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Update | FIRE’s Robert Shibley has put up a response to this post. My reply to his response can be found here.

There’s something I find very weird about the campus-free-speech crowd centered around FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education).

Every time a new example of incendiary, bigoted campus speech hits the news, the FIRE folks rise up to defend the speaker’s right to express his or her views — as, in my opinion, they should. Like them, I’m generally opposed to campus speech codes and in favor of the principle that more speech is the best remedy for bad speech.

But see what I did there? I called bad speech “bad speech.” Because whether I think speech needs defending has nothing to do with whether I consider that speech obnoxious. I’m happy to describe bad speech as bad speech in the course of saying it’s entitled to First Amendment protection.

Contrast that with Robert Shibley of FIRE’s comments on Alexandra Wallace’s racist YouTube rant:

“It is easy to see why Asian students in particular, and others as well, might find it offensive—although in my opinion it is really pretty tame, as far as Internet rants go.”

It’s easy to see why some other people might find this speech offensive, he says, though he himself considers it “pretty tame.” And how does Shibley summarize the video itself? In it, he says, Wallace

“claims that the ‘hordes’ of Asian students at UCLA (UCLA’s undergraduate population is about 37 percent Asian and Pacific Islander) cause various annoyances like loudly talking on their cell phones in the library and having their extended families come over and do their chores for them.”

Kudos to Shibley for quoting the word “hordes,” I suppose, but I find it curious that he leaves out the other two most inflammatory elements of the video — Wallace’s racist “ching chong” caricature of “Asian” languages, and her mockery of students who might have been attempting to reach family members in the path of the Japanese tsunami.

Blogger Matthew Hurtt — who approvingly quotes Shibley — takes a slightly different tack, arguing in essence that if you take out the bigotry from Wallace’s rant, it’s really not all that bigoted, but the minimizing effect of his rhetoric is similar. Tellingly, for the epigram of his blogpost, Hurtt invokes Voltaire:

“I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend – to the death – your right to say it.”

I say “tellingly” because Hurtt gets the quote wrong.

The “defend to the death” line originates with Voltaire biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall, who summarized Voltaire’s position as “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Voltaire himself phrased it even more strongly, in a 1770 letter: “I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.” [Update: That quote is fake too. See final update below for details.]

See the difference?

Alexandra Wallace’s speech was detestable. If you’re going to defend it on principle, there’s no reason not to admit that.

Update | Seems like I gave Hurtt too much credit. Responding to this post on Twitter, he says he doesn’t consider Wallace’s rant bigoted at all. Glad to have that cleared up, I suppose.

Second Update | FIRE’s letter to UCLA on the Wallace dustup does a much better job of threading the needle on these issues than Shibley’s blogpost. In it, they provide a dispassionate account of the video’s content (including the “ching chong” business, though omitting the “tsunami” joke), then explaining why they consider it deserving of First Amendment protection even if it is judged to be “hateful” or “offensive.” Law professor Eugene Volokh goes even further, defending Wallace’s free speech rights even as he characterizes the video as “bigoted” “moronic” “nonsense.”

2015 Update | My corrected version of the Voltaire quote is itself a fake. Oops. Read the whole story here.

Now that UCLA student Alexandra Wallace has confirmed that she did in fact put up the racist “Asians in the Library” YouTube video that caused such a fuss over the weekend, more and more students are raising the issue of what punishment — if any — she should face.

For her part, Wallace has apologized, and is laying low. But what’s next?

Rumors of Wallace’s expulsion from UCLA have been flying, driving “alexandra wallace expelled” to the top of search term lists on this story. University officials told the Daily Bruin that they intended to, in the newspaper’s words “examine Wallace’s video to see if it violates any part of the student code of conduct,” and UCLA’s chancellor yesterday sent an email to the campus community declaring that “speech that expresses intolerance toward any group of people on the basis of race or gender, or sexual, religious or cultural identity is indefensible and has no place at UCLA.”

The chances of Wallace’s expulsion, however, seem remote.

To begin with, it’s not at all clear that she violated campus rules. The University of California’s system-wide student conduct policy states flatly that “all persons [in the university] may exercise the constitutionally protected rights of free expression [and] free speech,” while the only UCLA student conduct policy that even remotely relates to her behavior is the rule against racial harassment, defined as follows:

“conduct that is so severe and/or pervasive, and objectively offensive, in that [it] so substantially impairs a person’s access to University programs or activities, that the person is effectively denied equal access to the University’s resources and opportunities on the basis of her or his race, color, [or] national or ethnic origin.”

