It's that time of year: fraternities across the country are giving parties with potentially offensive themes, and the potentially offended are predictably taking offense. Last year, the University of Texas, Texas A&M, the University of Virginia, and the University of Tennessee all made the news when students wore blackface to frat parties or when the frats themselves threw parties with racial themes. As I wrote last year, these episodes have a stylized, almost ritual quality. Fraternities pick themes--such as Texas' infamous "ghetto party"--that are certain to outrage just about everyone on campus, and then play dumb when just about everyone is indeed outraged. Then the protests begin: coalitions of students and faculty form, denouncing the frat in question as racist, and demanding everything from punishment (of the fraternity) to demonstrations of commitment to diversity (from the administration). Favored punishments include mandatory sensitivity training for the fraternity or even for the whole campus, letters of apology from the offenders to the offended, and suspending or even shutting down the campus chapter of the offending frat. Favored demonstrations of commitment to diversity include increasing minority admissions and hiring, stepping up minority recruitment, creating ethnic studies programs and majors, and establishing a diversity course requirement.

Depending on whether the school is public or private, and depending on whether school administrators understand the civil rights violations they could potentially commit if they set out to prove their sensitivity to minority concerns by punishing certain students for their expression, the school's response will at that point range anywhere from public commiseration ("What those frat boys did sure was awful! We at Sensitive State University deplore it!") to legally questionable punitive action. Too often, university administrators jump at the chance to pillory a (usually white, always male) student in the name of diversity. Fraternities are, symbolically, speaking, the last bastions of unrepentant wealthy white maleness on campus, and as such they are attractive targets for every campus' self-appointed sensitivity police. Fraternities, of course, understand this as well as anyone--which is why they throw such parties in the first place. If contempt is always already coming your way, you might as well court it.

This year, Duke is kicking off the annual ritual of outrageous call and outraged response. The occasion: a September 13 party at Sigma Chi fraternity organized around the theme "Viva Mexico!" Timed to "honor" Mexican Independence Day, the event featured invitations designed to look like expired green cards, t-shirts bearing the image of a drunk Mexican, and a mock border patrol checkpoint at the entrance.

Predictably, there were people who understood the party as a racist act: as one Mexican-American senior told the Herald-Sun, "Everything that I am -- my family, customs, culture and language -- was violated. ... The stereotypes of drunk Mexicans and border crossing were hurtful. ... Durham and the United States know the importanct of Latinos, so why doesn't Duke?" The language of violation (as if one person's expression could rape another), the evocation of hurt feelings (as the equivalent of rape), and the leap to blame Duke for the behavior of a few transient Duke undergrads, are classics of their type. So are the protests that followed the party. At a recent demonstration, according the the Herald-Sun, speakers asserted that the party proves Duke's longstanding neglect of the campus Latino population, and further added that it demonstrates the "pervasive ... intolerance" for minorities on campus. Speakers also noted that in 1994, concerned students were turned down when they asked the fraternity and sorority that sponsor an annual "South of the Border" party to change the name of the event.

Predictable, too, is Sigma Chi's response. "[The party] was designed to be a light-hearted celebration of the Mexican tourism scene," wrote the chapter's president, Marc Mattioli, in a letter to the editor section of the Duke student paper. "In no way was it intended to imply a political or social statement about Mexico, Mexican-Americans, immigrants or immigration policy. Obviously, it did not come off as such." According to one report, Mattioli is himself half Puerto Rican, and the fraternity's social chair is half Columbian. The chapter has apologized and is going to do some "educational programming" around the issue.

Not as predictable, and for that reason hopeful: the Duke administration is stating up front that there will be no punishment for the fraternity or for individual students.

Less hopeful, but still entirely predictable: the Duke administration is bending over backwards to (at least seem to) accommodate the various demands of the protesters. They want better recruitment of Latino students and faculty, more institutional support for Latinos, and a Latino studies program. In response, Duke president Nan Keohane is convening a committee for the express purpose of recruiting a more diverse faculty and staff (she deflected the demand for a Latino studies program by reminding the protesters that Duke is currently creating an America Studies program that will do the same sort of work).

A cynic might say that Keohane has appeased the protesters pretty effectively: calling a committee is hardly a call to action, as anyone who has ever served on a committee knows. In so doing, she makes her school look responsive and sensitive without actually having to do much or fund anything. But at the same time, she accepts the accusations, fraught assumptions, and skewed expectations of those she is appeasing. Instead of challenging, for instance, the assumption that "diversity" is a matter of skin color, rather than a matter of philosophy, she upholds it. Instead of questioning the idea that a school is by definition neglecting a minority population if it does not create all manner of special programs for that population, she plays into it. Instead of seeking to draw a distinction between the institution's commitment to fairness and free inquiry and the individual expression of a very small number of students, she accepts the flawed logic that equates the poor taste of a group of twenty-year-old frat boys with the racial climate of the entire school. And instead of pointing out that sensitivities are not amenable to regulation--that one person's joke is another person's slur--she has allowed the rigid identity politics of the protesters to stand, even though those politics are clearly undercut by the ethnic origins of the fraternity's officers.

Keohane is right not to entertain the punitive fantasies of those who would censor or censure offensive expression on Duke's campus. But until she and other administrators across the country address the false logic that underpins those fantasies, the fantasies--and the many failures of comprehension they reveal--will remain.

Hat tip: reader Fred R.

UPDATE: This is the sort of behavior fraternities should be getting punished for.