Racial confrontations on campus: Punishment may be warranted, but some of the punishers are pretty dangerous themselves

I am one of the many who guess that Doug [name removed] had to be punished, if the newspaper accounts are to be trusted. But a look at the institutions which performed America's first racism expulsion shows we have nothing to be proud of. We cannot feel safer from prejudice, assume our speech rights are secure, or pat ourselves on the back saying, "the system works." In this event there appear no comfort & joy, no heroes, no innocence, no high principles or universally applicable rules. Knowing of some of the University Disciplinary Council's habits and past actions, I'm as comfortable having them on my side as I am with allies like Cassius, Joe Stalin, George Bush and Hafez Assad. Now they are dangerous to our common opponent, but in general they're just plain dangerous.

Some of us hope to draw a line between racist words and actions, but in practice people won't agree on how, or whether, to enforce the distinction. Any rules here can and will be politicized, deconstructed and manipulated to mean whatever people want. Even the most innocuous regulations are misused by people who continually sprain their brains trying to concoct trendier, broader definitions of racism and sexism. Most activists here are working on intensely real problems of sexism, racism and poverty. But these few control-freaks often end up in powerful positions, or are so noisy that spineless bureaucrats prefer to appease them. The rest of us are guinea pigs for their ever-changing theories. There are people here who think that guns=phallic symbols=rape, that religion is mental illness, that individualism is fascism, and that the American flag is racist. Back home, there are cops and educators who think rock music=satanism=murder. Americans on the left and the right tend to take themselves as the measure of all things, and think that people with different cultural or political beliefs are unethical and insane. I've known brilliant, activist students here who believe that morality=fundamentalism=homocidal madness, and that any pretense of seeking objective truth must be a political tool to achieve a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Jacob Levy notes that such people are a minority here-most of us are only passively P.C. That doesn't comfort me at all, since what matters is not how many there are, but whether they hold obscure, powerful positions that few people know of, or want. At other schools, such liquefactionist notions surface in the faculty and administration as often as among students. Here, who knows? I can't say the Disciplinary Council is like that, since apparently it's nobody's business what they believe or how they operate. But it will always be possible for such people to get on important committees or pressure administrators. We dare not trust the process. Our only hope is in forcing cases into public view (unless a victim's privacy is compromised).

What scares me most is that if Andy Bernstein hadn't written about "Lou" and Doug, the University's controversial actions would never have become public knowledge. What else happens that we never hear about?

President Gregorian deplores public discussion of specific cases, asking us to trust him and the Disciplinary Council to be logical, impartial and restrained. He and his administration have not earned that trust. Like most people, he cannot get through the day at work without compromising the classically liberal ideals which he upholds in his private life. His unenviable job involves placating co-workers, donors, and the national press, at the cost of consistency. Having the whole Brown community scrutinizing him will make his job more complicated, but it will counterbalance special interests' demands on him. It might well pull him closer to his ideals.

The Disciplinary Council's procedural rules hardly resemble those of American courts. Instead, they aim for flexibility-a warm, fuzzy, liberal-sounding word which means raw power. Flexibility is what lets responsible authorities like Caligula Cæsar decide whether they feel like being the god of rape or the goddess of human combustion. One rule says that the Council doesn't have to follow its own rules. It usually doesn't. Another lets the president change a verdict from innocent to guilty, and lessen or increase a sentence. Hearings are private and unannounced, and the defendant can't have a lawyer.

One reason change in the Disciplinary process is unlikely is that the reforms needed in victimless or controversial cases are generally the opposite of the kinds of reforms needed for rape cases. Rape demands not just a specific rule against it, but a wholly different procedure-one of justice, not mere benevolent discipline or reconciliation. In general, offences must be listed more specifically. There should be minimum and maximum penalties for certain offenses, to check momentary passions and make punishments proportional .

But I'm pessimistic about our campus environment. It is full of people with mutually incomprehensible systems of thought, all with their own axes to grind. Nobody with any power is impartially looking out for everyone's rights. Verifiable information is scarce. So I can't predict the future, but I suspect that what happened to Doug ____ could also happen to people who don't deserve it in the least.