Friedersdorf writes: "Perhaps 18-to-22-year-olds can be forgiven for failing
to appreciate what's at stake in their activism. But UCLA administrators
cannot be forgiven for complying with student demands to punish this free
expression - a glaring illustration of their low-regard for the First
Amendment, California law, and liberal ideals."
Students attend the University of California, Los Angeles. (photo: Kevork
Djansezian/Getty Images)
The Anti-Free-Speech Movement at UCLA
By Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic
18 October 15
Administrators and student activists at the university are attacking core
First Amendment rights in a bid to punish expression that offends them.
A half-century ago, student activists at the University of California
clashed with administrators during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, a
series of events that would greatly expand free-speech rights of people at
public colleges and universities.
Today, activists at UCLA are demanding that administrators punish some of
their fellow students for expressive behavior that is clearly protected by
the First Amendment.
In the past, free-speech clashes have turned on whether Americans have the
right to criticize their own government during wartime, to march as
neo-Nazis past the homes of Holocaust survivors, to submerge a crucifix in
urine, or to burn the United States flag.
All of those things, the courts have ruled, are protected speech.
What did UCLA students find so outrageous as to warrant the violation of the
fundamental right to free expression? A "Kanye Western" theme party where
students wore costumes that parodied rap superstar Kanye West and his
celebrity wife, Kim Kardashian. For this, UC student activists would
squander their inheritance.
Perhaps 18-to-22-year-olds can be forgiven for failing to appreciate what's
at stake in their activism. But UCLA administrators cannot be forgiven for
complying with student demands to punish this free expression-a glaring
illustration of their low-regard for the First Amendment, California law,
and liberal ideals.
How did this happen?
Last week, when this controversy began, many news outlets reported that some
of the fraternity and sorority members who attended the "Kanye Western"
theme party wore blackface. While that offensive behavior would not change
the First Amendment analysis to come, there is no evidence for the claim:
The Greek organizations deny it and no published photographs from the party
depict anyone in blackface.
"We have been asked to respond specifically to rumors that some guests
attended the event in blackface," the fraternity said in a statement. "It is
important that we put this rumor to rest. Some of our guests attended the
event dressed as miners in reference to the Kanye West song 'Gold Digger,'
but their attire had nothing to do with race."The Huffington Post has
published a photograph that seems to confirm this explanation: a group of
girls pose with a bit of soot smudged on their faces, but not covering it,
and there can be no doubt that they are attempting to dress as miners, or
"gold diggers," because they are all holding plates of "gold" as if panning
for it.
Others who objected to the theme party deemed it an example of cultural
appropriation, a "microaggression" against black students, or deeply
insensitive and hurtful.
"The sagging or baggy jeans that students wore to the party represent one of
the most notorious African American stereotypes in fashion," UCLA student
Caleb Jackson wrote in The Daily Bruin. "So notorious in fact, that it has
led several cities across the country to make sagging illegal. The racial
undertones associated with this clothing style make its cultural
appropriation highly offensive to Black students."
Said Hanan Worku, another UCLA student, on Facebook, "Yes that's right, a
frat decided it would be okay to have their members repeat a part of history
that demoralized, mocked and dehumanized African Americans/ And celebrate
while doing it. They showed up with their chains and braids with stuffed
butts for God knows what reason. True Bruin values amiright????!!!!! Not to
mention all of this happened last night which happened to be a part of Black
Bruin Welcome Week! Coincidence right??????"
Meanwhile, critics of the critics insist that West is a famous celebrity,
not a stand-in for black culture; that stuffed butts were a reference to Kim
Kardashian, who is white and of Armenian descent, not black; that there is
nothing wrong with appropriating the dress of hip-hop culture, which is not
the same as black culture; that it's myopic for privileged student activists
to focus on a frat theme party while living in a city plagued by police
killings, homelessness, housing discrimination, and other injustices; that
activists are giving Greek organizations too much power to set their agenda;
and that college kids these days are oversensitive to the point of
self-parody.
