Students whose impudence exceeds their careful thought about the Bill of Rights can be forgiven for demanding a corporate spanking of everyone involved in the supposedly racist “Kanye Western” party, which parodied the egomanical rapper and his amply-posteriored celebrity wife.
UCLA administrators are another matter, and The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf gives them an earful for their “low-regard for the First Amendment, California law, and liberal ideals” in their party investigation:
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.
Friedersdorf notes that UCLA’s own resident First Amendment expert, Eugene Volokh, doesn’t think this is remotely legal (and he has the damning Supreme Court precedent to back it up), and that someone claimed to file a complaint against the school paper itself for running an op-ed defending the party.
This is a terribly “inopportune” time to be attacking unpopular speech because the UC system is considering new rules that could squelch criticism of Israel on campus, he writes:
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… 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.
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