"[Ron] DeSantis, 44, is not the first Republican politician of his generation to rail against his own Ivy League degrees while milking them for access and campaign cash."

"But now, as he seeks the Republican presidential nomination, he is molding his entire campaign and political persona around a vengeful war against what he calls the country’s 'ruling class': an incompetent, unaccountable elite of bureaucrats, journalists, educators and other supposed 'experts' whose pernicious and unearned authority the governor has vowed to vanquish...."

From "How Ron DeSantis Joined the ‘Ruling Class’ — and Turned Against It/Over the years, Mr. DeSantis embraced and exploited his Ivy League credentials. Now he is reframing his experiences at Yale and Harvard to wage a vengeful political war" (NYT).

I see no problem with a young person taking advantage of elite education and then rejecting its values. Who better to challenge the "ruling class" than someone who's had a direct experience with it? If education is any good it equips you to go on to pursue your own goals. Does the NYT think the students are supposed to absorb indoctrination and then go on to be loyal to the elite?

"Cornell University announced the temporary suspension of all fraternity parties and social events in a statement on Monday..."

"... following alerts from the school’s Police Department over the weekend that one student was sexually assaulted and at least four others were drugged at off-campus residences affiliated with fraternities registered with the school.... The Cornell police said they were made aware on Nov. 4 of at least four students who said they drank little or no alcohol at off-campus parties in recent weeks but became incapacitated. The students told the officers they had been 'exposed to Rohypnol,' the so-called date-rape drug."

The NYT reports.

"Swarthmore College’s two fraternities announced Tuesday that they are disbanding after weathering intense criticism over leaked documents that contained allegations of a 'rape attic'..."

"... as well as homophobic, racist and misogynistic language. In statements posted to Facebook Tuesday night, members of Phi Psi, which is not nationally affiliated, and Delta Upsilon wrote that they had unanimously decided to dissolve their fraternities and give up their houses. In April, a redacted version of a 116-page document that reportedly contained Phi Psi’s old meeting minutes and details of pledge tasks was published by two campus publications, revealing troubling details about the culture within the selective Pennsylvania college’s fraternities. The documents feature graphic descriptions of members’ sexual encounters, including a reference to an alleged 'rape tunnel.' It also describes their conversations about women, minority groups and sexual assault that often contained offensive language, such as homophobic and racial slurs.... 'We cannot in good conscience be members of an organization with such a painful history,' the members of Phi Psi said in Tuesday’s statement. 'Since the start of our membership, we made it our mission to improve the culture and perception of Phi Psi. Unfortunately, the wounds are too deep to repair.'"

From "Swarthmore fraternities disband after outrage over leaked documents joking about 'rape attic.'"

"A Texas fraternity brother who was arrested on hazing charges fell to his death on campus in an apparent suicide..."

The NY Post reports on the death of Andrew Walker, 19, who was arrested after an incident at the Kappa Sigma fraternity house at Texas Christian University:

Walker and another fraternity brother, Christopher Barker, allegedly plied freshman pledges with vodka shots and forced them to eat expired guacamole. The alleged hazing resulted in one of the freshmen landing in the hospital for alcohol poisoning. Authorities said his blood alcohol level was determined to be so high that he could’ve died.

IN THE COMMENTS: Eric the Fruit Bat said...

So it turns out that four stories is enough to do it? Good to know.

I said:

I lived across from a one-story building that was the jump-off for a suicide. I don't want to suggest how the man did that in a way that he must have known would work, because I don't want to given anyone any ideas. Don't kill yourselves.

Here was a 19-year-old boy who imagined his life had been destroyed by one bad thing, and I could list some recent news stories that send the message that's how the world works now. Somehow, the celebrities never kill themselves. They just keep fighting, but the young don't have the perspective of success. Only hopelessness. Please hang on, children.

Framing Brett Kavanaugh as an exemplar of masculine anger and aggression.

