EUGENE VOLOKH offers what might be the last word on the University of Tennessee blackface incident. Fellow Knoxville blogger SKBubba emailed me last night, suggesting that I was too hard on the University Administration. They’re trying to move the place up, he pointed out.

That’s true, and I’m happy to help. (Heck, I spent a lot of hours trying to help the last UT President with fundraising, etc., but that’s another story entirely). What bothered me about the initial reaction, though, was that it seemed to be instinctively punitive, when it should have been instinctively pedagogical. You don’t teach courtesy by enforcing political correctness at the point of a gun. You teach it by, well, teaching. And by example.

As it worked out, President Shumaker wound up denouncing the behavior but making clear that it’s protected by the First Amendment. That was the right thing to do. It just took them a little while to get there. But our Provost and President are new, and may not entirely have a feel for the place yet. One of the nice things about the University of Tennessee is that in the past it has managed to deal with these things without them blowing up into the kind of polarizing event that gets embarrassing national publicity.