OUR OPINION: The committee should not focus on expelling the students and should push for clarifications in University policy on threatening speech and diversity education.
The Select Committee on Hate Crimes has been working on rewriting the Free Expression Tunnel Hate Crimes Act for consideration at an emergency session of the Student Senate on Wednesday.
The bill contains provisions for both University and criminal punishments for the students responsible for the incident in the Free Expression Tunnel and added recommendations to the chancellor’s task force on diversity pushing for increased clarity in relevant University Code.
Simply expelling the students responsible for writing threatening language on the Free Expression Tunnel does not help shape the campus dialogue on free speech and prejudice. The committee should focus on ways to constructively punish these individuals with community service and education, inform other students about University regulations regarding prejudice and hate speech and push for programs to reduce prejudice through education.
Kelli Rogers, Student Senate president pro tempore and chair of the Select Committee on Hate Crimes, said the bill includes provisions to combine the various policies on harassment and threatening actions into one place and changed the language regarding punishment for the four students who admitted to painting the Free Expression Tunnel following the election.
Rogers said her constituents are not in favor of expelling the four students. Rather, they have pushed for an educational punishment, an idea several students proposed at the committee’s first meeting on Friday.
However, Sen. Maritza Adonis, a junior in political science who wrote the bill, said her constituents are pushing for expulsion, as some of the legal references in the original bill indicated the students responsible for the incident committed a crime.
The campus is divided on this issue, as some senators have heard students speak for and against expulsion of the four individuals responsible for the incident. Yet there is little point in agonizing over what punishment the University gives to these four persons if students aren’t communicating with University officials.
Instead, the Senate should make strong recommendations to the chancellor’s task force on diversity to clarify University policy on the issue, inform students of the relevant changes and work to educate, not punish, prejudiced students about diversity.
The University should work with students to see their ideas come to fruition with new programs like Vice Provost for Diversity and Inclusion Jose Picart’s diversity classes for incoming students.