It’s highly unlikely that a single YouTube video, pulled down hours after it was posted, which identified no student specifically and made no threats of any kind, could legitimately be construed as racial harassment under this definition. (Some of the reported responses to the video, on the other hand, which are said to have included gendered and racialized death threats made directly to Wallace by phone and email, might well constitute such a violation.)

In the end, this debate may well turn out to be moot. Given the incredible scale of the uproar her video has caused, Wallace may well find it prudent to transfer to another school rather than returning to UCLA next semester. (She has already made arrangements to reschedule her final exams so that she can take them in isolation from her fellow students.)

But if Wallace does decide to stay, it’s hard to see what grounds UCLA would have for denying her the opportunity to do so.

I don’t have anything relevant or coherent to say about the current crisis in Japan, but I have found a resource some of you may be interested in. The video below is a live feed of the English-language broadcast of NHK World, a 24-hour news channel produced by Japan’s national public broadcasting service.

Free video streaming by Ustream

March 19 Update | Alexandra Wallace released a second apology yesterday, and announced that she’s dropping out of UCLA.

Alexandra Wallace, the UCLA student who filmed herself in an anti-Asian YouTube rant over the weekend, has released a statement of apology to the Daily Bruin student newspaper.

In the video, titled “Asians in the Library,” Wallace mocked UCLA’s “hordes” of Asian students, saying that they bring their “moms and their brothers and their sisters and their grandmas and their grandpas and their cousins and everybody that they know” to campus and talk noisily on their cell phones in the library.

Wallace’s imitation of one such student — “Ohhhh, ching chong ling long ting tong. Ohhhhh” — sparked both outrage and stunned amusement across the web today.

Here’s the apology:

“Clearly the original video posted by me was inappropriate. I cannot explain what possessed me to approach the subject as I did, and if I could undo it, I would. I’d like to offer my apology to the entire UCLA campus. For those who cannot find it within them to accept my apology, I understand.”

More to come.

Tuesday Update | Wallace’s apology came hours after she received “numerous death threats via email and phone,” the Daily Bruin reported this morning. Campus police have advised her to reschedule her final exams for her own safety.

Second Update | University officials are investigating whether Wallace violated the campus code of conduct, but rumors that she has been expelled from UCLA are false, and expulsion is highly unlikely.

Well … probably not. But it’s a weird story anyway.

Joel Klein was chancellor of the New York City public school system for eight and a half years. In that time, he only declared four snow days. And — according to a speech he gave last week — one of them was because Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg’s son had a paper due.

At a swank benefit luncheon for a local charter school organization, Klein said that he promised Caroline’s son Jack — named for his grandfather, President Kennedy — that if Jack’s mom agreed to serve as chief fundraiser for the city’s schools, he’d call a snow day sometime on Jack’s birthday. Caroline took the job (and eventually raised half a billion dollars in donations for the schools).

I’ll let the New York Daily News take the story from here:

“Seven years later,” Klein told the crowd, he hadn’t made good on “my side of the bet,” even though Jack was “reminding me, like, all the time.”

But it would be Jack’s mother who called in the favor. On a day when it was “really snowing bad,” Klein said Caroline phoned him and said, “It’s not [Jack’s] birthday, but he’s got a paper due tomorrow. A snow day would be awfully rich right now.” He added that one of the “snow days I declared was that.”

Now, this was most likely a joke. Caroline Kennedy probably wasn’t serious when she asked for the snow day, and Klein probably wasn’t serious when he said he’d offered it. (Though it’s worth noting that none of the local news outlets that covered the speech identified the story as a joke, and one prominent schools blog went so far as to follow up with Klein about its veracity.)

Joke or not, however, it’s a telling story in a few ways.

First, this is a joke about money and access to power. Recall that Klein this was a speech to, as Klein himself put it, “some of the most fortunate and privileged people in this country,” a speech delivered at a benefit luncheon for charter schools. This isn’t a heartlifting story about the value of giving for giving’s sake. It’s a joke about return on investment, and about the access that wealth, properly deployed, brings the wealthy.

Second, it’s a story about the ways that an economic elite with no connection to the public school system shapes that system. For Kennedy’s son was not, of course, educated in the city’s public schools. (He wanted a snow day because the privates usually follow the public schedule.)

And finally, it’s a story that the vast majority of New York City public school parents wouldn’t find funny at all. For most of us, a snow day means a scramble to figure out childcare. For a lot of us it means taking a day off work — and for too many it means losing a day’s pay. There are hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers for whom a snow day falls somewhere between a pain in the ass and a crisis.

But Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg isn’t one of them. Joel Klein isn’t one of them. And neither were any of the people he regaled with this story last week.