The University of Oklahoma Signifies the Death of Free Speech in American Universities, and Defines Its Newly Accepted Limits

As we all know, a video has surfaced showing students of the University of Oklahoma singing a racist chant.  They were members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, and while on a bus carrying them to a formal fraternity function, the students were captured chanting “There’ll never be a ni**** SAE! You can hang him from a tree, but he will never sign with me.  There’ll never be a ni**** SAE!”  

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 27^th, 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.

William Sullivan is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.  He can be followed on Twitter.

"Separation of Church and State" Revisited

Few could forget Christine O’Donnell’s gaffe in the electoral debates last year. In an exchange with Democrat Chris Coons of Delaware, she and Coons came to blows on the matter of creationism and public schools, with Coons arguing that teaching creationism is not consistent with the separation of church and state. O’Donnell asked, “Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?”

The audience of legal scholars and law students that witnessed O’Donnell’s “blunder” gasped, and it appeared to be a painful exchange for O’Donnell. After all, Americans that grew up in the last half-century would need to have lived under a rock to not know that the standard notion of “separation of church and state” is a derivative interpretation of the First Amendment. The audience obviously assumed that O’Donnell has been living under that rock. Or more likely, they thought her a right-wing zealot bent on pushing her religion on others.

But perhaps she meant to point out that our Constitution does not explicitly mandate a total “separation of church and state,” and that this modern interpretation is flawed. And if so, the scoffs of the audience were unjustified. History and the literal verbiage of the First Amendment suggest that she would be absolutely right.

“In Adam’s fall, We sinned all.” Though this is a phrase unfamiliar to many today, two centuries ago, in countless schools across America, legions of children uttered these words in their formative years while reading from the New England Primer. This continued for many years after the Constitution and its First Amendment were penned.

This phrase refers to Adam, the first of men according to Christian dogma. His sin is disobedience to the order of God in consuming the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and this, according to Christian theology, is the reason for the “mortal sin” that afflicts all of mankind. Thus, the children of our founding fathers, in our nation’s first public schools, were almost universally taught that the reason for our worldly plight is the ancient sin of the first human product of the “Creation” described in the Bible.

This fact alone should give us pause to reconsider the contemporary interpretation of the First Amendment as the “separation of church and state.” After all, why would the New England Primer have been used to nurture literacy and moral values in children of the United States if the First Amendment explicitly mandates that religion is to be barred from all educational institutions associated with the state? If it was such a high priority for the fellows who drafted the guidelines of the Constitution to make sure religion doesn’t penetrate our educational and public institutions, why didn’t they promptly march around the nation and remove books of religious nature from all schools, or tear down any religious maxims from all town halls and political offices?

The very simple answer is that the drafters of the Constitution did not mean to imply the absolute “separation of church and state” in the First Amendment, as contemporary interpretation insists. In fact, the phrase never appears as such in the Constitution. Rather, the First Amendment is a broad statement about personal and religious freedoms, and regarding religion, the actual wording is: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This, very literally, is meant to describe that the federal government shall not adopt a national religion to influence or oversee policymaking, and that personal religious beliefs and practices shall not be imposed upon by the federal government.

Take historian and academic Thomas E. Woods’ position on the matter. He describes that the First Amendment does not grant power for the federal government to “interfere in the church-state relations decided upon by the states…The amendment clearly says that Congress shall make no law pertaining to religion, not that Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, or Georgia make no law.” Indeed, in early American Massachusetts, for example, state law allowed for public funds to go to the church, but “no one in the early republic considered it a violation of the First Amendment, which was universally understood not to apply to the states.”

But at various points in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the words of the First Amendment regarding religion became twisted by various social dilemmas, most notably the iconic clash between creationism and evolution in the 1925 Scopes trial, which laid the modern foundation for the notion of “separation of church and state.” So as a result, what the founding fathers intended to be a safeguard against a possible American theocracy in the future became a total disassociation between religion and any institution affiliated with the “state.”

Tragically, this evolved misconception that the Constitution mandates a separation of church and state has resulted in the casualties of freedoms that the First Amendment actually intended to secure. In 1962, Engel v. Vitale declared that local school boards could not approve any forms of prayer in school, effectively taking from public school children the right to openly clasp their hands and pray, even if state and local governments should choose to allow it! This is a federal prohibition of their free exercise of their religion, and entirely antithetical to the framers intention for the First Amendment.

The reason for the hard-and-fast segregation between “church and state” in America has nothing to do with an actual implication of the First Amendment. This segregation exists only as a derivative assumption, loosely based upon the First Amendment and the product of semantic sleight-of-hand. And as a result, liberty, as it pertains to religion, is perpetually under attack.

It is absolutely imperative that we revisit the Constitutional merits of the notion, “separation of church and state.” The First Amendment is a crucial foundational principle, but it has been entirely corrupted by generations of PC thugs.

William Sullivan