I'm reading "Brett Kavanaugh and the Adolescent Aggression of Conservative Masculinity" by Alexandra Schwartz in The New Yorker. Schwartz writes about Kavanaugh's "wildly emotional performance, in which he alternated between shouting, as he blamed the Clintons and the Democrats for conspiring to torpedo his nomination to the Supreme Court, and weeping, as he spoke about the pain that he and his family have experienced in the weeks since accusations of sexual assault against him became public."

First, Kavanaugh never wept. He struggled to contain his emotion, often sticking his tongue into his left cheek, which seemed to be his way of controlling himself. He was under an immensely powerful attack and fighting for his life. What he did was not "wild" (nor was it tame). It was real emotion, under some degree of control. If he had been completely controlled, I suspect the New Yorker writer would have called him steely and cold, and that would be characterized as masculine (and thus scary and bad).

Kavanaugh choked up and sobbed...

He didn't sob! He came to the verge of breaking down into crying, but he never did. He just stopped talking, did that tongue move, and waited to regain composure. Can men do that? How many times have I heard progressive women assert that men should cry and why don't men cry, come on, men, cry, we'll think better of you if you do, it's a strong man who can cry? But let him approach a breakdown into tears and he's already weeping and sobbing and he's condemned — as he was when he did not cry — as manifesting the bad kind of masculinity.

... as he described his father’s detailed calendars, which apparently inspired his own calendar-keeping practice; he seemed unable to gain control over himself, gasping and taking frequent sips of water. 

He didn't seem that way to me. He seemed that way to you? And actually it seems like bullying to subject a man to emotional torture and then taunt him for approaching tears, even as he fights like hell to control himself. I think of school yard bullies who terrify a targeted boy and make his own vulnerability to tears into further torture by saying things like, What's the matter, is the little baby going to cry?

The initial impression was of naked emotional vulnerability, but Kavanaugh was setting a tone. Embedded in the histrionics were the unmistakable notes of fury and bullying. 

I'm blogging as a read, so I brought up bullying before I saw Schwartz's use of the word. But she's accusing Kavanaugh of bullying! How does that work?

Kavanaugh shouted over Dianne Feinstein to complain about the “outrage” of not being allowed to testify earlier; when asked about his drinking, by Sheldon Whitehouse, he replied, “I like beer. You like beer? What do you like to drink, Senator?” with a note of aggressive petulance that is hard to square with his preferred self-image of judicious impartiality and pious Sunday churchgoing. 

If you protest bullying, you're the bully. Stop bullying me about bullying you. I think maybe Schwartz caught herself making Kavanaugh seem sympathetic — the poor man was weeping and sobbing — that she needed to flip into making him the attacker. He was defending himself, but look: He defended himself with "aggressive petulance."

What we are seeing is a model of American conservative masculinity that has become popular in the past few years, one that is directly tied to the loutish, aggressive frat-boy persona that Kavanaugh is purportedly seeking to dissociate himself from. Gone are the days of a terse John Wayne-style stoicism. Now we have Trump, ranting and raving at his rallies; we have Alex Jones, whose habit of screaming and floridly weeping as he spouts his conspiracy theories is a key part of his appeal to his audience. When Kavanaugh is not crying or shouting, he uses a distinctly adolescent tone that might best be described as “talking back.” He does not respond to senators. He negs them. His response, when he is asked about his drinking, is to flip the question and ask the senators how they like their alcohol; his refusal to say whether he would coöperate with an F.B.I. investigation brings to mind a teen-ager stonewalling his parents. If Kavanaugh is trying to convince the public that he could never have been capable, as a teen-ager, of aggression or peer pressure, this is an odd way to go about it.

Well, that's an interesting observation, and I'll let that part stand for now, because I want to watch the hearing which is beginning again. What Schwartz is describing is something I would not have called "masculine," but men are doing it. Is Kavanaugh like Trump?! Imagine Trump in the position Kavanaugh was in yesterday and how he might have behaved and spoken.

