Shortly before 7 p.m. on Nov. 12 of last year, Steve Hinkle, an undergraduate studying industrial technology, walked into a room of the Multicultural Center (MCC) at California State Polytechnic University -- San Luis Obispo. He wanted to post a flier about a speech sponsored by the Cal Poly College Republicans, of which he was a member. African American author C. Mason Weaver was going to speak the next day about his new book, "It's OK to Leave the Plantation: The New Underground Railroad."

A group of students were standing and sitting in the room. They were eating pizza and talking. Hinkle walked around them toward the bulletin board. One of them saw the flier and objected to it being posted. Hinkle was white. Several of the other students there were African American, and some of them said they were offended by the flier's content. One student told Hinkle that under MCC rules, he could not post it without permission. When Hinkle asked for more information about the posting policy, one young woman told him he either had to leave or she would call the campus police. At some point Hinkle asked if they might sit down and talk about it, but he left soon after, before the student placed the call and before the police arrived.

It doesn't sound like much -- one of those disputes over rules and regulations, with an interesting political twist, that have been occurring on college campuses for centuries. Young people get excited about ideas and proper conduct, and are not afraid to confront each other in circumstances in which their parents would just shrug it off, or change the subject.

But instead of having a campus debate about the worth of Weaver's book -- which says African Americans rely too much on government institutions and civil rights organizations -- and the appropriateness of posting the flier, Cal Poly charged Hinkle with disrupting the Bible study meeting that he inadvertently interrupted. After finding sufficient cause for disciplinary action, a university hearing officer and the vice provost directed that Hinkle write an apology. He has refused to do that, and the university has said it plans to take no further action against him. But the disciplinary action is still on his record and Hinkle, 23, worries about what that might do to his graduate school applications.

I have had a hard time making up my mind about this case. It seems to me that both sides violated the spirit of thoughtfulness and informed inquiry that I always thought college life was supposed to inspire. Hinkle did not ask the students if he was interrupting anything. There was no sign announcing a Bible study meeting. The students seemed to be just hanging out, as students often did in that room. But it would not have hurt him to ask.

The students, in turn, judged Hinkle and his flier without asking him to explain it and without reading Weaver's book. The speech went off the next day without a hitch, belying the notion expressed by some students in the group that there was something so offensive in what Weaver had to say that the flier had no place in that room. Some people, including the staff of the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), see this as a classic example of free speech violation. FIRE does not sue universities, but it exposes what it feels are campus muggings of the constitution that sometimes lead to such suits, and that is a possibility in the Cal Poly case.

The FIRE staff tell me I am not seeing the seriousness of the threat to our liberties from what Cal Poly has done to Hinkle. And they have a point. My instincts are to smooth over rough spots, avoid arguments and try not to get too excited and look foolish.

That is a very American way of thinking. It is why we object to harsh political ads on television or name-calling in Congress or a California gubernatorial ballot with 135 names on it or a brief encounter between a few college students turning into a seven-hour disciplinary hearing and a potential playground for lawyers.

Passions have run high about this at Cal Poly, a fine university on a lovely central California campus. That first night, when Hinkle began to complain to campus officials about being confronted at the MCC, he mistakenly said the person who said she was going to call the campus police was assistant professor of ethnic studies Charise Cheney, who like the student who made the call is an African American woman. In an e-mail to the campus director of judicial affairs, Cheney said the misidentification, which Hinkle soon apologized for, was "simply racist." She said such behavior was typical of the Cal Poly College Republicans. "Steven Hinkle entered the MCC on the evening of November the 12th with the clear intent of provoking students of color. While I whole-heartedly support First Amendment rights, Hinkle's behavior in the Multicultural Center is akin to yelling 'fire' in a crowded space, and therefore should not be protected by university policy," she said.

In his closing statement at the disciplinary hearing, Hinkle said, "I don't feel as if I was an interruption to these people's meeting. I feel that I was harassed. I feel that I am the victim in this and that the apology should be made to me for being mistreated as I walked into a center in which I . . . should feel welcome."

In a statement about the case, FIRE's director of legal and public advocacy Greg Lukianoff said, "There are at least three terrible wrongs here. First, Cal Poly tramples on the First Amendment rights of its own student. Then, they hold a kangaroo court and trample on his due process rights. Finally, they shamelessly evade and distort the facts of what actually occurred."

Nonetheless, it is easy to sympathize with the university officials. They made what looks like a clumsy attempt to find a middle ground. They asked Hinkle if he might just admit that he was sorry for inadvertently offending the other students, and talk it over with them rather than have a formal process.

University officials said they tried to have a similarly low-key conversation with the students who objected, but could not say if there was any suggestion that those students might also owe Hinkle an apology for making assumptions based on little inquiry into the book or the author he was promoting.

That slow, indirect approach has its devotees, but it is rather un-American, when you think about it. We relish administrative and legal conflict (which explains why even old "Law & Order" episodes thrill me). Our elections follow loud arguments -- once held at fire-lit rallies but now seen on television. That often seems to be the only way we can figure out what we want.

So the case of Steve Hinkle and the Cal Poly Bible Study group will have to work itself out the hard way. Lukianoff says FIRE only pursued the Hinkle case because Cal Poly was so unresponsive to its appeals -- refusing to respond to the group's arguments or ignoring them altogether and then calling FIRE statements "fabrications" with no clue as to what facts Cal Poly thought were made up. Left unchallenged, Lukianoff said, the Hinkle case could become one of many. "The use of the disruption charge to prosecute Steve is part of an increasingly common abuse of the term 'disruption' which some schools now use to punish protected speech they dislike," he said.

Which makes my point. I think hard cases like the Cal Poly affair are good for us. If we Americans are going to present ourselves as the world's best democrats, and instruct other nations like Iraq on how to better themselves, we ought to make clear to everyone that our way of doing things is often very messy and noisy and unsatisfying. If we really can't figure out how to handle these collisions of youthful attitude and opinion with a few polite nods and apologies, then more cases like the Cal Poly affair are just what we need.