I'm in public. I don't want my phone to shout racism.
Just white people who have lived in Oklahoma or states that border it need to be embarrassed.
He didn't mean that. Just people who were in fraternities or sororities, and also white people who have lived in Oklahoma or bordering states have to be embarrassed.
Oh, right, plus the balance of the Big 12 conference, and obviously any white Oklahoma Thunder fans (which is all of them I guess okay)
At least the frat didn't send a letter to the Iranian government pointing out that we might elect a racist president in less than two years.
12: I don't think we know that for sure, actually.
They've shown a tendency toward stepping in shite, so it's only a vowel movement further.
The post title misspells "croquet".
My Turkish roommate joined SAE. Once he invited me to come to their "Sex on the Beach" party which involved dumping a ton of sand in their basement and wearing Hawaiian shirts. I sat on the floor and made a sand castle. #adorkable
Automotive engineers have some odd ways of entertaining.
Is it just me, or was there a refreshing lack of hemming and hawing and academic administrator bullshit from David Boren. It was just "pack your bags and get out by midnight, oh and by the way your fraternity is never coming back as long as I'm in charge. Bye." Further support for my "put one man in charge" theory of school governance.
He was asked something like "will you help the displaced fraternity members find housing" and he response was "it's not our job to find housing for bigots." Sweet.
||
you can continue masturbating to Richard Dawkins but this is hilarious
|>
Is it just me, or was there a refreshing lack of hemming and hawing and academic administrator bullshit from David Boren.
Yeah, agreed. Granted, this was an unusually clear-cut case, with video of the racial slurs linked directly to the name of the frat.
Which is to say that these guys were extremely stupid in addition to being extremely racist, which made Boren's response a lot easier to pull off for a university president than it might have been if there had been any ambiguity to the situation.
9 is a huge lie. In my experience, black OKC is full of Thunder fans and everyone loves Kevin Durant in particular. We get regular updates from Lee's birthmom on how the season is going, since Lee only follows college.
Rooting for the Thunder is morally wrong.
Real life halfordisimo! So ten or so people sing a song, and fifty or so people, who may or not partially overlap with those who were singing, lose their homes the same day. I hope the ACLU takes their case.
"It's not our job to find housing for bigots" is, technically, a false statement, if the bigots signed leases and paid their rent to a government agency.
At least the bros now understand the error of their ways, and are going to advocate for racial harmony from now on.
Who's the white boy stoner in the link at 20?
20 may cease to be quite as hilarious, if only momentarily, at the moment the self-pleasuring ban kicks in, but for now it is pure awesomeness. Also enjoyable is Terry Eagleton's review of The God Delusion, right from the first sentence.
That review is infuriatingly woolly and badly argued. Not for nothing is the word for "an attempt to logically justify Christian faith" so close technologically to the word for "acknowledging that you have made an almighty cockup at some point in the recent past".
22 is exactly right: "stupid and racist," and 26 is exactly wrong and a good nominee for the "Yes, but..." not-quite-an-excuse prize. Particularly 26.last.
31 is also exactly right. Paraphrased Eagleton: "How dare you not take seriously all the effort put into making this stuff up!"
All I got was an error message.
To be clear, I make no claims about the merits of Eagleton's argument, a theological rejoinder to Dawkins being fundamentally pointless, merely about its entertainment value.
"It's not our job to find housing for bigots" is, technically, a false statement, if the bigots signed leases and paid their rent to a government agency.
I don't know the specifics, but if they were living in a frat house, they probably weren't paying rent to a government agency. (Although I admit I don't understand how the university president could tell them all to move out of the frat house. End any official recognition of the frat, yes, but empty the house I don't quite see the basis for.)
I'm assuming that the real estate under the frat house is owned by the University of Oklahoma, otherwise, the university president couldn't tell them to vacate.
38 you also don't know the terms of their lease, though, do you?
I would also assume that even if the fraternity had legit legal claims, they might not press too hard in this particular case.
Here's what will probably start making a real difference: http://www.sbnation.com/college-football-recruiting/2015/3/9/8175789/jean-delance-decommits-oklahoma-sooners
Makes sense -- MIT, the only school where I knew anything organizational about frats, either most or all were not on university owned land. But even in that case, while the frat might have been a tenant of the university, the students are subtenants of the frat. If the frat breached its lease and got itself evicted, I can see that it has a responsibility to its members to manage a soft landing. The university's not any more responsible to the frat members than they would be to any other student whose non-dorm housing arrangement went unexpectedly bad.
The details are for the courts to work out--for Boren to retain any credibility as the leader of the school, he had to call for punishment that sounded harsh but plausibly within his power, which is what he did.
If being racist is sufficient to be subject to some punishment, I wonder how hard it would be to prove that being racist was ingredient to being part of SAE. I bet that wouldn't be hard, with discovery.
And Unimaginitive, I'm sorry, but what is even the point of 26 last. You think the rehabilitation of racist jackasses was or should have been Boren's primary aim in declaring a punishment?
If the house is owned by the state and they are on record as keeping out people on the basis of race, isn't that an actual crime or something.
40, 42: Yeah, I suppose the individual students could sit tight and demand a full legal eviction process. Or they could slink off and find a couch to sleep on somewhere if they didn't think this was a good context to be indignant about how horribly abused they'd been.
prove that being racist was ingredient to being part of SAE
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/03/09/3631366/racist-chant-frat-long-history-racist-incidents/
44: If the land is university owned, I guarantee to you that the filmed conduct was a breach of the frat's lease.
I was just thinking that any legal argument they might make about having a right to their housing would bite them in the ass even harder.
I legitimately do not understand why this song gets such a swift and stern administrative reaction while equally gratuitously and intentionally offensive frat songs about rape just generate the administrative equivalent of shoulder shrugs. I'm not quite cynical enough to believe that the explanation for the difference is something like 41, but I'm at a loss for explanations.
frat songs about rape just generate the administrative equivalent of shoulder shrugs
Because rape isn't illegal in college.
With frats you have to be really careful about offending alums from those frats who are donors. Probably this crackdown is only going to cause a problem with SAE alums and not all frat alums, because SAE is unusually racist. But cracking down on rape-y songs would be harder because it would implicate more frats and hit closer to core fraternity values.
Yeah, this is the thing: frats get kicked off campuses all the time on the basis of the behavior of the few (that's why it's called a fraternity, bros). The immediacy makes this seem harsher to those not present/participating, but it's not a difference in kind at all to SOP.