ADDED: Let me get back to that last paragraph. First, Schwartz sets aside an older form of "conservative masculinity" — "the loutish, aggressive frat-boy persona." I don't know why this is considered specifically conservative. There is, indeed, something we call the "frat boy." I've had an aversion to this type of person since I was a college student and no one I knew would want anything to do with a frat boy. At the time, I believed fraternities were obsolescent and would soon be gone. I thought football was about to die too. Clearly, I was wrong, but I'm just saying I never liked the "frat boy" I never wanted anything to do with. I mean, there was one frat boy I once went to a movie with. I can't remember his name. Let's say it was Bob. The friends I had called him "Frat Boy Bob," and though I liked him, I never overcame my aversion to the general stereotype that I and my friends had stamped onto him. I can't remember his name, as I said, but I do remember the movie. It was the 1962 Orson Welles version of "The Trial" — with Anthony Perkins as — in the words of IMDB — "An unassuming office worker [who] is arrested and stands trial, but he is never made aware of his charges." I wonder if Frat Boy Bob ever became aware of my charges against him.

Schwartz sees Kavanaugh as distancing himself from the "frat boy persona." She adds, "Gone are the days of a terse John Wayne-style stoicism." I think she's positing a second older form of "conservative masculinity," the John Wayne type, but maybe she means to conflate John Wayne and the frat boy, which strikes me as ludicrous. I'm not convinced that the stoical and terse masculine type is gone, and Kavanaugh has some of that some of the time. He has a frat boy part to him too. He likes his beer. He went to parties. He owned up to that and he owned up to embarrassment because he didn't have the sexual activity that might seem to go along with that style, but he told us he was also proud of not acting out sexually because he had religious scruples. Schwartz makes no mention of the conservative masculinity that comes from religion and that demands sexual continence.

Schwartz posits a new sort of masculinity that is "is directly tied" to the old frat boy style. What's the direct tie? Did this new thing evolve out of the frat boy or spring from the same inborn impulses? I don't know what she means. She's observing something and it reminds her of something else, so these things are tied. As she proceeds to describe this newly popular form of masculinity, the model is less the frat boy (a college character) than the teenager:

When Kavanaugh is not crying or shouting, he uses a distinctly adolescent tone that might best be described as “talking back.” He does not respond to senators. He negs them. 

Negging is adolescent?! Maybe The New Yorker thinks "negging" is just being negative. But here's the Wikipedia article on negging, which is how I've understood the slang since first hearing it:

Negging is an act of emotional manipulation whereby a person makes a deliberate backhanded compliment or otherwise flirtatious remark to another person to undermine their confidence and increase their need of the manipulator's approval. The term was coined and prescribed by the pickup artist community, several of whose members have proposed it as an effective method to build attraction.

And as far as "talking back" — Kavanaugh was responding to questions. Yes, he was resistant to them much of the time, but the Democratic Senators were trying to manipulate and handle him and get him to damage himself. Perhaps Schwartz thinks Kavanaugh seemed like a teenager because she saw the Senators as adopting a parental scolding tone and she liked that and was disappointed that it didn't cow Kavanaugh. He stood up to them. Why isn't that good? It isn't good if you want him to let Senators treat him like a teenager. Then, his failure to accept the position they put him in looks like he's a bad teenager (and not the good little boy you characterize him as trying to be).

But what does any of that say about present-day conservative masculinity?!

"Police investigating after videos show dropped TV narrowly missing woman at UW-Madison fraternity."

Headline at the Wisconsin State Journal. Here's the video:

This girl was an inch away from death @5thyear

A post shared by Barstool Wisco (@badgerbarstool) on Jun 30, 2018 at 5:36pm PDT

The interpretation of bananas.

I don't know whom to believe here — "Frat Retreat Ends Early after Students ‘Frightened’ by a Banana Peel" — but whether Ryan Swanson is lying or not when he says he put a banana peel in a tree because he couldn't find a garbage can, this is one hell of an abject nonapology:

I want to sincerely apologize for the events that took place this past weekend. Although unintentional, there is no excuse for the pain that was caused to members of our community. I want to thank my friends in the NPHC for their candid and constructive conversations that we have continued to have. I have much to learn and look forward to doing such and encourage all members of our university community to do the same. We must all keep in mind how our actions affect those around us differently.

