The University of Oklahoma had no legal right to expel two students caught on video gleefully uttering racial slurs, a prominent civil-rights leader tells
Newsmax TV.
"How dare this president of a public university [do this]! Didn't he ever read the First Amendment of the United States Constitution?" Michael Meyers, president of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, said Wednesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show."
"That means racist speech, contemptible speech, vile speech, is protected under our Constitution. He doesn't get to punish students for their odious speech … He has to be challenged, he has to be contested."
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University President David Boren tossed two members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity for allegedly playing a "leadership role" in chanting a racial slur against African-Americans and boasting they could never join the fraternity.
He also ordered the entire fraternity out of its on-campus house.
But Meyers, a columnist for the New York Daily News, said no matter how reprehensible the racist words were, they are allowed by law.
"This was not something that was on campus. This was an off-campus event. This was a group of students on a bus with their own merriment and racist code words and things like that, but people get to express themselves as they please," he said.
"The courts have been unanimous. It's striking down campus speech codes … What we have got to do is to speak up for the right of dissent and for right for people to be different.
"Can you imagine if these were black students on a bus? … Would the president of that university hearing … possibly anti-white chants [say], 'Oh, we'll never tolerate that?' The answer is, he wouldn't ... He'd sit back and accept the hatred that comes from minority students …"
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