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It's a bad look, for sure, but how is this not just run-of-the-mill drunken disorderliness? "Racism" is not really the same thing as racial epithets. If you get drunk and repeatedly call a man a "dick" we don't generally run a story about a "sexist outburst." This strikes me as a wild exaggeration:
Extreme drunkenness can happen among younger generations, for sure. And when your drunk brain looks for the most offensive thing it can say to someone, and your social milieu is one where a racial epithet is the most offensive word you can think of, then the more strongly we disapprove of racial epithets, the more often we're going to hear them from angry, irrational people. Calling that "racism" seems like rhetorical sleight of hand to me.
Imagine a student getting plastered and, noticing her RA's MAGA cap, calling the RA a "Nazi" two hundred times. I can't imagine students putting together a petition demanding the drunk person's expulsion--it would be ridiculous. The drunk girl clearly has some problems, but none of them appear solvable by either tarring her as a "racist" or by expelling her from school.
In your hypothetical, the student is characterizing being a Nazi as detestable. In the real-life event, the student is characterizing being Black as detestable.
I'm skeptical of widespread American anti-Black racism narratives, and I don't think this case supports them (except weakly at the margin). I think it's possible (although unlikely) that the White girl doesn't harbor meaningful animus towards Black people, and that she was just grasping clumsily for an epithet that carried a powerful valence. I also assume the White girl has some fairly serious emotional problems (as do many people, such as myself) which were exacerbated by alcohol use.
Nevertheless, the White girl's behavior was grotesque. I have no objections at all to expelling her from school.
No. In my hypothetical and in the real-life event, a drunk person chooses the word that seems most likely to offend the person they are confronting. "Characterizing X as detestable" is just far, far too much cognition to attribute to someone this drunk.
As I've said, I'm confident that expulsion solves nothing in this case. But I could probably be persuaded that this girl should be expelled for her behavior (including both heavy drinking and resisting arrest), conditional on other students routinely being expelled for similar behaviors. What bothers me is the idea of expelling students because they said a naughty word (yes, even if they said it 200 times). If the line between expulsion and not-expulsion is "did you say a racial slur," that violates my intuitions regarding the importance of freedom of speech, thought, and inquiry in institutions of higher education.
If I say that Martin Shkreli is an asshole, I'm probably not exercising too much cognition. I'm certainly not consciously/explicitly characterizing anuses as bad. Indeed, there's a reasonable case that assholes (anuses) are good - after all, what's the alternative? Still, in context, there's some clear background knowledge: assholes are detestable.
So you're suggesting that broad principles of free speech require public colleges to treat student speech in a content-neutral way, with no special treatment for the communication of ideas we find abhorrent, including racial slurs? That seems fine, although it's not the position most public American colleges seem to take (certainly not in practice). It's hard to imagine how this would even function if implemented literally. How could student work possibly be evaluated in this context?
I'm suggesting that there is no "hate speech" exception to the First Amendment. The University of Kentucky is a public institution, and thus bound (through the incorporation doctrine) by the First Amendment.
Are you sure about that? I haven't taken a recent poll or anything, but in my experience it is the private universities where this tends to be more of a challenge. Public universities are aware that they are bound by law to permit offensive speech, and failure to do so can result in substantial judgments against them.
In this particular case, the (many!) physical altercations likely give adequate cover to the university if it decides to expel the drunk girl for assault, but only if nobody involved in the process accidentally writes an email or makes a speech about the epithet. If the university says "we're expelling this student for racism," they might very well lose the resulting viewpoint discrimination lawsuit.
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