Swanson says he has "much to learn" and, really, don't we all have an infinite amount to learn? Anything you do might be misunderstood by someone else, perhaps by someone who deserves empathy and perhaps by someone with powerful allies who will ruin your life if you don't anticipate how they will interpret something you say or do or even how people who hate you will claim to have interpreted something that really didn't confuse them at all.

And what about all the students who go to college for an education and get taught that their emotional stirrings — their fears about what something might mean — warrant attention and respect? Their misinterpretations count as real in the world that other people — including the once-privileged frat boy — must anticipate and guard against. Does that feel good enough or will it get old and, ultimately, just as insulting as the kind of old-fashioned expressions of racism of which the banana peel in the tree might have been reminiscent?

By the way, "How Did Slipping on a Banana Peel Become a Comedy Staple?"

"Eighteen fraternity members were charged in the death of a 19-year-old Pennsylvania State University student who fell multiple times after consuming toxic levels of alcohol..."

"... and whose own friends failed to get help for him for many hours," WaPo reports.

Criminal liability for failure to act is a longstanding problem in law. For a quick trip through the subject, here's Wikipedia's article. Below the jump are the details to the story that may flip your reaction from what it was when you read the sentence I quoted above.

"So the guy in charge of 'Greek' life on campus is worried about cultural appropriation?"

My favorite comment on a WaPo column (by Catherine Rampell) titled "A fraternity was told it was ‘appropriating culture.’/Administrators won’t say which."

I think it's actually pretty clear what the appropriation was. The fraternity was doing a badminton-based fundraiser and it called it "Bad(minton) and Boujee." There's a rap song "Bad and Boujee" and "boujee" is a distinctive spelling of the shortened form of "bourgeois" that's used as an insult and more commonly spelled — if anybody tries to write it — "bougie." The spelling "boujee" is actually good because it's phonetic and it keeps people from pronouncing it "boogie," which actually is a racial slur!

Here's the OED entry for the noun "boogie":

U.S. slang. offensive.

A derogatory term for an African American.

1923 Confessions of Bank Burglar vii. 40 Three coons came into the barn..the three of them took a drink and then put the bottle in the hay... At noon the ‘boogies’ came in for another shot.
1925 Flynn's 1 Aug. 572/1 One of the cops..caught two boogies. We picked up the two hard-lookin' young negroes.
1925 Flynn's 1 Aug. 572/1 The boogie jus' got up and grinned.
1937 E. Hemingway To have & have Not iii. xiv. 205, I seen that big boogie there mopping it up.

Anyway, the spelling "boujee" is associated with black people, especially when used in connection with the rap song title. Here's the video of the song. Once you've watched that, you'll have to stoop to faux naivety to act like you don't know what the university was talking about. It's a separate question whether cultural appropriation is bad and whether it's something universities should patrol and how clearly they need to speak when they do.

Anyway, I'm just getting up to speed on the word "boujee," and I found a helpful blog post by Damon Young at Very Smart Brothas, "THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BOUGIE, BOUJEE, AND BOURGIE/BOURGEOIS, EXPLAINED." Excerpt:

Bougie Black people are mostly urban, have completed some form of secondary education, and, most importantly, possess and are mindful of a certain urban/educated aesthetic. These are the people discussed and deconstructed in my Shit Bougie Black People Love series....

Anyway, Boujee describes the type of nouveau/hood rich that would totally, definitely cook up some dope with an Uzi.* They may have even made more money last year than their Bougie and Bourgie/Bourgeois counterparts, but the IRS would never, ever, ever know.

I plan to read more Damon Young. Like his newest post: "HOW MAD SHOULD I BE WHEN WHITE PEOPLE GREET AND TALK TO MY DOG WHEN I’M WALKING HIM INSTEAD OF ME?"