49: Partially, I think "equally gratuitiously and intentionally offensive" has to be looked at on a case by case basis -- you need to be thinking of specifics. Partially, I think there's more room for ambiguity in rape-culture talk than there is in this kind of racism -- if you parse rapey frat songs carefully and charitably, can you be really certain that they're talking about anything nonconsensual?
And partially, of course, as a bitter feminist, I think you're probably right that university administrations just give much less of a fuck about anything that doesn't impact football, and that as a society we can agree that racism is straightforwardly a bad thing and not to be tolerated, but that sexism and rape culture are just human nature, and it's silly to think of stamping them out completely as opposed to toning them down a bit.
That the only guy I knew who wanted to bring fraternities to my fraternity-free school was a douchebag only reinforced my opinion of fraternities as places for douchebags. That may be unfair, but still.
And yet, without fraternities we wouldn't have Animal House, so I guess their legacy has not been entirely corrosive.
52: agree with JRoth.
Of course, one cannot discount the possibility that T. Boone Pickens was behind this video.
53: well, yes, there are plenty of examples, although google searches results for fraternity songs are completely swamped with variations of this story right now, so it's hard to find any. But here are a few examples. There are worse things I've seen. (With "worse" meaning "equally offensive and with even less wiggle room to claim the lyrics are just a joke that no one should take seriously".)
Slim Pickens wouldn't do something like that.
The filmed song clearly took place on a bus, not on anyone's real estate. The loss of home is kind of similar to the people who have forfeited their homes because their kid sold drugs from the house, a police practice that is generally opposed here, except (1) it's more like losing your home because your roommate sold drugs somewhere else on the planet, and (2) singing a song is not illegal, nor is using the N word.
"Being a racist" also is not a crime.
Now that I think about it, I guess at Yale, the frat that was chanting "No means Yes, Yes means Anal!" at the sororities a few years back did get banned from campus for five years. So that's something.
Being a racist isn't a crime, but running a program affiliated with a university that denies membership to people based on race is very fucking much illegal.
Wow. You're getting into the territory where I really hope you're shitstirring for the fun of it, rather than believing what you're saying.
It clearly took place at an official or semi-official fraternity event -- formal dress on a bus singing frat songs? That makes it conduct attributable to the frat as an organization, rather than one or two individual miscreants. And it is specifically a statement of intent to deny housing to students on the basis of race, whether or not it's set to music -- I don't have the lease in front of me, but I would be literally willing to bet ten grand that 'compliance with the university's non-discrimination policies' is in there in some form.
And a fraternity is a voluntary organization intended to express social affiliation, unlike a family. It is perfectly sane to impose consequences on the members of a fraternity for the actions of the fraternity as an organization, because they chose to join and are collectively responsible for those actions. This is nothing at all like evicting a grandmother because her grandson the drugdealer visits her.
59: As others have pointed out, that argument wouldn't have even carried much weight back when procedural liberalism was taken seriously.
Nowadays, in this transitional phase to full Halfordismo, I say fuck 'em.
44- I think the line "No n***** will ever join SAE" qualifies.
I mean, as with all the fraternity rape songs, clearly they have room to at least argue that they were "just joking." It's not like the lyrics were literally true--this black member of SAE's OU chapter is shocked and appalled and says he never felt like his fraternity brothers were racist.
I don't believe they were "just joking"--I think in some sense they thought they were joking--again with the idea that what is intentionally and gratuitously offensive is "humor", with plausible deniability but almost always expressing a kernel of real belief underneath)--like i.e. I seriously doubt any of them actually wants to "hang a n***** from a tree", they're just finding humor in the saying something so offensive out loud, but I don't doubt many of those singing (but possibly not all) are truly and genuinely racist.
Please, please, please let one of them contest the University's action. Pretty please??
I would love to conduct the discovery process to see whether this was an isolated incident. Review their computer data, cell phone information, depose everyone.
So much fun to be had.
The filmed song clearly took place on a bus, not on anyone's real estate. The loss of home is kind of similar to the people who have forfeited their homes because their kid sold drugs from the house, a police practice that is generally opposed here, except (1) it's more like losing your home because your roommate sold drugs somewhere else on the planet, and (2) singing a song is not illegal, nor is using the N word.
I haven't the heart to actually watch the video so can only talk in general terms, but chanting a racist songs on public transport would get you arrested most places. Even if it's not a specific statute as it is over here, surely it would fall under public disorder/breach of the peace type catchalls.
[. . . dropping my usual initialism and going back to the full pseud for now, lest anyone mistake the capital M for a lazy Σ . . .]
Regardless of whether singing the song was in any strict sense illegal, it was morally repugnant and wholly unacceptable. And it was clearly not a slip-of-the-tongue, one-off momentary lapse of judgement. You definitely get the sense that this song has been sung before, and absent the video going viral, it probably would have been sung again in the future.
Consider the fact that new members had to be taught this song. Did any of them ask, "Are we really gonna sing that?" If they did, the answer was, "Yeah, we are."
The fig leaf excuse for allowing fraternities to be affiliated with colleges and universities is that they supposedly promote the highest ideals of honor and scholarship, and gleefully singing a song like that, without the slightest hint of irony or parody, is equivalent to taking a massive shit on those ideals. Bastards got what they deserved. If they want to challenge their evictions in court, let 'em.
The video linked in 65 is painful to watch, but everyone should absolutely watch it.
Are there no fair housing laws that apply in this case? Maybe not, because Oklahoma, but I'm not alright with a landlord being able to boot their tenants on less than 30 days notice.
Right, even in lease-breaking cases, it's not like you pack your bags that day. We need expert testimony from an Oklahoma real estate lawyer!
What's so difficult to understand about Tom Cotton is that in certain pictures he is utterly "adorkable" and in others he is not cute at all.
Er 72 to 12 sorta. I forgot this thread is not about that because I am not awake. I forgot to check if racist frat boys are hot. They often are, I'm afraid.
Is the landlord/tenant relationship really the right one to apply here? I feel like universities usually are able to do things like kick students out of dorm rooms on time scales that are much shorter than any tenant eviction process would ever be. Is there a legal distinction between dorms and frats?
I would expect that frats are in a gray area of whatever law happens to apply, which is why it's fine for Boren to do the harshest thing plausibly within his power. If he had come out and said something like "we're conducting an investigation" or "we're looking at the relevant laws," he loses the university. Plus, is there some slippery slope here that I'm not seeing?
