The fallout from the death at the hands of Minneapolis police of George Floyd, with a white officer kneeling on the black man's neck until he was unconscious, has brought about many changes already.
Among them are a new hypersensitivity to some opinions about race among college students, who are calling attention to classmates' social-media posts on the subject and demanding action. In response, academic officials are launching investigations, imposing discipline and rescinding offers of admission.
A free-speech group, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, warns the crackdown impedes the process through which people can be trained to become more accepting citizens.
Will Creeley of FIRE said that while some of posts prompting action are "flatly racist," he contends colleges and universities "should only rescind a student’s admission in narrow circumstances — if the post is a true threat of violence, for example, or falls into one of the carefully defined categories of unprotected speech."
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The better, albeit harder, course is for the colleges to admit the students and teach them.
"Colleges and universities are uniquely prepared to introduce students to the worldviews and experiences of others who have lived lives very different from their own — indeed, they are designed to do so," he argued. "Confronting new ideas and reevaluating one’s own is the point of a liberal arts education. For many, this will be transformative. For those students who have authored racist social media posts, it may be especially so."
He pointed out that rescinding admission "stops the educational process before it has started."
Creeley maintained that a college education for a "newly exposed and embittered 18-year-old" is more likely to open up a student's perceptions about other community groups than most other means.
Further, the students would face "social sanctions" for being exposed, he reasoned.
And legally, the First Amendment "protects a great deal of speech that many find deeply offensive, including hateful speech."
"This is for good reason: we can’t trust those in power to define what speech may be punished without critically endangering dissent," he said.
Public universities are bound by the First Amendment, and private schools typically commit themselves to that standard, he pointed out.
The real issue, he said, is how to deal with "young adults who have expressed hateful views."
"Shunning them may be a rational individual response, and is itself an expressive or associational act protected by the First Amendment," he said. "But institutions committed to education should not allow themselves that easy out, or deny such a student a chance to actually examine his or her own views."