_______________________

* That's a reference to the lyrics to the song "Bad and Boujee": "My bitch is bad and boujee/Cookin' up dope with an Uzi."

ADDED: The word pronounced boujee or bougie seems to have originated in speaking about black people. The first printed examples — according to the (unlinkable) OED — were spelled "bourgie" (showing the connection to the word "bourgeois" more clearly). The OED defines this word as "slang (chiefly U.S., orig. in African-American usage). Chiefly depreciative... A person, esp. an African-American, regarded as bourgeois or middle-class, or as exhibiting characteristics attributed to the middle class, such as conventionality, materialism, or pretentiousness." Example:

1968 Negro Digest Nov. 64/2 Instead of recognizing differences among members but valuing the common cause, individuals will begin to call some people ‘Uncle Toms’, ‘bourgeois’ or ‘bourgies’, conservatives, foot-shufflers, black Caucasians and a variety of other uncomplimentary names.

It was also an adjective, again, "Originally used chiefly of and by African Americans." Example:

1968 Ramparts 26 Oct. 29/1 Silly-ass Kenneth Freeman..said some bull crap about ‘Huey P. Newton come from a bourgie family.’

Jury finds Rolling Stone liable in the defamation suit over its false fraternity-gang-rape story about the University of Virginia

The winning plaintiff is Nicole P. Eramo, who was the associate dean of students, the NYT reports.

[I]n videotaped testimony shown during the trial, Jann S. Wenner, Rolling Stone’s founder and editor, said the magazine was wrong to retract the story fully.

“We did everything reasonable, appropriate up to the highest standards of journalism to check on this thing,” Mr. Wenner said. “The one thing we didn’t do was confront Jackie’s accusers — the rapists.”

Referring to Jackie, Mr. Wenner said there was nothing a journalist could do “if someone is really determined to commit a fraud.”

The jury didn't buy that.  And Eramo was deemed a public figure so the verdict represents a finding that the publisher either knew the story was false or had reckless disregard for whether or not it was true.

There's a second lawsuit brought by the fraternity.

"I'm seeing people defending Trump. They say 'locker room.' And: this is the way men talk when they are alone with men."

"It's like they are *trying* to validate the anti-fraternity ideology of feminists."

Something I wrote in a discussion at Facebook yesterday.

Where did it come from — this myth of "Bernie bros"?

I'm seeing articles like "Bill Clinton Accuses Bernie Bros of Sexism." But what are "Bernie Bros"?

Fully committing to the patently false idea that Sanders’ supporters are uniquely nasty, TIME reported on Clinton’s recent New Hampshire speech thusly:

Clinton also called attention to a collection of male Sanders supporters dubbed ‘Bernie bros’ who launch vitriolic attacks on Clinton supporters online in solidarity with the Senator’s cause. Though the Sanders campaign has distanced itself from the “bros,” Clinton suggested that Sanders supporters made it difficult for women to speak freely about his wife’s campaign online.

Bloggers “who have gone online to defend Hillary, to explain why they supported her, have been subject to vicious trolling and attacks that are literally too profane often, not to mention sexist, to repeat,” Clinton said Sunday.

Dubbed? Who dubbed? Are there guys who've adopted that term for themselves or is this the way Clinton supporters have decided to collectively insult male Sanders supporters? It's weird to be reading this so soon after Gloria Steinem — in her ham-handed effort to help Hillary — said that young women who are for Bernie are going where the boys are.

My ancient ear isn't well-tuned to the nuance of "bro," but to me it feels like a sexist insult, perhaps a mild one, like calling young women, "chicks." But I sense that "bro" refers to a particular type of man, and yet, I'm not picturing the type of man who'd be hanging out in a left-wing political campaign (which is another reason why Steinem's remark didn't work very well).

I'm seeing at ThinkProgress: "Bernie Sanders Tells Berniebros To Knock It Off — ‘We Don’t Want That Crap.'" Does that mean Sanders acknowledges the existence of a cadre called "Berniebros" (or Bernie Bros)?

Young people lack a sense of humor... and it's the professors' fault.

According to Caitlin Flanagan, talking to Bill Maher about her new piece in The Atlantic, "That’s Not Funny!/Today’s college students can’t seem to take a joke."

This is a very old topic really. The only thing that seemed new is the long, inside look at the annual convention of the National Association for Campus Activities, through which many entertainers get hired and which doesn't work as a channel into paid employment for comedians who seem at all politically incorrect. For example, one comedian got laughs with the idea of a "sassy black friend":

But afterward, two white students from an Iowa college shook their heads: no. He was “perpetuating stereotypes,” one of them said, firmly. “We’re a very forward-thinking school,” she told me. “That thing about the ‘sassy black friend’? That wouldn’t work for us.” Many others, apparently, felt the same way: Yee ended up with 18 bookings—a respectable showing, but hardly a reflection of the excitement in the room when he performed.

I don't know why anyone would expect something as bureaucratic as the National Association for Campus Activities to bring anything edgy and transgressive into town.  That doesn't mean students don't know find transgressive things funny, just that they're staying out of trouble. And why court trouble over "sassy black friend" — which is just an old stereotype, eliciting an easy laugh? It's not the Lenny Bruce line of comedy that really challenges people! It's comfortable, careless, and silly.

Would Lenny Bruce seek approval and income through the National Association for Campus Activities? No. He wouldn't even try. And that's not because the students wouldn't find him funny. They would. And so would the professors. But he'd have to find a different path to reach them, and he wouldn't whine about that! He'd want to be rejected by the bureaucratic filters of the National Association for Campus Activities. I think. I don't know. He's dead. I'm just using his rotting corpse in a manner he's in no position to refute.

Flanagan says:

If your goal were simply to bring great comics to a college campus, it would be easily accomplished. You would gather the school’s comedy nerds, give them a budget, and tell them to book the best acts they could afford.

Who's the "you" here? The university administration? That's all so wrong-headed, handing $$$ to students who somehow could be identified as the "comedy nerds" and letting them choose "the best."

If you wanted to bring great comedy to college students, you'd open a comedy club near campus and operate entirely independently and beholden to nobody.

ADDED: Previously on this blog: "Why did Caitlin Flanagan write such a poorly supported article on fraternities and rape?"

And why did the Wall Street Journal publish it? Was there a whole lot more material in the original article, which was then edited down to make Flanagan look utterly ridiculous? 

It begins with the description of one horrible crime. It ends with Flanagan describing her own fear of men. It's lurid and emotional to tell us about one woman's victimization and another woman's feelings, but where's the support for Flanagan's proposition that fraternities should be shut so that women can achieve equality on campus?...

Another entry in the reconsidering-the-70s series.

Last week, you may remember, Meade pushed me to reconsider America. The band, America. I scoffed, because I scoffed back in the 70s. Today — on my own, unprompted by Meade, just based on hearing this song on the satellite radio — I want to take you back to the utterly douchey charming music of Loggins and Messina:



"Love the girl who holds the world in a paper cup/Drink it up..."

ADDED: I'd heard this song many times, but for some reason it was a complete surprise to me that it was called "Danny's Song." Somebody should make a list of songs with titles that don't pop up anywhere in the lyrics. Speaking of lyrics, there's a line "Seems as though, a month ago, I was Beta Chi/Never got high." What's Beta Chi? A fraternity? Googling I got to the amusing Urban Dictionary definition: "a word used by kenny loggins in his version of 'danny's song.'" There's a second definition, and it's twice as down-voted as up-voted so I won't quote it. Ah, a little more searching and I get a message board discussing the lyric and somebody says: "Dan Loggins was my fraternity brother in Beta Chi at Cal State University in Los Angeles in the mid 60's. Hope this sheds some light on this subject."

YEARS LATER: I confuse Kenny Loggins with Dave "Please Come to Boston" Loggins

"A racist song... caught on video was a fixture within a fraternity chapter at the University of Oklahoma, not an anomaly..."

"... the university reported Friday, and members first learned it at a gathering of the national fraternity four years ago."

If the UVa frat sues Rolling Stone, "they are opening up every young man in that fraternity to scrutiny — their drinking habits, and I’m sure some of them are underage..."

"... their sexual habits, and their overall conduct....  It just seems like there’s a whole host of issues that could be there, and it would be unfair and unwise to subject these young men to that," Charles Tobin — who specializes in defamation law — told WaPo's Terrence McCoy.

In addition to that skeletons-in-the-closet problem, McCoy points out the problem of a group claiming defamation:

The Rolling Stone article doesn’t specifically name any student beyond pseudonyms and descriptions that aren’t matched by any member of the frat house....

For any group to have a justifiable claim, wrote Ellyn Tracy Marcus in the California Law Review in 1983, the group needs to be small. "As group size increases, courts become skeptical that the defamation could reasonably be understood to refer to any individual group member. … Reasonable persons do not take literally statements defaming groups of people, and understand such statements only as generalizations or exaggerations."

I'm looking at that law review article, and it's talking about, for example, a case where individual D.C. taxi drivers tried to sue The Washington Post for an article portraying D.C. cab drivers as rude louts. Rolling Stone besmirched the name of a specific frat. Anyway, McCoy also links to Eugene Volokh's analysis (from last December, before the recent news that the police investigation has found absolutely no evidence to support the rape anecdote told by Rolling Stone). Volokh discusses "defamation of a group," but then moves on to the separate topic of "Defamation of the fraternity": "Corporations and unincorporated associations that have recognized legal identities (such as unions, partnerships and the like) can also sue for defamation that causes injury to their organizational reputation, independently of whether any member was defamed."

I'm not a libel law expert, but I see the "group libel" problem as addressing whether individual frat members could successfully claim to have been defamed because their frat was defamed. If the frat sues as an entity, there's no "group libel" problem.

"No, it’s not constitutional for the University of Oklahoma to expel students for racist speech."

Eugene Volokh argues strenuously.

"Thank God Sigma Alpha Epsilon's University of Oklahoma chapter dared to go above and beyond to prove their racism."

"Thank God they actually sang a song. Because they pretty much could have done anything else without anybody suspending them or even complaining about racist behavior. Think about the chant: 'There will never be a n**** SAE.' You think they just came up with that?"

Writes Elie Mystal at Above the Law.

UPDATE: Breaking news email from CNN:

Two University of Oklahoma students were expelled today for their alleged "leadership role" in a racist chant by Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity members, a decision that President David Boren says speaks to his school's "zero tolerance" policy for such "threatening racist behavior."

"2 UVA Frats Refuse to Sign Agreement Forged After Rape Story."

"Alpha Tau Omega and Kappa Alpha Order said the university was wrong to suspend all Greek life in the wake of a Nov. 19 article that purported to detail the gang rape of a woman named 'Jackie'..."

“The fact is the university has never acknowledged that they made a mistake in suspending 25 percent of the student body that had nothing to do with an article that proved to be erroneous,” said [Kevin O’Neill, a lawyer for the two frats]. “The university has not apologized and has not explained why they took this action.... Some of the things they are asking students to do, like stand at top of the stairs and monitor rooms, creates a duty the school should be bearing themselves if that’s their concern."

"Rolling Stone Never Gave the Villains of Its Gang Rape Story a Chance to Defend Themselves."

Writes Judith Shulevitz in The New Republic.

[T]he reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, allowed herself to be bound by a vow she made to Jackie not to contact the alleged rapists, especially the pseudonymous Drew, said to have lured her into the room where seven men raped her. Erdely may not even have tried to identify them....

“If I had to guess what happened at UVA—and at this point, we can only guess (which is why we should not be passing judgment),” Wendy Kaminer, a civil libertarian and feminist who has written extensively on both rape and free speech on campus, emailed me, “I’d guess that the story is neither entirely fabricated nor entirely true, and, in any case, compels a real investigation by investigators with no stake in their findings.”