University of Texas President Larry Faulkner is forming a President's Committee on Racial Respect and Fairness in response to a string of "racially insensitive" events on campus. A statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. was egged on MLK Day; a fraternity-sponsored "gin-and juice" party on January 31 saw students donning blackface and wearing "potentially offensive" t-shirts; in the wake of outrage about the party, one black student claimed that he had been "racially profiled" by campus security officers; this week, the American Civil Rights Institute placed an ad in the student newspaper expressing "anti-affirmative action sentiments": "If you are white, you may be a victim of illegal discrimination," it read, encouraging white engineering students to challenge a Texas Department of Transportation program that allocates grants exclusively to minority and women students.

It is not known who egged the statue; the costumes are constitutionally protected forms of expression; campus officials deny profiling anyone; and the ad simply apprises students of the law: as recent events at Princeton and MIT have made eminently clear, government-funded entities cannot discriminate on the basis of race or gender--even if that discrimination is directed against white men and done in the name of diversity.

These facts pale in comparison to the hysteria generated by failure to acknowledge them, however, and so UT's president has joined the chorus of the outraged, decrying racism on his campus and vowing to do what must be done to ferret it out and expel it. In a letter addressed to "Members of the UT Community," Faulkner personally apologized to students, faculty, and staff "for any action by (the) University itself that may have contributed to the issues we are now confronting." He offered his "public, personal condemnation of offending individual behavior outside the official control of the University." He spoke of the importance of community "standards of civility and decency," noting that "our community has an obligation to adopt and to uphold the highest standards of respect for others." In order to preserve those standards, he wrote, "we must reject, and take steps to eradicate, behavior that casts disrespect on any person because of ethnic or racial identity."

The rhetoric is a disturbing combination of diversity-ese and puritanical intolerance. In the name of showing respect for each individual, it advocates rejecting--and, chillingly--"eradicating"--those who do not conform to an externally imposed norm of conscience. In the name of tolerance and inclusion, it preaches ritual expulsion. In the name of fairness, it seeks to subject each member of the UT community to an intrusive ideological litmus test. Those who fail it must go: all in the name of civility and decency, of course.

What Faulkner does not mention: UT's legal obligation to the First Amendment; UT's ethical obligation as an academic institution to foster debate and inquiry rather than censorship and surveillance; the liberal value of meeting offensive expression with principled expression; the importance, in this difficult day and age, of learning to live with the knowledge that the world is not a womb; and the crucial facts that 1) ignorance, insensitivity, and even hate are not crimes, 2) that very few people we encounter in life will give a damn about our fragile egos and delicate sensibilities, and 3) that it is a rank waste of time and energy to insist that they do.

Faulkner is trying to cast himself as a good guy--and he is employing every patronizing and illiberal tactic available to him to do it. The piece de resistance? Faulkner's suggestion that the problems on his campus are the fault of the lawsuits against the University of Michigan: According to the Austin American-Statesman, "Faulkner said the problems seemed to begin with news reports of the pending Supreme Court case on affirmative action policies at the University of Michigan." Perhaps--just perhaps--the problems on UT's campus are the products not of the "attack" on affirmative action, but of the intellectually dishonest and morally bankrupt rationale for racial preferences themselves.

Thanks to reader Chuck H. for the link.