UNC President Erskine Bowles is asking a commission to study whether each of the university system's campuses should have a policy blocking hate speech, Mandy Locke reports in this story from the News & Observer.
Bowles was reacting to racist graffiti painted in the Free Expression Tunnel on the N.C. State campus after the Nov. 4 election. It declared, "Shoot that n----r in the head", among other things. The university is disciplining a student who took responsibility for initiating the painting, and four students involved have apologized. The state NAACP has asked that they be suspended. Neither state nor federal authorities have filed charges.
Bowles' concern about the racist speech is understandable. Intolerance and the promotion of violence have no place in a civil society, especially on a university campus. But there remains that other troubling question -- if the First Amendment is to truly mean anything, should it not protect even the most offensive speech? And if not, who decides where the line will be, and whether it moves?
It's also a sensitive issue for the university, which more than four decades ago suffered under the humiliation of a legislatively-imposed Speaker Ban Act that sought to prevent subversive speakers from appearing on state property, including university campuses. That law was passed by the General Assembly while Bowles was a student at Chapel Hill. That law threatened the university's accreditation and led to a prolonged campaign to have it declared unconstitutional, as it ultimately was.
Regulating speech is a tough question in a society that reveres its First Amendment rights to speak out -- but the university is within its rights and its responsibility to consider hate speech and what, if anything, to try to do about it.
What do you think?