Those substantive debates are healthy and both sides raise plausible points.
It is salutary for collegians to contest such matters in the student
newspaper, on campus, and on social media. Evidently, public discourse has
changed some minds. Said the frat, "we sincerely apologize for the offense
and hurt we caused to our fellow Bruins, especially those in the African
American community ... We are grateful for the dialogue we have had so far,
and we intend to continue communicating with our fellow Bruins about how
SigEp and Alpha Phi can make this a learning opportunity."
What's unhealthy is the movement to suppress free speech at UCLA.
University administrators bear the most culpability. After hearing
objections to the theme party, but before finishing an investigation into
it, UCLA officials suspended the social activities of the fraternity and
sorority, effectively punishing them without due process even as these same
officials publicly acknowledged that they didn't have all the facts.
Moreover, university officials are abusing their authority merely by
investigating protected speech in the first place. And the student newspaper
is cheering them on, demanding in an editorial that the office of UCLA
Fraternity and Sorority Relations take a more active role in preemptively
clearing all party themes.
UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, one of America's foremost First Amendment
scholars, has published several Washington Post items explaining why these
reactions are legally dubious. "The suspension of the fraternity and
sorority is likely unconstitutional," he wrote. "Costumes that convey a
message are treated as speech for First Amendment purposes (see, e.g.,
Schacht v. United States (1970) and Cohen v. California (1971)). And a
university may not punish speech based on its allegedly racist content; see,
e.g., Rosenberger v. Rector (1995), which holds that a university may not
discriminate against student speech based on its viewpoint."
He adds that "interim speech restrictions imposed before a full
investigation and adjudication have historically been seen as more
constitutionally suspect (as so-called 'prior restraints'), see, e.g., Vance
v. Universal Amusement, Inc. (1980); and the prior restraint doctrine is
applicable to restrictions imposed by universities, see Healy v. James
(1972). But in any event, even setting aside the prior restraint doctrine,
suspending an organization's social activities because of the offensive
message conveyed by the organization's past speech violates the First
Amendment."
In a followup post, he notes that the Supreme Court has unanimously held
that student organizations have the right to express "the thought that we
hate," a far more offensive message than anything conveyed by the Greek
organizations at UCLA:
In that case, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (2010), the Court held
that universities may require student organizations that get
university-provided benefits to accept all would-be members - including ones
whose beliefs are at odds with the organization's principles (e.g., if an
atheist wants to join the Christian student group, or vice versa). I think
that was correct, for reasons I gave in this article. (The article was
published several years before the Christian Legal Society decision, so it
doesn't cite that decision.) But the result is certainly controversial: The
majority consisted just of five Justices, the four liberals plus Justice
Kennedy; the four other conservatives dissented.
Yet even the majority made clear that, while reasonable and
viewpoint-neutral restrictions on student group membership policies are
constitutional, viewpoint-based restrictions on student group speech are
unconstitutional:
Although registered student groups must conform their conduct to the Law
School's regulation by dropping access barriers, they may express any
viewpoint they wish - including a discriminatory one. Today's decision thus
continues this Court's tradition of "protect[ing] the freedom to express
'the thought that we hate.'"
So if a group wants to express hostility to homosexuality-or hostility based
on race, or sex, or religion, or what have you-it has the right to do that.
And that's so even if the group seeks access (on the same terms as other
groups) to generally available university property, services, and subsidies.
And on this point, the Court was unanimous: The liberal Justices plus
Justice Kennedy took this view; the other conservative Justices would have
just taken this further, to secure student groups' right to choose their
members as well as their right to choose their speech.
