Blog | Don’t expel ‘racist’ Oklahoma students - teach them (Update: Students kicked out for creating ‘hostile learning environment’)
Update:
As expected, and sadly, Oklahoma kicked out two of the students in the video citing a “hostile learning environment.” Expelling these students does nothing to make the learning environment less hostile and can lead to just the opposite. They did something wrong and disgusting. But the university took the easy way out.
The easy thing to do in the aftermath of the publication of a 10-second video which revealed a group of fraternity students at the University of Oklahoma happily singing a racist chant is to go the “no tolerance” route and expel them.
That would be a mistake for those students, the university, as well as the students calling for the expulsions.
But that seems where we are headed any way:
The Greek letters have been removed from the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house and the football team protested instead of practicing as fallout continued from an SAE video of members chanting racist remarks at the University of Oklahoma.
School President David Boren, who joined hundreds of students at the Norman campus in a Monday protest, has already severed ties with the fraternity and promised a thorough investigation that could result in expulsion of some students from the school.
Fraternity members have until Tuesday night to clear out of the fraternity house.
"To those who have misused their free speech in such a reprehensible way, I have a message for you. You are disgraceful," Boren tweeted after the protest. "You have violated all that we stand for. You should not have the privilege of calling yourself 'Sooners.'"
Boren added that the school will become "an example to the entire country of how to deal with this issue. There must be zero tolerance for racism everywhere in our nation."
Suspending the SAE chapter on campus makes sense. While not every member did this ugly thing, enough did. It’s sort of like in football, when one person commits an infraction, the entire team gets punishment. I have no problem with that.
I have no problem with the protests and am agnostic about the high-profile football recruit and Hip Hop artist who have decided to no longer play for the university on the football field or in a concert, respectively. Individuals have to assert their disgust in ways they see best.
And I don’t have a problem with the students on the video being placed on academic probation, if that’s an option.
But kicking them off campus, expelling them, is not as constructive as the protesters and the university president seem to believe it will be. The road less traveled would be to embrace those students even as they are being disciplined. Make it clear to them why the campus, and much of the country, has responded in disgust to their actions.
Maybe assign them community service and teach them the history of such chants and why they are so powerfully ugly and the macro and micro of U.S. race relations and our fraught history on the subject, and other such things to make amends - but they must be allowed to make amends. Simply being angry at them and throwing them away is not a good idea, no matter how much sense it seems to make in the white hot aftermath of what they did.
Oklahoma University is a place of higher learning - not a place for perfect people.
News flash: Young people in large groups often do stupid things. Sometimes those stupid things end up physically harming themselves or others. Sometimes they lead to hurt feelings and angst and anger, as it has in this case. But we must remember that they are there to learn, to be made better. All throwing them away will do is teach them to not get caught. It won’t help them understand the reaction. It won’t help them understand why what they did was even wrong.
But it’s bigger than the students singing that racist chant on that video. The other students who are hurt by what they heard need to learn something, too, especially on the issue of race, that no one’s perfect, that none of us wants to be forever identified by our worst moment on this issue.
They need to be taught the difference between someone committing a racist act - as what happened in the video - and being racist. They are not one in the same, yet that important distinction is too often lost in such discussions.
The students who are offended by the video also need to be taught empathy and be encouraged to practice it.
They need to be challenged about what they should do after the white hot reaction dies down.
Will they allow the offending students to make amends? Will they leave space in their hearts and minds to forgive if those students do?
Will this prompt them to search their own hearts and minds and past actions to determine if what they’ve been doing helped create an atmosphere in which dealing with the complex issue of race is nearly impossible to speak about forthrightly because they and others have been too quick to throw imperfect people away? Are they willing to reveal times when they’ve crossed the racism line? And I’m talking about black, white, Latino and Asian-American students.
What about professors and staff members on campus? What will they learn? What will they teach their students?
Everyone already knows that racism is bad, that what the students on that video did was wrong. Reinforcing that point does not push the conversation forward.
This is not the first time this kind of issue has popped up, and it certainly won’t be the last.
So, yes, discipline the students in the video. But do not throw them away - and don’t forfeit another opportunity to help each of us better understand the complexity of an issue that has haunted this country since before its founding.
This story was originally published March 10, 2015 at 9:07 AM with the headline "Blog | Don’t expel ‘racist’ Oklahoma students - teach them (Update: Students kicked out for creating ‘hostile learning environment’)."