“You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught (To Hate)”
Five years after the debut of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma, their South Pacific explored this theme in a more exotic context.
This week, it’s returned to where “the corn is a mile high” University of Oklahoma campus where the SAE fraternity has been purged and two frat leaders expelled for a racist chant recorded on a bus that began with the perverse and hateful line, “There will never be a [n-word] at SAE.”
UO President David Boren’s rationale for the expulsion: “You will be expelled because of your leadership role in leading a racist and exclusionary chant which has created a hostile educational environment for others.”
The linkage is obvious with recent controversies in the UC System — including the attempt to bar Rachel Beyda from a UCLA student government judicial position because she was “too Jewish” to be impartial, as reported in this newspaper and then in the New York Times, which have set the national cornfield of controversy ablaze. Though the two cases are far from equivalent, they do bring to national attention how univresity administrators discipline incidents of speech that go beyond the pale.
I’ve done my own informal survey on reactions to campus hate speech, not as scientific as the recent poll by the Brandeis Center and Trinity College. A distinguished historian, who generally steers clear of such controversies, replied: “Disgusting.” A friend, who lives in Germany and is married to a German women, wrote: “How ironic that my daughter who hopes to transfer to UCLA from Santa Monica College will be exposed to more anti-Semitisim than my son at Goettingen [in Germany] which expelled his grandfather in 1934.”
One underlying issue is how much “free speech” is protected on campus? Eugene Volokh “Students talking to each other about a student group event about how Hamas has it right? (The Charter of Hamas, recall, expressly says, “The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: ‘The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.’ (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).”) Why, that could be labeled leading an anti-Semitic and exclusionary discussion that, once it’s publicized on campus, creates a hostile educational environment for Jews.”
The further implication is that—if the expulsions by UO’s President’s David Boren are upheld—the door would be open to invoking Title VI of the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act, as interpreted by federal courts and the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), for creating “a hostile learning environment” for Jewish students.
In an earlier piece Volokh made the argument that OU President Born, in expelling the two frat leaders, had gone too far. The caveat is that there are 20 years of court rulings raising a high bar on free speech grounds for punishing students for even the most offensive utterances. Presumably, if the expelled student leaders sue, Boren will have to show a convincing nexus between the chant, the positions held by the student frat leaders, and the likely and predictable impact on African American students, probably as individuals and not just an abstract category.
I’m no constitutional lawyer, but in my view there may be a middle way between doing nothing and throwing out the students. On the one hand, there is “free speech.” On the other hand, there is “privileged speech.” When a university student uses a campus free speech area or soap box to spout off bigoted tripe, the speech should be protected. But when a campus organization is involved in such an episode, the organization—though not the speaker—can and should be stripped of university privileges and expelled from campus. Hence, Boren was right to kick out the SAE fraternity, but not to expel the student leaders. Instead, they should have been left standing, naked and exposed, as bigots to be shamed by their fellow students.
Does this Solomonic solution make sense?
Born in New York but educated as an historian at UCLA, Harold Brackman, a consultant for the Simon Wiesenthal's Museum of Tolerance, is coauthor with Ephraim Isaac of From Abraham to Obama: A History of Jews, Africans, and African Americans (Africa World Press, forthcoming).
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