On Monday, UCLA student Caterina Kachadoorian argued in a Daily Bruin op-ed
that, as an Armenian, she wasn't offended by the Kim Kardashian costumes,
and that student activists at UCLA would do better to focus on
black-on-black violence (a position that I find wrongheaded). Says a
censorious comment beneath that article:
I have sent Caterina Kachadoorian's letter to the Office of Internal
Affairs. I have demanded an investigation into the Daily Bruin to determine
how this hate speech was published. I have requested an internal
investigation and firing of the staff member that allowed this hate and
discrimination to be published.
This student impulse to demand that authority figures punish other students
who say or do things that they don't like could not come at a more
inopportune time. As Glenn Greenwald wrote in a recent article at The
Intercept, "One of the most dangerous threats to campus free speech has been
emerging at the highest levels of the University of California system, the
sprawling collection of 10 campuses that includes UCLA and UC Berkeley. The
university's governing Board of Regents, with the support of University
President Janet Napolitano and egged on by the state's legislature, has been
attempting to adopt new speech codes that-in the name of combating
'anti-Semitism'-would formally ban various forms of Israel criticism."
He continued:
Under the most stringent such regulations, students found to be in violation
of these codes would face suspension or expulsion. In July, it appeared that
the Regents were poised to enact the most extreme version, but decided
instead to push the decision off until September, when they instead would
adopt non-binding guidelines to define "hate speech" and "intolerance."
One of the Regents most vocally advocating for the most stringent version of
the speech code is Richard Blum, the multi-millionaire defense contractor
who is married to Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California. At a Regents meeting
last week, reported the Los Angeles Times, Blum expressly threatened that
Feinstein would publicly denounce the university if it failed to adopt far
more stringent standards than the ones it appeared to be considering, and
specifically demanded they be binding and contain punishments for students
found to be in violation.
The San Francisco Chronicle put it this way: "Regent Dick Blum said his
wife, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., 'is prepared to be critical of
this university' unless UC not only tackles anti-Jewish bigotry but also
makes clear that perpetrators will be punished." The lawyer Ken White wrote
that "Blum threatened that his wife . would interfere and make trouble if
the Regents didn't commit to punish people for prohibited speech." As campus
First Amendment lawyer Ari Cohn put it the following day, "Feinstein and her
husband think college students should be expelled for protected free
speech."
Students who value fundamental human rights, protecting unpopular activism,
or safeguarding the political liberties of the least powerful among us ought
to be lobbying for the most stringent free-speech protections possible, not
undermining core human rights that have benefitted generations of
marginalized people as a salve for outrage at a frat party. As the ACLU once
explained in answer to the question of why it sometimes mounts defenses of
speech that is racist or promotes intolerance:
Free speech rights are indivisible.
Restricting the speech of one group or individual jeopardizes everyone's
rights because the same laws or regulations used to silence bigots can be
used to silence you. Conversely, laws that defend free speech for bigots can
be used to defend the rights of civil rights workers, anti-war protesters,
lesbian and gay activists and others fighting for justice. For example, in
the 1949 case of Terminiello v. Chicago, the ACLU successfully defended an
ex-Catholic priest who had delivered a racist and anti-semitic speech. The
precedent set in that case became the basis for the ACLU's successful
defense of civil rights demonstrators in the 1960s and '70s.
The indivisibility principle was also illustrated in the case of Neo-Nazis
whose right to march in Skokie, Illinois in 1979 was successfully defended
by the ACLU. At the time, then ACLU Executive Director Aryeh Neier, whose
relatives died in Hitler's concentration camps during World War II,
commented: "Keeping a few Nazis off the streets of Skokie will serve Jews
poorly if it means that the freedoms to speak, publish or assemble any place
in the United States are thereby weakened."
The college students fighting to limit free speech or to punish free
expression are courting tremendous harms that would ultimately fall
disproportionately on the least powerful, most marginalized groups of the
present and future--and as UCLA graduates, they are highly unlikely to be in
either group, which may help explain their lack of concern for how their
behavior could affect the less privileged. It is nevertheless incoherent for
activists who say that they live in a system of white supremacy to empower
state administrators to police speech at their discretion!
