THE BLOGOSPHERE IN ACTION: I have to go to The Volokh Conspiracy to find out what’s going on at my own campus.

The University of Tennessee’s Administration should be ashamed of itself. Not that the fraternity in question has a lot to be proud of. But free speech isn’t only for things that you should be proud of, something that universities certainly seem able to appreciate in many other contexts. As Eugene Volokh writes:

Uh, administrators, sorry to distress you even further, but the First Amendment gives people the right to be uncivil, unharmonious, and not terribly respectful of racial harmony. What’s more, it means that when you sanction people, you are violating the Constitution, and can be and should be sued and held financially liable.

The funny thing is that this very issue — people’s right to wear blackface — has come up before, and has actually led to a U.S. Court of Appeals decision, Iota Xi v. George Mason University (4th Cir., some time in the early 1990s) that made perfectly clear that public universities may not punish students for wearing blackface. But even without the Iota Xi decision, the right First Amendment result would be obvious.

You needn’t be the author of a First Amendment text, like Volokh, to see the principle here. One might almost say you need to be a university administrator to miss it. As I said, the University — and specifically Provost Loren Crabtree and whoever advised him on this — should be ashamed. And such tactics in the name of political correctness make a mockery of claims regarding academic freedom at universities, which, as I’ve said before, are in fact some of the most hostile environments in America where free speech is concerned. I’m embarrassed to see my own institution fall prey to such thinking.

UPDATE: On looking at the story again, this passage leaps out at me:

“We will require the leaders and members of Kappa Sigma to demonstrate a commitment to uphold our expectations for civility, ethnic diversity and racial harmony,” Crabtree said.

This sounds suspiciously like a demand for a loyalty oath, pledging fealty to the University’s positions on “ethnic diversity” and “racial harmony.” That, too, is a violation of the First Amendment.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And people are already making fun of UT for this. Sigh.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Eugene Volokh has another post on the “blackface” issue.

ONE MORE UPDATE: Great. The story’s on Drudge, and Neal Boortz has a link on his program notes page, which means it was on his show today. Presumably, the reason for the University’s response was fear of bad publicity, but the response has so far produced nothing but bad publicity. I wonder if they’ll take the appropriate lesson from that.