King case and last year’s disturbances. Interest was so strong that lecturer Sally Dickson allowed 130 students to enroll in a seminar designed for about 20. The Stanford course began two weeks ago with a viewing of an edited three-hour videotape of the state trial, which resulted in acquittals except for one count on which the jury was deadlocked.

“My purpose was to give them an understanding of the verdict and what accounted for the verdict,” said Dickson, who is also associate dean of students at Stanford’s law school.

The class discussed the possible fear that the suburban jurors in the state trial might have had of young black men such as King, she said. Students also debated whether prosecutors erred, worsening those fears by not calling King as a witness.

The once-a-week seminar is part of the African and Afro-American studies program. Still, only about half the students enrolled are African-Americans, creating what Dickson said is a “most encouraging mixture.”

Her course includes discussion of the 1965 Watts riots and looks at economic and social conditions then and now. Among required readings are the 1965 McCone Commission report, which recommended aid to depressed neighborhoods and changes in police procedures; the Christopher Commission report, the highly critical study of the Los Angeles Police Department written after the King beating, and parts of the autobiography of former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates.

Lydia Jones, a senior biological sciences major from Virginia, said she signed up for the Stanford seminar because she was surprised by the verdicts in the state case and wanted to know how it could have turned out differently.

“Now that federal trial is going on and is so much in the news with all the anticipation and anxiety,” she said. “I knew the class would be extremely stimulating and right on the cutting edge.”