And all calls for university administrators to police the minutiae of campus
life rob students of the opportunity to learn how to govern themselves even
as they contribute to the spike in administrative costs that render so many
unable to afford tuition. The notion that university money is best spent
paying someone to sit in an office vetting the themes of fraternity parties
sounds like the premise of a SNL skit.
To deflect criticisms like these, defenders of the student activists are
using the increasingly common tactic of treating the fringe position of a
small number of ideologically homogeneous progressives as if it were
equivalent to the opinion of all black people. "When black students share
their hurt and disappointment with something like the 'Kanye Western' party,
too often we respond with the way we see things, and it's usually
accompanied with criticism about how incorrect we think the black point of
view is," Chris Tang, who is not black, writes in another op-ed in The Daily
Bruin. "But there's an issue with this because we are implicitly saying that
we understand the black point of view, when in reality, many of us don't."
There is nothing wrong with a black student being offended by a theme party,
and attempts to articulate such grievances ought to be met with
open-mindedness and compassion. And frats and sororities should be more
sensitive to how their actions will be received.
But there is no "black point of view," a prejudicial notion that is so
easily refuted that it's a wonder anyone invokes it. There are plenty of
black people--a majority, I would wager--who understand better than many
other Americans the importance of the First Amendment to the history of the
civil-rights movement and the future of other civil-rights causes. As if to
underscore that point, the Los Angeles Times highlighted an open letter sent
to UCLA by Michael Meyers, president of the New York Civil Rights Coalition.
He said that "as an African American civil rights leader" he had to speak
out. "We are increasingly alarmed-and distressed-by the failure of public
university officials to support free speech and diversity of opinion on
campus," he wrote in the letter to UCLA's chancellor. "Diversity of opinion
surely includes the right of students to contest orthodoxy and to poke fun
at popular culture and celebrities."
That is exactly right, and UCLA administrators should publicly apologize for
acting to the contrary rather than caving to the illegal demands of student
activists.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Students attend the University of California, Los Angeles. (photo: Kevork
Djansezian/Getty Images)
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/the-anti-free-speech-mov
ement-at-ucla/410638/http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/the
-anti-free-speech-movement-at-ucla/410638/
The Anti-Free-Speech Movement at UCLA
By Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic
18 October 15
Administrators and student activists at the university are attacking core
First Amendment rights in a bid to punish expression that offends them.
half-century ago, student activists at the University of California clashed
with administrators during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, a series of
events that would greatly expand free-speech rights of people at public
colleges and universities.
Today, activists at UCLA are demanding that administrators punish some of
their fellow students for expressive behavior that is clearly protected by
the First Amendment.
In the past, free-speech clashes have turned on whether Americans have the
right to criticize their own government during wartime, to march as
neo-Nazis past the homes of Holocaust survivors, to submerge a crucifix in
urine, or to burn the United States flag.
All of those things, the courts have ruled, are protected speech.
What did UCLA students find so outrageous as to warrant the violation of the
fundamental right to free expression? A "Kanye Western" theme party where
students wore costumes that parodied rap superstar Kanye West and his
celebrity wife, Kim Kardashian. For this, UC student activists would
squander their inheritance.
Perhaps 18-to-22-year-olds can be forgiven for failing to appreciate what's
at stake in their activism. But UCLA administrators cannot be forgiven for
complying with student demands to punish this free expression-a glaring
illustration of their low-regard for the First Amendment, California law,
and liberal ideals.
How did this happen?
Last week, when this controversy began, many news outlets reported that some
of the fraternity and sorority members who attended the "Kanye Western"
theme party wore blackface. While that offensive behavior would not change
the First Amendment analysis to come, there is no evidence for the claim:
The Greek organizations deny it and no published photographs from the party
depict anyone in blackface.
