Hearing Lennox
Is being a thorn in the side sufficient grounds for expulsion?
This is the question university officials face in the Jan. 30 hearing for Topinabee junior Dennis Lennox II.
Lennox faces charges for providing false information to a university official, for not identifying himself to a university agent when asked and for distributing printed materials in violation of the Advocacy Policy.
The punishment could range from a written reprimand to expulsion. RightMichigan.com, a conservative Web site, is urging its readers to contact CMU officials to protest what it calls a deliberate abrogation of free speech.
Lennox does, in theory, face expulsion. However, to label the hearing as an effort to rid the university of Lennox and the conservative perspective is misinterpreting the concept of the university's disciplinary spectrum.
It would be unreasonable to expel Lennox. Perhaps he has violated university policy, but at no point does the distribution of fliers, or even Lennox's other disruptive activities, warrant expulsion.
While expulsion technically is a possibility, it is not a likely one - nor is it even one we think university officials to seriously consider.
Before rallying behind Lennox, his supporters must first take the disciplinary code for what it is: a spectrum, the extremities of which rarely are exercised. Do not presume malice against an entire ideology simply on basis of a possible, yet unlikely, punishment.
The charges against Lennox do not specifically address his message, but rather the manner through which he spread it. University officials have reiterated the necessary consequence of free speech: that it is impossible, if not even undesirable, to distinguish hate speech from free speech and to limit only the former.
Rather, the charges seem more along the lines of preserving rules of order, which are in place to balance the cacophony of entirely free expression. Free speech, if said simultaneously, has no meaning.
Not handing out fliers in an academic building, for example, could be justified for the sake of creating an academic environment in which students are not disrupted by the personal agendas of others. After all, other arenas of more fluid speech are provided.
If Lennox was singled out, it was not because he holds an ideology with which the university ardently disagrees. He is being charged because of the extent to which he flouted CMU's code of conduct.
The university should give Lennox little more than a written reprimand, and take this opportunity to better justify its regulations on speech, responding to the charges that these restrictions are infringements on Constitutional rights.
Then, perhaps, this conversation will become meaningful.
