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Abstract: 

The point of this article is to examine the consequences of institutional responses to “hate speech,” and not its legality— for one thing, I am not particularly qualified to debate from that perspective. In addition, working on a small private campus, I have certain freedoms (no pun intended) that are unavailable to a judicial officer at, say, a large public land-grant institution. More importantly, it will be mercifully rare that we need to respond to someone who wants to freely call others nasty names on a regular basis—rather, the objections will more often than not come from those who want to know why they would be prohibited from uttering such invectives should they choose to do so. Finally, there is no consistency between objectionable terminology: Some words (“nigger”) are clearly verboten; others are regularly used by some students but shun - ned by others (“fag”); and even more are still commonly accepted (“gay,” “lame,” etc.). With such disparate attitudes towards “offensive” speech, where do we draw that line in the sand, and how do we frame our institutional response when it is crossed?

Keywords: Code of Student Conduct; hate speech; discrimination;

Affiliations:  1: University of Denver.