stupid college kids

[gsh]

I find myself conflicted over the two University of Oklahoma students who got expelled. Yes, they said some awful things, but being expelled from a state school seems like a potential violation of their first amendment rights. I may not agree with what they say, etc. Beside, racists are some of the people most in need of learning.

Comments

[tamnonlinear]

I'd assume that the folks most in need of access to higher education are people from historically oppressed and under-represented social groups, not a bunch of white boys who never learned that they don't have a great out of consequences free card from the constitution. The school is not obligated to provide them with a platform, nor to tolerate the presence of hate speech that makes the school less welcoming for minority students. I don't feel any sense of conflict over this whatsoever.

[whitebird]

Yup, this is the way it is. People do, in fact, have free speech, as these students proved. People are not invulnerable from the negative things that happen to them because of how they choose to express themselves.

[tamnonlinear]

And I'm going to worry about whether or not the poor little racists get a second chance sometime significantly after everyone else gets a decent first one.

[whitebird]

I'm disinclined to care if jackasses get a second chance, no matter when it might be.

[gsh]

Are you suggesting that it is perfectly fine to throw people who say "the king is a fink" into jail, and still claim that there is freedom of speech, since they had free speech, but aren't invulnerable from negative things?

[whitebird]

No, that isn't what I'm saying, and that isn't what happened.

What happened was that they, as a group representing the frat, made and posted publicly a video containing quite a lot of hateful speech. (I've not listened to the video, and so I'm assuming it only goes to the level of hateful speech, not to the level of hate speech, as then they'd have been charged as that's illegal.) Expressing themselves in such a manner so publicly likely goes against the school's student behavior code of ethics, as promoting racist and hateful ideas, even when not illegal, is socially repugnant. As students, they agreed to follow the college's student behavior policies or face the consequences. Expulsion is a consequence.

And, state funded colleges are not acting as representatives of the governmental legal system, but they do have a social mandate to ensure their students act in such a way as to not create a hostile environment for others.