Yesterday, the Emory faculty was supposed to vote on whether to repeal the school's speech code. Turns out the vote never took place. Emory sociology professor Frank Lechner kindly wrote to inform me of this fact.

According to Lechner, instead of voting on whether to repeal the code, the faculty voted to table the motion to repeal the code. Lechner reports that the motion to table may have been facilitated by the Emory administration's promise, conveyed by the General Counsel, Kent Alexander, to revisit both the content of the policy and related procedures in collaboration with the University Senate. He also reports that according to Alexander, the policy was not in fact used to sanction Carol Worthman and the Emory anthropology department last semester (elsewhere, Alexander has gone so far as to argue that Worthman and her colleagues were not really sanctioned when they were sentenced to diversity training, because the training was technically "voluntary"). That's a bit hard to believe, considering that the charges against Worthman were made under Emory's Discriminatory Harassment Policy, and that this policy contains the speech code that some Emory faculty are moving to repeal. Lechner notes that after the motion to table was approved, further discussion centered on how the Emory faculty can address the "racial issues" on campus.

Truly a disappointing ending to a most promising prospect, not least because the motion to table the vote appears to have been accompanied by a discussion that sought to deny the facts of the Worthman case and to shift the terms of debate from the question of free speech to the problem of racism. Here's hoping that the next meeting will see both the honest, unfettered, focussed exchange that appears to have been missing at this one, and the vote. There is only so long it can be put off.

UPDATE: The Emory Wheel has coverage of the meeting. Thanks to Maurice Black for the link.