"We have been asked to respond specifically to rumors that some guests
attended the event in blackface," the fraternity said in a statement. "It is
important that we put this rumor to rest. Some of our guests attended the
event dressed as miners in reference to the Kanye West song 'Gold Digger,'
but their attire had nothing to do with race."The Huffington Post has
published a photograph that seems to confirm this explanation: a group of
girls pose with a bit of soot smudged on their faces, but not covering it,
and there can be no doubt that they are attempting to dress as miners, or
"gold diggers," because they are all holding plates of "gold" as if panning
for it.
Others who objected to the theme party deemed it an example of cultural
appropriation, a "microaggression" against black students, or deeply
insensitive and hurtful.
"The sagging or baggy jeans that students wore to the party represent one of
the most notorious African American stereotypes in fashion," UCLA student
Caleb Jackson wrote in The Daily Bruin. "So notorious in fact, that it has
led several cities across the country to make sagging illegal. The racial
undertones associated with this clothing style make its cultural
appropriation highly offensive to Black students."
Said Hanan Worku, another UCLA student, on Facebook, "Yes that's right, a
frat decided it would be okay to have their members repeat a part of history
that demoralized, mocked and dehumanized African Americans/ And celebrate
while doing it. They showed up with their chains and braids with stuffed
butts for God knows what reason. True Bruin values amiright????!!!!! Not to
mention all of this happened last night which happened to be a part of Black
Bruin Welcome Week! Coincidence right??????"
Meanwhile, critics of the critics insist that West is a famous celebrity,
not a stand-in for black culture; that stuffed butts were a reference to Kim
Kardashian, who is white and of Armenian descent, not black; that there is
nothing wrong with appropriating the dress of hip-hop culture, which is not
the same as black culture; that it's myopic for privileged student activists
to focus on a frat theme party while living in a city plagued by police
killings, homelessness, housing discrimination, and other injustices; that
activists are giving Greek organizations too much power to set their agenda;
and that college kids these days are oversensitive to the point of
self-parody.
Those substantive debates are healthy and both sides raise plausible points.
It is salutary for collegians to contest such matters in the student
newspaper, on campus, and on social media. Evidently, public discourse has
changed some minds. Said the frat, "we sincerely apologize for the offense
and hurt we caused to our fellow Bruins, especially those in the African
American community ... We are grateful for the dialogue we have had so far,
and we intend to continue communicating with our fellow Bruins about how
SigEp and Alpha Phi can make this a learning opportunity."
What's unhealthy is the movement to suppress free speech at UCLA.
University administrators bear the most culpability. After hearing
objections to the theme party, but before finishing an investigation into
it, UCLA officials suspended the social activities of the fraternity and
sorority, effectively punishing them without due process even as these same
officials publicly acknowledged that they didn't have all the facts.
Moreover, university officials are abusing their authority merely by
investigating protected speech in the first place. And the student newspaper
is cheering them on, demanding in an editorial that the office of UCLA
Fraternity and Sorority Relations take a more active role in preemptively
clearing all party themes.
UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, one of America's foremost First Amendment
scholars, has published several Washington Post items explaining why these
reactions are legally dubious. "The suspension of the fraternity and
sorority is likely unconstitutional," he wrote. "Costumes that convey a
message are treated as speech for First Amendment purposes (see, e.g.,
Schacht v. United States (1970) and Cohen v. California (1971)). And a
university may not punish speech based on its allegedly racist content; see,
e.g., Rosenberger v. Rector (1995), which holds that a university may not
discriminate against student speech based on its viewpoint."
He adds that "interim speech restrictions imposed before a full
investigation and adjudication have historically been seen as more
constitutionally suspect (as so-called 'prior restraints'), see, e.g., Vance
v. Universal Amusement, Inc. (1980); and the prior restraint doctrine is
applicable to restrictions imposed by universities, see Healy v. James
(1972). But in any event, even setting aside the prior restraint doctrine,
suspending an organization's social activities because of the offensive
message conveyed by the organization's past speech violates the First
Amendment."
