Before I go any further, I should disclaim the fact that OU isn’t just some local university to us. My wife started her undergrad schooling there, finished her graduate degree there, and lectured at their College of Medicine for many years. I’ve guest lectured several times myself. Our house is brimming over with OU paraphernalia: hats, shirts, jackets, footballs, etc. Our babies wear OU onesies until they are old enough to wear toddler-sized OU-branded outfits. We all screamed ourselves hoarse last time OU played Alabama in the Sugar Bowl. You get the idea.
When OU suffers public humiliation, we feel it too. When David Boren acts to alleviate that humiliation by laying as much of the blame as possible on the only named individuals, we feel relieved, even though we are confident that countless ΣΑΕ boys have gleefully sung about lynching and only a tiny fraction of those have ever been caught on film and punished. The last time I wrote about the demise of ΣΑΕ at OU, it was basically to mention that two foolish young men were having an incredibly bad run of moral luck, and were about to become the fall-guys for an entire system of racism that has existed for several years within (at least) that one fraternity house. Since that time, those young men have been publicly named, administratively expelled, and endlessly shamed online and even named/shamed in mainstream news outlets. They have also received a barrage of threats, according to sources close to the families. (Yes, I have those. No, they will not come forward.)
As is usual in these sorts of cases, various arguments have sprung up over the facts of the case, the values our community should try to uphold, and which particular legal precedents and administrative rules will eventually prove dispositive. Very often, people have confused these last two sorts of arguments, perhaps in the hope that our legal system will come to embody their own values.
The most common argument that I’ve seen on my feeds pits civil libertarians who argue that racist chants should be considered constitutionally protected speech against progressive anti-racists who argue that state schools should be allowed to enforce their student codes against verbal harassment and creation of a hostile academic environment via speech acts, just as private universities are allowed to do. (Replace “should be” with “are” in that last sentence to make it an argument about the existing state of our federal legal system and probable outcomes from appeals courts, instead of an argument about how people would like to see their own moral values implemented.) Some variations on these arguments include the possibility that President Boren may have had a constitutionally viable path for punishing ΣΑΕ (e.g. investigating them for ongoing violations of Title XI and OU’s existing EEO policies) but that he chose to act quickly and solely against their speech instead, gambling that the short-term benefits would outweigh the long-term costs. Any amount of delay and OU rapidly loses support from the public, the student body, and the alumni donor base. On the other hand, it takes some time to build a watertight case against ΣΑΕ, who will probably sue in retaliation for OU’s ousting them in great haste this week. I have yet to settle on a firm position as to how the school ought to have reacted, but it is difficult to imagine that Boren didn’t carefully weigh up the foreseeable consequences in light of his extensive political experience. (White-flight Republicans may well disagree.)
It is difficult for me to imagine that racist chanting will turn out to be legally protected speech throughout all OU campuses, regardless of context and how much it interferes with student performance, but just in case that comes to pass, I would like to briefly mention that a private university called OCU is rapidly expanding in several areas, including medicine. Tuition might be a bit higher, but at least you won’t have to wear racism-canceling headphones when strolling across campus.