Now, the house mom, who is a friend of Barry Switzer and who said she never heard the song, is in a video where she
repeats racial slurs. (You might want to have the speaker muted before you click that link. The video autoplayed for me.)
Always fun to just make up hypothetical, inapplicable legal rules to protect racist dicks. Frat housing is, usually, either just a form of student housing on university owned property (not governed by ordinary rules for leases, for obvious reasons) or a contract between the chapter and the university, which allows the university to close or suspend the chalter from the property, also for obvious reasons. It's not an ordinary landlord-tenant relationship.
I'm willing to bet they're not going to come home and find their belongings on the ground before they've had a chance to line up something new.
Just white people who have lived in Oklahoma or states that border it need to be embarrassed.
No way, I'm on the front lines fighting the good fight. You all should be ashamed that you're hiding out in safe territory.
From the link: "Fraternity 'house mothers' are adults employed in a supervisory and organizational role at fraternity houses."
79: Like House Bunny, but older and without the great comic timing.
74: IANAOKL, NorAIAHousingL. But, generally, my best guess is that if you're living anyplace, you have the rights of a tenant whatever they are locally. If you have a lease, you have whatever rights you have under the lease. If you don't have a lease, you probably still have some rights, and they will generally include a right not to be evicted other than by legal process.
If the frat members decided to defiantly sit tight, I doubt the university could compel them to leave in a timeframe shorter than months -- bring an action in housing court to evict them for breach of the lease, and take it all the way to its conclusion. I would understand the president's words to indicate that he wants them out of the frat house (presumably on university property) tomorrow, not that he could forcibly compel them to leave that fast.
Eviction is a slow process many places if the tenant/subtenant doesn't cooperate with the landlord's expressed wishes. But I think the university is well within its rights to evict the frat and its members, whatever the proper local procedure, and doesn't have any specific obligation to mitigate the inconvenience to the members.
the idea that what is intentionally and gratuitously offensive is "humor"
I've noticed this tendency in myself sometimes. Why is this such a common confusion, at least among young men?
I mean, obviously in many cases it is boundary testing and kidding on the square, but it doesn't always reflect underlying sentiment. I hope, anyways.
76: Yeah, but I'm leery of putting too much into that six-second clip. The heavily repeated hook to the song playing in the background is:
"Gold all in my watch
Don't believe me, just watch
Nigga nigga nigga"
(The appeal of Trinidad James to a bunch of southern white fraternity brothers is a separate question)
Why is this such a common confusion, at least among young men?
Privilege! If you involve Baby Jesus in your offensive joke, I betcha those frat fellows would suddenly discover that some provocative things aren't funny at all.
I don't like lyrics that rhyme a word with itself in a different meaning.
86: But, yes, a six-second clip without context doesn't prove much.
90: the clip in the OP is only 10 seconds.
I never did watch the clip in the OP. I really don't want that coming out of my speakers at work or my phone when I'm in public.
My sense is that kicking the students out of the frat isn't happening under housing authority but on pain of being kicked out of the school. "Stop living at the fraternity or you're no longer a student". That's a power the university has to compel behavior even if they don't own the house or the land it sits on (as is usually the case at MIT, for example).
$5 to the first person who finds someone defending the frat against "political correctness."
94 - Limbaugh's show starts in half an hour.
93: Oh, duh. Yeah, that'd make sense.
I doubt 83 is right. If you're in student housing, the university can kick you out of the dorm without going through a standard eviction process. You're not a tenant. Ordinarily, you've signed a contract, not governed by ordinary landlord-tenant law that allows you to be kicked out for violation of various university policies, not a lease. Frat members are in a more complicated relation to this than people who live in a dorm, but in a lot of places it's just a form of student housing and amounts to the same thing.
I admit I'm well out of my specialty here, but that has to be right.
Terry Eagleton is SUCH. A. DICK. And his writing sucks. Just to be clear, this isn't boundary testing, I speak from the heart. Not that Dawkins isn't, but seriously, I hate Eagleton so much.
$5 to the first person who finds someone defending the frat against "political correctness."
What is $5 in Fellatios?
$5 will get you a loogie.
Someone needs to reuse the end of that tweet in a criminal punishment case against a minority and send it back at the author.
I think you're overcharging, frankly.
The overall weighted average costs for manual stimulation, oral sex, straight vaginal sex, and anal sex were $27, $37, $80, and $94 respectively.
98: Yeah, I don't know anything about Eagleton beyond the linked piece, but what a mess.
I was forced to read Eagleton as an undergraduate lit student. I wasn't a fan. Dawkins remains a fucking dick, though.
97: My guess is that Nathan's got the answer; that a university legit couldn't kick you out of student housing any more easily than any landlord could, but they could kick you out of school for refusing to be evicted, so it never comes to that.
I would have figured the big jump in price would be between manual and oral, not oral and PIV.
You're not accounting for local cost of living.
I knew Eagleton slightly many years ago. He was a bit precious, but generally OK. Then he became famous and lost the plot. Sadly common trajectory.
Is 1/7 of a fellatio calculated as a fraction of the activity for an average fellatio, or by the arousal of the receiver? Could we really trust people to report honestly? Probably not, but some clever gent might prime himself such that he could orgasm with only 1/7 of one fellatio, and that seems like stealing. Halford?
97: The graduate student housing contracts I've read/signed have been along those lines. You waive or are never granted various protections. There's some procedure for being kicked out usually but since I was never kicked out I'm not sure how it worked.
Something something volume discount.
Dawkins remains a fucking dick, though.
Every time I see a rebuttal to Dawkins on religion, I think Dawkins does a fine job of picking his opponents. But maybe it's just that anyone who rebuts him at a length of greater than a sentence or two is necessarily wasting the reader's time. What needs to be said beyond "Dawkins is a dick"?
(That only applies to religion, of course. Rebuttals regarding feminism or evolutionary biology can be longer and still be sensible.)
(The netnanny let me back in -- it seems to work on some kind of ratio of dirty words to the rest of the thread. Could maybe people who want to make jokes circumlocute a little for me?)
106 -- maybe, but my guess would be that for first amendment related reasons and other reasons it's substantially harder for a public university to expel students for being racist than it is to kick a racist organization out of on-campus university-owned student housing for violating student housing policies. In any case, on-campus student housing is not a world, I believe, where ordinary landlord-tenant law applies (though of course that's likely to be landlord-friendly in OK regardless).
