"In the video, three students are seen walking across the parking lot... saying the [n-word] louder with each repetition."

On Monday, the same day that students held a march and rally over the incident, campus police arrested two of the students in the video, identifying them as Jarred Karal and Ryan Mucaj... [I]n an incident report filed by police, Karal and Mucaj, both described as white, 21-year-old male students, had been playing 'a game in which they yelled vulgar words' as they walked with a third student. After arriving at the parking lot of the student apartment complex, they 'switched to saying a racial epithet,' according to the report. The men were loud enough for some students in the complex to hear the shouting from their apartments.... On October 21, Karal and Mucaj were charged with ridicule on account of creed, religion, color, denomination, nationality or race.... [University of Connecticut President Thomas C. Katsouleas] has worked to stress his belief that the university both has a zero-tolerance policy against racism and should not be defined by the recent racist incidents...."

From "White UConn students were arrested for shouting the n-word. Black students say the incident is part of a larger problem/Students say the university needs to do a lot more to address a deeper culture of racism on campus" (Vox).

First, let's distinguish between doing something "to address a deeper culture of racism on campus" and having the state prosecute 2 individuals for saying the n-word to each other in some kind of game. The arrests are a complete distraction from whatever the serious problem may be in the campus culture.

Second, here's that zero-tolerance policy again, that fake, self-serving way for those in power act as though they're taking the problem their constituents care about seriously. We just saw the case of Marlon Anderson, here in Madison, Wisconsin, who was fired for saying the n-word in the context of telling a student not to call him the n-word. Everyone could see the badness of zero tolerance in that context. In this University of Connecticut case, guys who thought they were only talking to each other were playing some sort of game of saying bad words, in which context, it's plain to see that they knew the word was transgressive. They had no target, but they were overheard and recorded, and now they're being scapegoated.

Third, whatever is going on with the school's purported "zero-tolerance" policy, that was not what Karal and Mucaj were arrested for. It's something the school's president is trying to use to defend himself from the students who want the culture to change. I suspect that to these students, what Karal and Mucaj did is evidence that there is a racist culture. If that could happen, they may think, it means that much more is happening all the time. In that light, you should see why Katsouleas's response would be experienced as infuriatingly weak.