Today, the Emory faculty was slated to vote on whether or not to repeal the school's speech code. I don't have any news yet on how that vote went. But I can report that the Emory Wheel has marked the day of the vote by publishing a staff editorial disavowing the paper's courageous reporting of last fall's campus speech debacle:

In our news and editorial coverage regarding Dobbs Professor of Anthropology Professor Carol Worthmanís infamous racial slip last semester, we made a conscious decision to reprint the n-word in its entirety. Since Nov. 7 of last year, we have asked you to read that word no fewer than 25 times in almost as many separate articles.

As an editorial board, we have now come to regret this decision.

It was wrong of us to dismiss the damage that word can cause and the anger it can bring. We further regret that it took us three months of reporting on this issue to realize that its message directly applied to our own policies and to make the belated decision to censor it and similarly offensive terms.

When the Worthman story broke, our editors considered censoring the word with dashes but decided against it, on the principles of objective reporting. But we overlooked that one of the responsibilities of the paper is to minimize harm. Since there is no loss of factual information in the visual censoring of offensive remarks such as the n-word, we have no journalistic grounds for overriding those who have asked us not to spell it out.

We see no reason to subject those who cannot stand even the sight of the word to those who would prefer, for whatever reason, to have it spelled out.

What a sorry way for the Emory paper of record to commemorate the day the faculty was slated to determine whether the school should embrace the principle of free, unfettered inquiry.

Thanks as ever to Maurice Black for the link.