I can't see the first amendment coming into play significantly -- I've never heard of that as an issue in, e.g., public housing.
Rebuttals regarding feminism or evolutionary biology can be longer and still be sensible.
Can be, but "Dawkins is a dick" remains adequate, at least in the case of feminism.
I regret to say that we of the F.B.I. are powerless to
act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in
some way obstructed interstate commerce.
- J. Edgar Hoover
I had no idea that prostitutes were so affordable. That's cheaper than taking the family to a movie (factoring in a stop at the concession stand).
Literally the first thing I found googling, and god knows I don't know much about housing law. But under Ohio state law it looks as if college student housing is expressly defined as the same thing as rental housing generally, while things like secondary school boarding school dorms, hospitals, and prisons are distinguished. That accords with my intuition about how this should work.
The question is really whether Eagleton is so awful that the piece JMcQ ingenuously linked is not at all funny. Reasonable people may disagree about this. (I think I took part in an offline version of this debate when the article was published.) But regardless of that WHOA I did not remember this line:
When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.
Um... nice... effort?
98: Eagleton vs Dawkins is definitely a classic "Can't we just kick them both in balls?" situation.
Or, more directly comparable, it's a lot cheaper than getting a massage.
125: Probably not on a hourly basis.
LB Thread Participation Continuance Comment.
The Contractor shall invoice the County only for providing the tasks,
deliverables, goods, services, and other work specified in Exhibit A - Statement of
Work and elsewhere hereunder. The Contractor shall prepare invoices, which shall
include the charges owed to the Contractor by the County under the terms of this
Contract. The Contractor‟s payments shall be as provided in Exhibit B - Pricing
Schedule, and the Contractor shall be paid only for the tasks, deliverables, goods,
services, and other work approved in writing by the County. If the County does not
approve work in writing no payment shall be due to the Contractor for that work
cheaper than taking the family to a movie
"Guess where we're going tonight, kids!"
"Agaaaain?"
Well, here you go. Oklahoma specifically excludes students in student housing and frat members from its landlord-tenant laws. This is as much research as I will do on this issue!
Exhibit A: 1/7th of a blowjob
Exhibit B: $35/blowjob
130: Why Halfordismo? #277: Reduced legal research overhead.
131-
Dear Judge,
The members of the jury would like to examine exhibits A and B again.
Sincerely,
the jury foreman
If you want to get a sense of the prostitution market, you can just look at the p/e fellatio.
Literally the first thing I found googling
LB was feeling lucky. (I'm not surprised they got rid of that button...)
The appeal of Trinidad James to a bunch of southern white fraternity brothers is a separate question
Yeah, I thought they were supposed to be listening to Bob Marley.
If you want to get a sense of the prostitution market, you can just look at the p/e fellatio.
Beware the temptation of the gaussian copulation
Parenting question: We have a black family set of dolls (I think this one) and out of nowhere over the weekend the kids decided to take some string and hang grandpa by his neck from our stair banister, they called it "hang the grandpa." I have no idea where they got the idea for this game, I told them to stop doing it because it was rude while avoiding a larger discussion about the history of lynching. Clearly I'm within my legal rights to kick them all out of the house, but seriously WTF kids?
98: Eagleton vs Dawkins is definitely a classic "Can't we just kick them both in balls?" situation.
Basically this. The theological argument, such as it is, I have no use for, but the invective is thoroughly entertaining.
138, 140: "The power of cast iron compels you!"
In Animal House, I think without checking that Dean Wormer was able to put the Delta House on double secret probation by unilateral fiat, but it took a vote of the (Omega dominated) Pan-Hellenic council to shutter the house and kick them off campus. This kind of Potemkin proceduralism has no place at the Universty of Oklahoma, and a good thing too.
If you want to get a sense of the prostitution market, you can just look at the p/e fellatio.
The equilibrium price is determined by the invisible handjob of the marketplace.
In my property law class it was claimed that many dorms don't give students leases but rather licenses. Precisely so they can evict them very quickly if they want. Maybe the same for frat houses? I would not expect particularly good tenant protections in Oklahoma.
cheaper than getting a massage.
Cecil Adams explicitly excludes the cost of providing a comfortable location in his numbers.
Also, in the US, I think that the median worker and her clients are both going to be fairly unpleasant people.
Slightly off topic, but I recently visited Mississippi for the first time and boy howdy did I win at Southern Stereotype Bingo. A lunch conversation with five or six people all about what kinds of guns everyone owned and/or had shot. A business acquaintance trying (politely) to convert me to Christianity (and dissing Mormonism at the same time). And the use of the n-word to refer to a particular black person, as some sort of explanation for why that person had done something unethical. And then, when I called the n-word sayer on it, the explanation that "well that's what they're like down here, anyway."
I have already told all this to Smearcase and preemptively admit "not all Southrons," etc.
And now two of them were expelled, so they can stay in the frat house as long as they like!
Volokh thinks expelling might be illegal.
Can someone expel Boren for calling himself "DBo"?
I don't know to what extent Volokh himself is a hack but he certainly is highly regarded by hacks and lends his name to a community that houses hacks so I don't have a terribly high opinion of his opinions.
I'm very confused by the link in 145. I assumed it was meant to provide support for the idea that median prostitution clients are going to be fairly unpleasant people... but it doesn't seem to? Unless I'm missing something?
Volokh is extremely tendetious on these topics and not to be trusted in full (he made his name arguing that sex harrassment laws violate the First Amendment, a position that even conservative courts have found ... not persuasive) and you'll note that Volokh just ignores the hostile environment argument that's the actual legal basis for the expulsion. But those are the kinds of first amendment traps that can be hard for a public university and that I referred to briefly above. (And nothing in the first amendment should stop them from kicking the frat+frat members off campus for explicitly saying that they'd deny blacks membership in their campus-sponsored house and lynch them).
In this case I think that righteous, vengeful God David Boren has a decent 1st Am legal case for expulsion, certainly more than decent enough under the circumstances to do it and then say "come sue me, dickheads." The willingness to do so and do so promptly makes him awesome.
visited Mississippi
An Alabaman I know, a blonde middle-aged preacher at that, said to me, "You know how you feel when you're in Alabama? That's how I feel when I'm in Mississippi."
One way the internet has improved greatly since 2003 is that reasonable people usually no longer feel compelled to get into extended debates with assholes like Volokh just because they happen to be two of the twenty people in the world with blogs.
