At the University of South Carolina, members of an all-black fraternity are building the first all-black house in USC's Greek Village. Sadly, but predictably, this has drawn some nasty commentary--on a national site called fratty.net, some USC students have posted anonymous, offensive messages about black people and have indicated that blacks are not welcome in USC's Greek Village.

USC officials are not going to attempt to suppress the offensive material on fratty.net--not because they recognize that it is not their place to act as censors, but rather because they feel that if they got into the business of monitoring web content, they could never keep up with all the content that ought to be banned: "We don't want to set a precedent for blocking Web sites because there are countless sites we might have to try to block," said Dennis Pruitt, USC's vice president for student affairs. But that doesn't mean USC will leave students' offensive but protected speech alone. The plan is to enlist students in the work of censoring one another, and to indoctrinate insensitive students into the proper views: "[T]he university applied pressure on the Web site operator and upon the university's Greeks to police their members and their Web pages. Pruitt said that will be followed with a strong dose of sensitivity training for students through programs such as its University 101 course, which teaches civility and good citizenship." Pruitt is also contemplating a policy that would require USC students to pass a "computer ability quiz" before they are allowed to use USC's network; the quiz would address "speech, accountability and privacy issues," and would, it appears, amount to something akin to a speech code.

It's very kind of Pruitt to alert organizations such as FIRE exactly where he plans to impose beliefs on USC students. It makes the work of organizations that fight to defend the civil liberties of college students that much easier.

But perhaps things could be made even simpler if Pruitt and his colleagues were to educate themselves in exactly what they can and cannot do to encourage--or pressure--students to adopt views that the school thinks are good for them. Pruitt could begin by reading FIRE's Guide to First-Year Orientation and Thought Reform on Campus, published just this week. The guide explains in elaborate detail how First Amendment rights include the right to private conscience, and how public colleges and universities that attempt to dictate social attitudes are violating their students' civil liberties.

Thanks to Maurice Black for the tip.

UPDATE: The national office of the Kappa Sigma fraternity is acting where USC cannot. It has expelled from the organization a USC student who posted racially offensive comments at fratty.net, and is planning to deliver a course of sensitivity training to the USC chapter later this month.

How would the administration at that university respond to an all-white fraternity? Just curious...

You note that the FIRE guide mentioned in the last paragraph specifically applies to public colleges and universities. I'm pretty sure that USC is a private school, which gives their administrators more leeway to abuse the freedom of expression of USC students.

The University of South Carolina (USC) is public. But FIRE's guide addresses the question of private colleges' and universities' obligations to students as well. Basically, it's a question of truth in advertising. If the school claims to honor students' expressive and associative freedoms, then it has a contractual obligation to fulfill that promise.

I have a slightly different take on this.

Like most universities, USC has a number of civility-type documents that could be used as a speech code. When this incident occurred, I fully expected the university to use those documents to discipline the individuals or their fraternities. To my surprise, Pruitt's office didn't do so. Instead it relied on informal pressure, including a lot of educational efforts. Even the sensitivity training mentioned in the press does not seem to be mandatory (at least not yet). The University 101 course mentioned is an introductory, non-credit session for incoming freshmen. Teaching "civility" to freshmen may be pointless, but unless it includes something more like indoctrination, it doesn't sound like a major inhibition.

This wasn't a perfectly libertarian response, but compared to what I expected and what has happened at lots of other places, it almost seems reasonable. Perhaps FIRE is finally having some influence.

Having gone on the job market again this year, I can tell you that chances are the University 101 course does indeed include indoctrination.

A good half of the schools with openings in my area have a similar course--something all freshmen must take, and filled with leftists books like Barbara Ehrenreich as well as a healthy smattering of slave narratives, post-colonial, anti-West novels, Brokeback Mountain, Karl Marx, etc. Centralized control over the reading lists, requests that cover letters address your commitment to this sort of "education"--all point towards a desire on the part of the university, or at least a vocal and powerful faculty contingent, to program students.

I was under the impression that schools had started phasing these sorts of classes out, but I think that the perceived need to convert Republicans has resulted in their return.

There's a small part of me that might actually welcome a return of the Democrats to the White House, because it might mean that these courses would disappear for another 4-8 years.

I don't think the schools actions as reported in this article are inappropriate. It's bad when college-age people have to be taught manners, but in this case apparently they do.

However, I think this is kind of silly:

"While Pruitt said students have reacted positively, Student Government president Justin Williams, who is black, said the community has a long way to go.

"'I know that racism exists at the University of South Carolina,' Williams said...."

Maybe he just felt like he had to make that statement because it was expected of him, but if he, a black person, was elected Student Government president, then racism at USC obviously isn't all that bad. Show me somewhere where racism doesn't exist.

FYI, some people (such as Hugh above) may have possibly confused one USC for the other: the University of South Carolina, being discussed here, is public; the University of Southern California is private.

We here are getting a "civility" policy following some pretty horrible behavior (that I think a civility policy would have done diddlysquat to prevent), and yeah, those things can very quickly become "speech codes" not necessarily because of intent, but because so many "riders" (both contradictory and redundant) get added to make everyone happy that it becomes an unmanageable disaster waiting to happen.

Sometimes I think we could prevent the need of a civility policy by just giving everyone boxing lessons.

"Sometimes I think we could prevent the need of a civility policy by just giving everyone boxing lessons."

Forget about boxing: go straight for firearms training. In the immortal words of Robert Heinlein, "an armed society is a polite society."