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These are not hard questions to answer. To the standard of bullying and harassment that private universities are legally permitted to regulate in their Student
by eli_gottlieb 3y ago
These are not hard questions to answer. To the standard of bullying and harassment that private universities are legally permitted to regulate in their Student Code of Conduct, calling for genocide is in fact bullying and harassment. To the standard of constituting a crime for which an offender can be arrested and tried in court, calling for genocide is not a crime.
Public universities are, as institutions of the state, required to scrupulously uphold the First Amendment, and have an entire toolkit of time-tested ways to do that without making campus life unlivable for whomever the undergrads go on a moral crusade against this semester. I went to a public school that encountered some of the same controversial issues Harvard, Penn, and MIT flubbed, and did a lot freakin' better by standing for the letter of the law in distinguishing between private speech and student conduct in the course of campus activities (eg: in a classroom).
You wanna call for genocide in a campus newspaper editorial? As a hypothetical, it's free speech if the newspaper agrees to print your piece. You wanna mob someone's dorm room or community center calling them a genocidaire (much closer to what Harvard and MIT students are actually doing!), without letting them go in and out of their own space undisturbed? That's harassment insofar as you prevent any specific individual from going about their normal life, including its public component as a student (of a university) or employee (of a firm).
You don't get to walk into a random office building downtown and force the security desk to take you upstairs to the 15th floor so you can hold placards and yell slogans at desk-jockeys working for Web Marketing Firm #23. You don't get to barge into a classroom where course lectures are being given to do that either.