Volokh doesn't ignore the "hostile environment" analysis, he addresses it explicitly. There is no exception to the 1st amendment for speech which creates a hostile environment. Perhaps the fraternity was discriminatory in its membership policies, but Boren explicitly states in his press releases that he is expelling the students for their speech. Volokh may hold views uncongenial to your own, but in this instance he's not going out on a limb - here we have a state actor sanctioning a citizen for the content of their speech. The 1st amendment means nothing if that is not prohibited.
I take it you, randomly appearing commenter, are not in fact a lawyer who works on first amendment issues, but just a randomly appearing libertarian windbag? At least I hope you're not, for your clients' sake.
Please provide some authority that would allow a state actor to sanction someone for the content of their speech on the grounds that is creates a "hostile environment". Note that the Volokh post provides extensive authority for the opposite conclusion. Are you a lawyer, or do you just pretend to be a bad one on the Internet?
Since I just took the university's sexual harassment training, I can say that the people who run the place are sure that they have a duty to avoid creating a hostile environment.
Volokh doesn't ignore the "hostile environment" analysis, he addresses it explicitly
Wait, he does? Unless you're taking the "hostile environment" question and the discriminatory admission policy to be the same, I don't see where he does that.
And not addressing the "hostile environment" question except to try to conflate it with discriminatory admissions policy.
I'm not an lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that at least for sexual harassment cases, employers have been found responsible for creating a hostile environment. I don't see why the racial harassment should be different.
Ah, I see the update. So Volokh asserts that there's no exclusion. I'll wait for more analysis.
The kids in 138 would be a perfect playdate for White Power Zardoz.
The 4th Cir decision he cites is interesting. I think the concurring judge has the better of it -- and I'm not going to bother with cases from the intervening 20 years.
I'm pretty sure that I can (effectively) kick students out of school based on final-exam answers which, in any other context, would be Constitutionally protected speech.
We currently (it will hopefully go a way when the student running it graduates) have a white supremacist student group. My impression was that the school thinks they can't do anything about it for 1st amendment reasons. Though it's certainly plausible that the reason they're still around is that they've avoided doing anything as obviously awful as this frat song.
I don't find the concurrence especially compelling. While it is right to point out that content-based restrictions on speech are not per se unlawful but instead subject to strict scrutiny, it doesn't actually point to any content-based restrictions that have survived strict scrutiny review. Strict in theory but fatal in fact and all that. Are there any such cases that have upheld a content-based restriction? I am not aware of any, though perhaps there are some in the national security area. In any case, I would not count on any such cases being applicable to these facts.
My point about Volokh addressing the "hostile environment" notion was simply that there is no recognized exception to the first amendment which allows for sanctions on speech which, by virtue of their content, create a "hostile environment". If the fraternity here had been engaging in other discriminatory practices, that's a different question and one we don't have the facts to answer.
In any case, Boren shot himself in the foot when he put out the statement saying that he was punishing the students for leading a chant - he pretty explicitly said he was punishing the students for the content of their speech.
Do universities have some equivalent of "conduct unbecoming" that they can boot students for?
Having worked in universities for my entire adult life, I suppose I should know something about this, but I don't.
I think you could fail a student for answering a question with a statement that would be constitutionally protected in other circumstances. Instructors would, I think, generally be given pretty wide latitude to conduct their classes as they see fit. If the failure led to expulsion, so be it, as long as similarly situated students were treated the same. Of course, that's not what's happened here. You will note that Volokh makes exactly this distinction in his first post.
It's probably harder to get rid of students than of assistant professors, right?
To 171, I think the answer is that any code of conduct (at a state university) would be superseded by the first amendment.
We currently (it will hopefully go a way when the student running it graduates) have a white supremacist student group. My impression was that the school thinks they can't do anything about it for 1st amendment reasons.
Towson has (or had, maybe the ringleader has graduated) a White Students' Union. My impression in that case is that the WSU were very careful about what they said, and stuck strictly to the "It's just about pride in our heritage" line. It was smarmy BS, and deliberately meant to bait people, but I think Towson decided that they had to put up with them.
The Oklahoma thing seems different. If the Towson group had screwed up and been filmed doing something like this, I think the University might have tried to get rid of them.
The twitters tell me the first amendment isn't at issue here, insofar as the students are being expelled on contractual grounds (violated student code of conduct).
It seems to me that there's a pretty obvious difference between punishing someone for leading a chant and punishing someone for the specific content of that chant, and especially when the chant itself is about aggressively violating various laws and talking about murdering people.
It's odd to read about this case for me because Boren actually comes off as sincerely, genuinely very very angry, which is not something I'd expect from someone high up in school administration. "This is very disappointing and now what we'd expect from students here blah blah blah we're looking into taking steps against them" is about what I'd expect, not a reaction this strong and this immediate. (I'm not fully certain of the timeframe involved, but he would have found out around Sunday evening, right? So showing up early on Monday with "You have twenty four hours to GTFO you racist motherf****rs!" really is surprising.
Then again I'm most familiar with the University of Minnesota, which appears to have managed to get a president who is both profoundly disingenuous and also stupid enough not to realize that he is, so maybe university presidents aren't always that bad.
173- I've never heard of an assistant professor whose family is a big donor although I imagine there are some situations like that.
Which is to say it's probably easy to get rid of some students but not others, while it is almost always easy to get rid of assistant professors.
Boren actually comes off as sincerely
Maybe he is--I don't know much about him--but I do know that he's been a senator and a governor, so he's going to be more attuned to "optics" than most administrators.
Public university president is one of those jobs that probably shouldn't be held by anyone who actually wants it.
176: The University of Oklahoma is part of the State of Oklahoma, so the first amendment is very much at issue here. The University can't write a code of conduct for its students that conflicts with the Constitution or any other federal law - just like the State of Oklahoma can't pass a law that conflicts with the Constitution or any other federal law.
177: the difference between punishing someone for the contents of a chant vs. leading a chant is not at all obvious to me.
177: Not to mention, speech regarding violating the law, even in murderous ways, is very much protected, subject to very narrow exceptions for true threats and incitement to imminent action, neither of which seem to be at play here.
I am sure Boren is genuinely and extremely upset at this video, which he should be.
I actually happen to know (not well) the General Counsel of the University of Oklahoma. I think that, to date, he has mostly had to concern himself with potential violations of NCAA regulations.
