Really, Hunt?? So, should American universities also allow the American Nazi party to set up shop and advocate genocide of “undesireable” groups? How far do you think this campus free speech should go?
Official recognition and support is not an unassailable free speech right. The university officially sponsors the school newspaper. If the newspaper were taken over by white supremacists, would the university be required to sit quietly and continue to provide official premises and sponsorship?
I see a huge difference between the Catholic church’s beliefs and practices vs those of hate groups. Catholics don’t permit women to be priests. They are still permitted senior roles and one of the officially recognized doctors of the church is a female. If the Catholics started chanting that women should be lynched from trees, I think your analogy would be more apt.
Edited to respond to Hunt’s edit: Just to clarify: i agree that the students have free speech. I do not see that their right to free speech includes being officially recognized by any university, public or otherwise, especially since sponsorship includes official recognition and alliance with the university.
All the way, as long as we’re talking about speech.
So, hayden, you feel confident that you can draw the line between groups that have totally unacceptable views, and those that just have somewhat unacceptable views?
“This fraternity has deep southern roots, and I suspect the chant originated decades ago, during battles over integration.”
Their national headquarters isn’t in the South. It’s in Evanston, Illinois.
As I posted on the other thread discussing this, while of course there is no excuse for this behavior and I’m glad SAE national shut them down immediately, it is interesting to me that Kanye West seems to have no problem using the n-word multiple times, as in his most recent release (“All Day”). If a black fraternity on campus were to have a party and play that song, is that ok then?
I don’t know the lyrics to that song, but I am assuming Kanye is not singing about hanging white people from a tree.
So if SAE had just chanted “no n-words in SAE” without referring to hanging people from a tree, that’d be ok?
I’m no fan of the n-word, obviously, and it’s not acceptable in my household, but I’m also not a fan of double standards.
So, suggesting some students should be strung up and hung from trees should be protected speech??
@Pizzagirl, I can’t really respond to the “n word”, but the closest analogy I can come up with is that there is a qualitative difference between hearing my rural Southern niece refer to herself as a “redneck” and hearing a random social commentator from, say, Seattle using the same term. The nuances are completely different.
They are permitted to say whatever they want.
The university is not required to maintain ties with them.
Freedom of speech goes both ways. You can say what you want but that doesn’t exempt you from backlash.
This really doesn’t seem like a hard concept.
Pizzagirl - SAE was founded at the University of Alabama. It is the only currently-active national fraternity founded in the antebellum south, although its national headquarters was created at Northwestern in the 1920s.
We don’t have thought police here.
I will be curious to see what, if anything, the university does about this. I agree with Hunt, that there is nothing they should do. This speech took place off campus, in a private setting. If the university is going to punish students for this, then they will have to punish every student who listens to bigoted/misygonic music in their dorm room.
Yes, pretty much. There may be situations in which speech can be prohibited because it is immediately inciting unlawful behavior. But this song–especially when sung in private–doesn’t fit that description. It’s just speech we really, really don’t like.
Pretty ironic that this is the official creed of the fraternity:
The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe.
—John Walter Wayland, The Baltimore Sun, 1899
Dang, I was hoping to send my son to one of these southern universities that offer awesome full tuition and full ride scholarships to top students. Really questioning the wisdom of that now.
I’ve heard that before and I’m sure it’s correct. But, what I very specifically asked was;
Is being a student at the University of Oklahoma a “right” or a “privilege”?
I knew about this song 35 years ago. I was told about it (did not hear it sung, though) with respect to a West Coast university. So it is not unique to the South. I was told about it in the context of SAE pledging a Black student (and the song used the word “Black,” not the N-word).
“It goes without saying, furthermore, that the chant would not have endured there, and at other chapters, had the fraternity pledged any African-American members over the years.”
I’d go further and say it wouldn’t have endured if they had pledged men of character over the years. Lots and lots and lots of white young men know that this is wrong and that they have a responsibility to speak up.
(Perhaps they pledged men of character and failed to retain them after the pledges realized what kind of organization they were in.)
D ruled out Alabama for similar reasons.
“We don’t have thought police here.”
Golly, really?
And yet nuance is a part of daily social interaction for most adults, whether it’s deciding whether certain magazines are appropriate for sale in front of the counter or behind it, whether there’s implied threat or exasperated hyperbole in the phrase “I could just kill him!”, whether (to circle around a bit upstream) Kanye is likely to insult his target audience by asking “what’s Gucci my n----?”