In a followup post, he notes that the Supreme Court has unanimously held
that student organizations have the right to express "the thought that we
hate," a far more offensive message than anything conveyed by the Greek
organizations at UCLA:
In that case, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (2010), the Court held
that universities may require student organizations that get
university-provided benefits to accept all would-be members - including ones
whose beliefs are at odds with the organization's principles (e.g., if an
atheist wants to join the Christian student group, or vice versa). I think
that was correct, for reasons I gave in this article. (The article was
published several years before the Christian Legal Society decision, so it
doesn't cite that decision.) But the result is certainly controversial: The
majority consisted just of five Justices, the four liberals plus Justice
Kennedy; the four other conservatives dissented.
Yet even the majority made clear that, while reasonable and
viewpoint-neutral restrictions on student group membership policies are
constitutional, viewpoint-based restrictions on student group speech are
unconstitutional:
Although registered student groups must conform their conduct to the Law
School's regulation by dropping access barriers, they may express any
viewpoint they wish - including a discriminatory one. Today's decision thus
continues this Court's tradition of "protect[ing] the freedom to express
'the thought that we hate.'"
So if a group wants to express hostility to homosexuality-or hostility based
on race, or sex, or religion, or what have you-it has the right to do that.
And that's so even if the group seeks access (on the same terms as other
groups) to generally available university property, services, and subsidies.
And on this point, the Court was unanimous: The liberal Justices plus
Justice Kennedy took this view; the other conservative Justices would have
just taken this further, to secure student groups' right to choose their
members as well as their right to choose their speech.
On Monday, UCLA student Caterina Kachadoorian argued in a Daily Bruin op-ed
that, as an Armenian, she wasn't offended by the Kim Kardashian costumes,
and that student activists at UCLA would do better to focus on
black-on-black violence (a position that I find wrongheaded). Says a
censorious comment beneath that article:
I have sent Caterina Kachadoorian's letter to the Office of Internal
Affairs. I have demanded an investigation into the Daily Bruin to determine
how this hate speech was published. I have requested an internal
investigation and firing of the staff member that allowed this hate and
discrimination to be published.
This student impulse to demand that authority figures punish other students
who say or do things that they don't like could not come at a more
inopportune time. As Glenn Greenwald wrote in a recent article at The
Intercept, "One of the most dangerous threats to campus free speech has been
emerging at the highest levels of the University of California system, the
sprawling collection of 10 campuses that includes UCLA and UC Berkeley. The
university's governing Board of Regents, with the support of University
President Janet Napolitano and egged on by the state's legislature, has been
attempting to adopt new speech codes that-in the name of combating
'anti-Semitism'-would formally ban various forms of Israel criticism."
He continued:
Under the most stringent such regulations, students found to be in violation
of these codes would face suspension or expulsion. In July, it appeared that
the Regents were poised to enact the most extreme version, but decided
instead to push the decision off until September, when they instead would
adopt non-binding guidelines to define "hate speech" and "intolerance."
One of the Regents most vocally advocating for the most stringent version of
the speech code is Richard Blum, the multi-millionaire defense contractor
who is married to Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California. At a Regents meeting
last week, reported the Los Angeles Times, Blum expressly threatened that
Feinstein would publicly denounce the university if it failed to adopt far
more stringent standards than the ones it appeared to be considering, and
specifically demanded they be binding and contain punishments for students
found to be in violation.
The San Francisco Chronicle put it this way: "Regent Dick Blum said his
wife, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., 'is prepared to be critical of
this university' unless UC not only tackles anti-Jewish bigotry but also
makes clear that perpetrators will be punished." The lawyer Ken White wrote
that "Blum threatened that his wife . would interfere and make trouble if
the Regents didn't commit to punish people for prohibited speech." As campus
First Amendment lawyer Ari Cohn put it the following day, "Feinstein and her
husband think college students should be expelled for protected free
speech."