It's funny the things universities will take an ethical line on. I heard a story recently about a tenured faculty member at a prestigious university (not here) who, at the time of his hire, was widely known to have been forced out of his previous job because he sexually assaulted a subordinate. So the university's reaction was more like "yay! he's free for poaching!" than worrying about hiring a potential predator.
180 - This is true, and given what's happening at UMN right now I'm comparing him to someone really, hilariously bad at this kind of thing*. Boren just seems like he really is acting impulsively - probably with at least some "quick lawyers I can say this right?" double checking, but not in a way that looks like carefully worded defensiveness.
*we're talking about a man who responded to a pretty damning report about the university with, roughly, "This report reveals some problems at the University, but it's important to remember that the review only said that we failed to do things they were evaluating in this one area, not other areas they didn't investigate, and didn't say we failed at things they didn't evaluate at all."
The University can't write a code of conduct for its students that conflicts with the Constitution or any other federal law - just like the State of Oklahoma can't pass a law that conflicts with the Constitution or any other federal law.
But surely the University can write a code of conduct that places some limits on student behavior that go beyond restrictions imposed by enacted laws, no? Otherwise, the the only permissible code of conduct would be "Don't do anything illegal," at which point it becomes redundant and pointless.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the honor code.
I do kind of like the idea that Boren is intentionally exceeding his legal authority by just a little bit in order to dare the fraternity/students into suing the university over it. Getting sued over it would probably be a decent public relations boost to the university, and the idea that that's how far over the line this stuff was at that university would probably push back against the 'University of Oklahoma is for racists' impression that the video gives. That said, he could probably announce that the University is seizing the belongings of the ringleaders in that video and it would still be better for the students involved not to sue the university over it. "Make no fuss whatsoever and hope everyone forgets about this really quickly" is probably the best strategy for the students involved and the SAE organization generally.
170: You, sir (and I'm betting heavily you're a sir, because you're a libertarian shitbag), are an idiot.
The Supreme Court has for a number of years now recognized that you can prohibit student-to-student harassment in the school context, and, indeed, sue school administrators for a failure to do so. Davis v. Monroe Cnty. Bd. of Educ., 526 U.S. 629 (1999) (permitting Title IX suit against school district for hostile learning environment; same standard would apply under the Civil Rights Act). It's certainly true that these cases don't create an "exception" to the First Amendment, but that's only true as a tautology -- the First Amendment allows state educators to balance the harms from unduly harassing speech in certain contexts, so there's no need for an "exception." See also Bonnell v. Lorenzo, 241 F.3d 800, 823 (6th Cir. 2001) (upholding university's need to enforce sexual harassment policies over professor's right to speech disclosing harassment claim). That is the reason why the Boren press release used very specific language -- "hostile learning environment" - that's been upheld in a bunch of related cases involving universities and public schools
In addition, you apparently don't understand that the First Amendment applies differently to public entities in different settings, including (most importantly here) schools and universities. Under the Tinker doctrine and its progeny, schools are absolutely free to apply content-based restrictions on student speech for a number of reasons, including but not limited to restrictions that interfere with the orderly function of the school. As a conservative asshole who has smoked enough pot to become a libertarian, you likely remember the "Bong Hits For Jesus" case. More broadly, that's why, for example, bans on wearing confederate flags have been upheld in school See Barr v. Lafon, 538 F.3d 554, 568 (6th Cir. 2008); West v. Derby Unified Sch. Dist. No. 260, 206 F.3d 1358, 1366 (10th Cir. 2000) (nb -- this applies in Oklahoma). The test is, to boil down a very complex doctrine to a few simple words, whether the school actually has shown disruption sufficient to warrant the content-based restriction. But there's no ban on content based restrictions per se (so long as they're justified). And you don't have to show disruption from the particular speech itself that gave rise to the disciplinary action, just that the ban on the particular speech is reasonably related to past disruption.
Now, it's also true that, at the same time, you can have a university speech code directed towards "harassment" that's fatally overbroad. Many such speech codes have been shut down. And you can have a university that purports to fire or discipline a student for improper harassment or disruptive activity, but hasn't actually shown sufficient harassment or disruption to justify the sanction. All of those create very legitimate First Amendment issues. The "hostile learning environment" cases require much more than a one-off statement; you have to show creation of an environment that actually makes it difficult for learning to take place. In practice, these are all very complicated doctrines, and the cases are all very fact-specific.
Here, the question is whether there's enough to go on from the SAE bus video alone to justify expulsion on either a hostile learning environment or school disruption theory. Without knowing a lot more, t's not an open and shut case either way. You'd probably need to link the case to other instances of disruption caused by racial discrimination at OU, the environment created for black students by discriminatory fraternities, etc., etc. It's clear that the university can't just expel someone for having racist beliefs, or even expressing them, even these guys. But it may well be able to discipline or expel students, including these guys, from engaging in conduct, up to and including racist fraternity chants, that create an animus-driven "hostile learning environment" that prevent other students, here particularly black students, from learning.
I don't know why I just wrote all that, since we all know that the reality is that you are just some dude who is really deeply committed to preserving your right to say ni**er in private.
A quick check of some public university codes of conduct reveal numerous rules against "hazing", whose definition covers many things that are not illegal, including things like "endangering someone's psychological well being". I doubt whether, constitutionally speaking, you couldn't pass a law against that (I don't know about a constitutional right to paddling, though).
193: doubt whether, constitutionally speaking, you could pass a law against that
191: It's kind of interesting that there doesn't seem to be a lot of overlap between getting worked up about the idea that there's a First Amendment violation in this and getting worked up about civil liberties issues that don't affect right-leaning knuckleheads.
"It's clear that the university can't just expel someone for having racist beliefs, or even expressing them, even these guys."
Here's the relevant sentence from Boren's press release:
"You will be expelled because of your leadership role in leading a racist and exclusionary chant which has created a hostile educational environment for others."
Seems like they are pretty much conceded that they expelled the students for expressing a racist idea. Good luck applying Tinker and its progeny to speech made at a private function whose only connection with the school was that students at the school were in attendance.
As to the rest of your post, I think I now have a pretty good grasp on the quality of your legal skills.
I had no idea that prostitutes were so affordable
At those prices you better be willing to exposure your dick to MRSA or hepatitis or worse.
No, you moron, they explicitly linked the speech to what (Boren's lawyers undoubtedly told him) would be the basis for a content-based restriction conceivably permitting expulsion, the hostile educational environment. The fact that you read Eugene Volokh's tendentious blog does not mean you have any actual knowledge, jackass.
