ILLEGAL AND UNAMERICAN: Party Poopers: University Administrators Chill Speech by Investigating Campus Gatherings.

Earlier this month, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) administrators temporarily suspended a campus fraternity and sorority for hosting a “Kanye Western”-themed party before even completing an investigation into allegations that some attendees wore blackface.

While no evidence that any student wore blackface has been found (several students dressed as miners, with soot-smudged cheeks and pans of gold in an dual reference to Kanye West’s song, “Gold Digger” and the gold rush of 1849), that’s beside the point: The First Amendment protects even overtly racist expression. Given that there don’t seem to be any allegations that students were engaged in anything but protected expression, there is no justification even for an investigation, let alone punishment like the suspensions leveled at this fraternity and sorority.

At UCLA, the driving force behind the university inquiry was calls from other students who, according to the Los Angeles Times, swarmed the chancellor’s office “demanding a response” from the school, and holding signs that read “Our culture is not a costume.”

The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf criticized those students last week for “squander[ing] their inheritance” from the student-led Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, which made freedom of speech a more prominent issue on the nation’s college campuses.

But Friedersdorf puts most of the onus on the university administration, which he (accurately) alleges should know better.

Yes. The metastasizing “student life” and “diversity” bureaucracies are responsible for most of the disciplinary idiocy on campuses today. They should be massively defunded.