The chant was undoubtedly racist, and insensitive to
the shameful legacy of racial lynching in America. Those involved are worthy of derision, and the
community has resoundingly trumpeted its disapproval, as has the entire nation.
The question at hand, however, has never been about whether
what the boys did was ethically reprehensible.
It clearly was. The more pressing
question that we must confront now is whether such an act is worthy of
expulsion from a state-funded university, and what that means for the state of
education in this country if it is. And
beyond that, we must consider whether freedom of speech is anything more than a
mantelpiece in America which, though fondly remembered and often superficially revered,
has become little more than an old, dusty concept in a culture which is bent on
cultivating homogenized thought.
At the University of Oklahoma, two of the students
involved in the chanting were indeed expelled. Most disturbing for me is not that such
sentiments are uttered within such fringe environments as this. Honestly, can anyone say that these boys would ever consider weaving a noose with the intent of hurting someone? Yes, that's rhetorical, because it would be an entirely stupid suggestion which would recuse the accuser from any intellectual forum. The real problem, however, is that so few Americans
seem outraged at the frivolous decision to derail these youths’ lives over
something as practically inconsequential as their offensive, yet presumptively
protected free speech.
University president David Boren announced a
decision to expel the youths via
Twitter, where he is cited as having said:
I have emphasized that I have zero tolerance for
this kind of threatening racist behavior at the University of Oklahoma. I hope that the entire nation will join us in
having zero tolerance of such racism when it raises its ugly head in other
situations around the country. I am
extremely proud of the reaction and response expressed by our entire university
family – students, faculty, staff, and alumni about this incident. They are “Real Sooners” who believe in mutual
respect for all.
Perhaps most troubling about Boren’s statement is
that not only is he making explicit efforts to regulate the content of speech
on his own campus, but he is imploring all other universities to follow
suit.
These boys are meant to be examples, make no
mistake, and the punishment for their offensive utterances is being exacted
without the courtesy of a show trial. Boren
and the university have cited no specific part of the conduct code that the
students had violated to justify their decision. After all, their words didn’t hurt anyone
(aside from hurting some people’s feelings), nor did they explicitly threaten
to physically harm anyone in particular.
Consider that members, and indeed the president, of the Muslim Student
Association at UCLA have been caught leading chants of “Death to Israel! Death
to the Jews!” with no such punishment as expulsion handed down by university
administrators. (Such events are
commonplace, by the way, extensively documented by Daniel Greenfield here.) By contrast, rhetorical
salvos against SAE by OU officials and media sensationalism have yielded death
threats against the fraternity’s members.
The message to other college students at OU and around
the country is clear, however. There are
some things that you just can’t say, if what you say sufficiently offends
others who share the views of your school’s administration.
David Boren’s statement overtly seeks to replace the
notion of “freedom of speech” enumerated in our First Amendment and repeatedly
upheld by our courts, supplanting it with “free speech which is subject to
limitations determined by the state.” The
latter is fascism, not freedom.
Freedom is a messy thing. But the purpose of learning, and ostensibly, our
universities, should be to seek the truth amidst the clutter.
In a letter to William Roscoe penned December 27th,
1820, Thomas Jefferson spoke of the purpose of the newly founded University of
Virginia. “The institution will be based
on the illimitable freedom of the human mind,” he writes,
“for here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to
tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”
This is the best way to achieve intellectual progress,
not the suppression of thoughts contrary to perceived norms and a social status
quo. As Robby Soave at Reason.com explains:
A school is exactly the kind of place where evil
views should do battle with moral and logical views, and lose. We have everything to gain by confronting
racism head-on in an intellectual setting that a university purportedly
provides, and a lot to lose by trampling students’ rights in a misguided rush
to do the opposite.
In short, bad ideas are more consistently destroyed
in an open marketplace of ideas, if one has any faith in humanity’s potential
for reason. But that reality ceases expression
when our institutions of learning disavow the ambition to cultivate reasonable
individuals in favor of becoming factories which produce fascists, blindly
supportive of singular viewpoints.
There is clear substance warranting litigation
against OU, and the lines in this social battle are being drawn. The SAE fraternity is reportedly
preparing a lawsuit against the university, and OU has hired a former federal
judge to
investigate racism within the fraternity. The PC thought police of the left are
celebrating the university’s decision to expel these students and eagerly
awaiting the coming witch hunt, while constitutionalists and libertarians are
rightfully condemning
both.
This may seem a small and insignificant story, but
in the trenches of cultural warfare, inches matter. Instead of being allowed to go back to class,
and hopefully educated as to why chanting racist songs about murder is wrong,
the pillorying of these boys in the public square could go a long way toward further
homogenizing thought in the state-sponsored indoctrination camps that we call
universities.