Please tell me Eugene Volokh is anonymously trolling the blog.
201: Eugene Volokh is anonymously trolling the blog.
201: Surely he would do so openly.
What Volokh and his cohort like to do is to just assert incorrect or incomplete but semi-plausibly-based-in-the-caselaw right-wing theories as if they were legal fact, usually with an Aspbergery* faux-objective tone from Volokh himself that is designed to hide that he's actually stating extremely controversial and debatable positions.
I'd say it was an obvious fraud that everyone should have seen through by now, but they almost knocked out the entire health care system once by doing so and are very close to doing so again, so the joke's on the rest of us.
The * was supposed to be "sorry." I need a better word but haven't found one that works.
If you then start referencing your partial plausible right wing theories in legal arguments, there's a place for you on the Supreme Court.
192 is fun. TRO delivers a great smackdown.
204: But you concede this isn't an open and shut case, right? I think you're exaggerating the extent of disagreement for theatrical purposes (not that I disapprove of that).
204: You know what I miss about living in Southern California? The nerdy tones of Volokh and Erwin Chemerinsky debating on KPCC.
I can't possibly wade into this thread (except to denounce Oklahoma and all its works*), but it's nice to see "Ripper" living up to his nickname.
*ok, not Woody and Will
208 -- You're right, I don't think it's an open and shut case. Boren could certainly lose if the expelled students sue (though as people have said above, the factual inquiry would be great, and would go to other instances of discrimination by these guys, SAE generally, and maybe white students at the universities generally). I was the one who brought up potential First Amendment issues originally above. But he could also win. What I object to is acting as if this is some clear and obvious violation of the First Amendment based on an extremely limited and partial understanding of First Amendment law.
Also, "Later" has clearly shown up to either defend his love for EV or assert his right to say Ni**er, so the hell with that asshole.
210: I'm not denouncing anything until ogged denounces all the statements by Iranians leaders cited here -http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/03/Iranian-View-of-Israel/387085/
I don't understand how Later's argument (or Volokh's) is anything but an absurd strawman.
Isn't Volokh actually at some kind of university? Maybe he skipped the sexual harassment training?
More likely sat in back asking tendentious questions.
Guess I didn't learn the "incantation of magic words in a press release" exception to the first amendment. Clearly I should have gone to Hollywood Upstairs Legal College like you.
Wasn't your entire argument that he used the wrong magic words in the press release, and so opened himself up for a lawsuit?
I should go to law school. It can't be that hard based on all the people I know who have finished it.
Well Scott Lemiux agrees with him, so once again liberals are useless.
He only agrees about the expelling students, not about kicking out the frat.
Lemieux, who I generally like a lot, is also not a lawyer and also very much does the "now I will just assert controversial legal positions as if they were objective fact" thing. But I haven't even read what he has to say.
Yeah but I'm totally addicted to his Moops posts.
Yes -- that was a genius. I want "the Moops invaded Spain" to be a recognized legal cliche, like "two bites at the apple."
I don't see how you get a non-trivial portion of the membership of a university-sanctioned fraternity all singing a song with racist lyrics promising discrimination in a university-affiliated program at a public university without forcing the university to act to prevent themselves from being sued for allowing a hostile environment. I have no idea about whether not that's enough to expel a student.
I find the Moops metaphor totally incomprehensible. Apparently you either need the right Trivial Pursuit set or have seen the right episode of Seinfeld.
I thought it was the Moocs that invaded Spain.
225 - That's not really an unusual feature of references to Seinfeld (or whatever).
223: ARRRGH. Never say "two bites at the apple." It doesn't make any sense. there's nothing wrong with taking two bites out of an apple. The correct expression is "two kicks at the cat."
Also, "The Moops invaded Spain" was invented by Jon Chait.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/07/new-secret-history-of-the-obamacare-deniers.html
Jesus christ, there is nothing like listening to the old-timers in my department go on and on about Seinfeld references. We had a dinner last week where the chair had some buddies in town. Maybe twenty minutes of remember-that-episode!! joyousness. The weirdness of the situation, that a bunch of rural elderly Texans* in 2015 identify so deeply with a bunch of 90s New Yorkers, sustained the situation sufficiently for me.
* Not really Texans. The buddies were Texans but the old-timers in my department are both very liberal, and the Seinfeld ringleader is Iranian.
There's more than one band called The Moops. Years ago one of them played here, and in an interview one of the members responded to the question "why 'The Moops'?" by saying it was because it was "spoom" spelled backward. I'm pretty sure that he gave that answer because the name obviously came from the Seinfeld episode, and in retrospect he thought that wasn't indie-rock cool. I'm also pretty sure that he didn't know that spoom is a thing that is literally cool, a frothy sorbet kind of thing, but arguably less cool in the other sense than a Seinfeld reference.
228.last: Actually, I believe it was Simon Maloy in Salon (article date is one week earlier).
In fact here's a tweet from Lemieux: I didn't know this, but @SimonMaloy deserves credit for inventing the devastating "Moops" analogy to describe Halbig
Hey, Later, hunt the students down and take their case pro bono! You'll have great fun proving everyone wrong.
How odd that it's not spelled spume to remind us of the natural kind.
214 Isn't Volokh actually at some kind of university? Maybe he skipped the sexual harassment training?
The lawyers here all threw a fit at the university's new "professors, don't fuck your students" policy, so I guess there's some innate tendency of law folks to have trouble with these messages.
Actually, I'm being unfair: it was the sexual harassment policy more broadly construed that they found problematic, including the way accused students are treated.
Yeah but I'm totally addicted to his Moops posts.
I don't read LGM often enough to be aware of all its traditions, and I think I saw posts and comments there about "Moops" about thirty times before one day stumbling across an article on Gawker that clued me in to what the joke was all about.
At those prices you better be willing to exposure your dick to MRSA or hepatitis or worse.
On that point, I thought this from the link was... odd:
These days unprotected sex fetches a premium price: A 2005 study found that Mexican sex workers typically charged anywhere from 20 to 50 percent more for sex without a condom. In London the average upcharge is 14 percent.
14%?? It seems like it should be 300%. Especially considering that only an insane john would be willing to have, much less pay a premium to have, unprotected sex with a prostitute.
As Charlie Sheen would have said if he were an economist, he doesn't pay women for sex. He pays them for having a very high discount rate for future welfare.