Students who value fundamental human rights, protecting unpopular activism,
or safeguarding the political liberties of the least powerful among us ought
to be lobbying for the most stringent free-speech protections possible, not
undermining core human rights that have benefitted generations of
marginalized people as a salve for outrage at a frat party. As the ACLU once
explained in answer to the question of why it sometimes mounts defenses of
speech that is racist or promotes intolerance:
Free speech rights are indivisible.
Restricting the speech of one group or individual jeopardizes everyone's
rights because the same laws or regulations used to silence bigots can be
used to silence you. Conversely, laws that defend free speech for bigots can
be used to defend the rights of civil rights workers, anti-war protesters,
lesbian and gay activists and others fighting for justice. For example, in
the 1949 case of Terminiello v. Chicago, the ACLU successfully defended an
ex-Catholic priest who had delivered a racist and anti-semitic speech. The
precedent set in that case became the basis for the ACLU's successful
defense of civil rights demonstrators in the 1960s and '70s.
The indivisibility principle was also illustrated in the case of Neo-Nazis
whose right to march in Skokie, Illinois in 1979 was successfully defended
by the ACLU. At the time, then ACLU Executive Director Aryeh Neier, whose
relatives died in Hitler's concentration camps during World War II,
commented: "Keeping a few Nazis off the streets of Skokie will serve Jews
poorly if it means that the freedoms to speak, publish or assemble any place
in the United States are thereby weakened."
The college students fighting to limit free speech or to punish free
expression are courting tremendous harms that would ultimately fall
disproportionately on the least powerful, most marginalized groups of the
present and future--and as UCLA graduates, they are highly unlikely to be in
either group, which may help explain their lack of concern for how their
behavior could affect the less privileged. It is nevertheless incoherent for
activists who say that they live in a system of white supremacy to empower
state administrators to police speech at their discretion!
And all calls for university administrators to police the minutiae of campus
life rob students of the opportunity to learn how to govern themselves even
as they contribute to the spike in administrative costs that render so many
unable to afford tuition. The notion that university money is best spent
paying someone to sit in an office vetting the themes of fraternity parties
sounds like the premise of a SNL skit.
To deflect criticisms like these, defenders of the student activists are
using the increasingly common tactic of treating the fringe position of a
small number of ideologically homogeneous progressives as if it were
equivalent to the opinion of all black people. "When black students share
their hurt and disappointment with something like the 'Kanye Western' party,
too often we respond with the way we see things, and it's usually
accompanied with criticism about how incorrect we think the black point of
view is," Chris Tang, who is not black, writes in another op-ed in The Daily
Bruin. "But there's an issue with this because we are implicitly saying that
we understand the black point of view, when in reality, many of us don't."
There is nothing wrong with a black student being offended by a theme party,
and attempts to articulate such grievances ought to be met with
open-mindedness and compassion. And frats and sororities should be more
sensitive to how their actions will be received.
But there is no "black point of view," a prejudicial notion that is so
easily refuted that it's a wonder anyone invokes it. There are plenty of
black people--a majority, I would wager--who understand better than many
other Americans the importance of the First Amendment to the history of the
civil-rights movement and the future of other civil-rights causes. As if to
underscore that point, the Los Angeles Times highlighted an open letter sent
to UCLA by Michael Meyers, president of the New York Civil Rights Coalition.
He said that "as an African American civil rights leader" he had to speak
out. "We are increasingly alarmed-and distressed-by the failure of public
university officials to support free speech and diversity of opinion on
campus," he wrote in the letter to UCLA's chancellor. "Diversity of opinion
surely includes the right of students to contest orthodoxy and to poke fun
at popular culture and celebrities."
That is exactly right, and UCLA administrators should publicly apologize for
acting to the contrary rather than caving to the illegal demands of student
activists.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize