A free speech professional claims that denying is related to “past speech” would be illegal.
After a decade-long discriminatory song picture that resulted in the school’s suspension, Sigma Alpha Epsilon is still prohibited from performing at the University of Oklahoma.
The Interfraternity Council at the university reported to The College Fix that Sigma Alpha Epsilon had submitted a proper development request that the IFC Executive Council reviewed but did not receive the majority vote necessary to proceed.
In response to queries from The Fix, IFC did not respond with more details on the reason for the rejection. Additionally, the university’s media relations group did not respond to a number of inquiries for comment in recent weeks.
Ten years ago, many SAE members were filmed chanting a discriminatory track about lynching and excluding black people from the fraternity.
On a bus, students yell,” You can hang them from a tree, but they’ll never sign with me, there will never be a [n-word ] SAE.” Two expulsions were caused by the movie.
A free talk expert who previously criticized the sentence on First Amendment basis, wrote fresh remarks for The Fix.
Eugene Volokh of the Hoover Institution wrote in an email that “if their program is being rejected because of their previous speech, that is also illegal.”
Volokh, a former law professor at the University of California Los Angeles, told The Fix:” But I can’t know for sure, of training, whether that is the purpose for the refusal, or whether there are some other issues with their application.
Racist speech is protected by the Constitution, Volokh said in an analysis ten years ago, just as it is the expression of another hateful ideas, and universities are not required to control students for it.
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He also stated in the Washington Post that speech can still be protected by the Constitution if there is a” true threat” but not just because it refers to violence.
Similar arguments were made at the time by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression that the sentence constituted “censorship.”
Robert Shibley, the executive producer of FIRE at the time, wrote in USA Today,” It is far better to let the marketplace of thoughts determine the social effects of racist speech” as opposed to government crackdowns on a stance. The SAE users of the OU are “hounded to the very end of the earth on social media and exposed for humanity on Google,” according to the article.
Hearth declined to comment on the situation in its previous speech from 2015, which was later changed.
National Sigma Alpha Epsilon did not respond to comments on the website. It did, nevertheless, make comments to OU Daily and the .
According to the student newspaper, CEO Steve Mitchell stated that” we are dedicated to learning from our past, earnestly listening to those affected, and collaborating to make up, resolve, and promote a new start.”
According to the student paper, the fraternity apparently applied in 2024.
Further: Scholars debate whether Trump’s military deployment to Los Angeles is legal.
A picture of a racist Standard song video from ten years ago, courtesy of ABC News/YouTube
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