Not a lawyer, etc., but, having just looked this up, I don't see how Tinker and following cases help make the case that expulsion is ok. Tinker refers to "substantial disruption of or material interference with school activities," which would be a stretch to apply to a secretly videotaped incident in a bus. Fraser and Hazelwood focus on protecting children from vulgarity and school-sponsored activities, respectively. What am I missing?
The videotape incident alone doesn't get you there. But if the videotape incident is evidence of part of an ongoing attempt to harass and intimidate African American students out of taking full opportunity of the education available to them (including, e.g., by intimidating them from joining educational opportunities such as fraternities), the evidence of the videotape combined with other evidence can be enough to justify the expulsion.
Here, the argument would be that the video is evidence of an ongoing effort by these students to create a hostile educational environment by intimidating blacks out of fraternities, not that the videotaped incident itself sufficed (with nothing else and no other evidence) to constitute the harassment and/or interference with school activities.
If this was literally the only time something like this ever happened in the past and there was no evidence of anything other than that one guy sang a racist song, then that probably wouldn't be enough for expulsion under the 1st Am. Unfortunately for the jerks it does look as if they were in fact trying to keep black kids out of their school-sponsored club through harassment and intimidation and this wasn't just some random incident. Thus the U would be reasonable in acting (based on this evidence, which it can take into account) to prevent harassment, intimidation, and a hostile educational environment for its other students.
Put differently, if you're otherwise justified in, e.g., preventing kids from wearing Confederate flags to school to prevent race riots, you don't need to show that any given example of the wearing of the flag by a particular kid actually caused a race riot to justify punishing a kid for a violation of the policy.
Here, if you could show that there was in fact a real, recent history of intimidation of black kids out of activities at the University of Oklahoma and especially that these kids had been involved in such activity as fraternity members, you could (certainly reasonably under the First Amendment though these doctrines are fluid enough so that you can't say definitely) expel them.
I think the videotape incident might get you to kicking the frat off campus pretty easily.
What's the standard of evidence in that case? I'm comfortable going with the common sense, "These dumbfucks didn't come up with this song on their own so obviously it's a fraternity tradition," but YMMV.
That guy makes the whole thing appear worse. The place must have improved and then reverted in a relatively short time.
That's called regressing to mean.
Obama seems to have genuinely made people worry for their white supremacy.
For some unknown reason, it occurred to me today that it would be very funny if a lottery winner deadpanned the "what will you do now?" question with "I did the math, and I can buy enough bullets to kill all the white people."
"I'm going to Disneyland! To kill, and killl!"
250: I don't think you need to win the lottery to get measles.
Even with a big Powerball win, you'd better not miss much. You're going to be paying over $1 a cartridge for rifle rounds with stopping power.
I figured you'd pay someone to do it for you.
Heh, I remember the shitstorm around this one, dozens of people loudly defending their bonds of brotherhood. Poorly written, it's true (I've never been to a frat party but...) but extra credit for being written 7 months before someone died in a hazing drinking incident.
Less than you think. Don't make me google that, too.
256: That will work for the first million. After that white people will start to stay much further away.
If you find a hitman on google, it's a cop. Overall, this is a good thing.
I'm not going to go look it up, but am going to offer an analogy a hypothetical: suppose a shopkeeper puts up a sign on the door that says 'No Dogs or Irishmen' but nonetheless serves the dogs and/or Irishmen who brave the sign and come in anyway. Title VII violation? Isn't it just speech? How about if its a help wanted posting?
'Hostile environment' consists of speech.
I wonder if FIRE will offer to represent them. And, if the offer was made, would it be accepted?
254: You are giving me horrible flashbacks.
Obama seems to have genuinely made people worry for their white supremacy.
So, when you were gone for a few years, you were like gone gone.
educational opportunities such as fraternities
If nothing else, a lawsuit would be great just to see the expression on the lawyer's face when they said that.
97: Universities do that in shitty ways too. "You went to the hospital because you were suicidal and had yourself admitted for a couple of days? You're not safe to be here."
Meanwhile, the situation at home is bad. I suppose that that's the law, but I wish that there were a legal way of distinguishing the two situations so that the mentally ill kid who is not a risk to anyone else isn't afraid to get help.
188: MPHP, Are you talking about the Dan Markingson case? Because, whoa, is that a crazy situation.
Would the slew of protests be evidence that a significant number of members of the university community found the video to be creating a hostile learning environment?
It seems like a stretch to me, and yet, weirdly makes intuitive sense.
Kind of OT: A colleague, who has been very supportive of me in my year of job hell, has been named as a defendant in a civil case due to her participation in a Title IX investigation. She needs to raise money to retain a lawyer, and I've posted a link to her fundraising page at the other place. It should be visible to Mineshaft friends, but if you can't see the post, and you'd like to donate, please message me for the link.
268: This is not in any way intended to discourage the moneyraising, given that she needs a lawyer, she clearly needs it. But what the hell is going on that the university isn't providing her with representation? That's weird.
266 - Sort of! Except the people doing the review in question were instructed by the president not to look into the Markingson case (based on a sneaky reading of what the faculty senate had required them to do) but only current practices at the university, which only makes it worse for them. (Also the organization that won the bidding to do it was, coincidentally, the same one that accredits the university. My suspicion is that Kaler was caught off guard because he thought the fix was in and then discovered too late that there had only been enough fix to soften the report but not to get a positive/neutral one.)
270: Yeah, I know. The reviewers didn't look at his case specifically, but they still found plenty of stuff wrong with the university's IRB procedures even though the scope of their investigation was limited.
I can't help but think though that none of it would have gotten any attention at all if Carl Elliot hadn't been making a lot of noise about Dan Markingson
That's absolutely true - and making noise steadily for seven or eight years straight at that. He's really not very good at giving up on things, and you'd think the university would have caught on to that earlier and tried something other than "oh he's just a crackpot this will go away any second now" at some point.
269: The university not providing her with a lawyer is indicative of reasons why it's been a year of job hell.
268, 269, 273: I share LB's reaction, and suspect that the first thing your colleague needs a lawyer for is to write a letter to the university demanding that it provide one.
Report from a former grad school classmate who teaches at OU: "At OU the University owns the land they are on and oversees their activities through the Inter-Greek Council. Student Affairs has oversight. The President was able to close the Frat house immediately because of that. The episode has sparked a debate about whether it would be better for the campus to go Greek free. That is, Fraternities and Sororities would not be on campus and would not be able to use university services. Obviously they could still self-form off campus, but that would significantly increase the costs."