Kansas State University football players are refusing to participate in any football activities, but it’s not because of any concerns about the coronavirus. No, the football team is boycotting because of a tweet.
The tweet in question was from a Kansas State student. It said, “Congratulations to George Floyd on being drug free for an entire month!”
Of course, the tweet is repulsive and embarrassing. The proper reaction to anyone reading it would be disgust. The players said in a letter, “We are demanding that Kansas State University put a policy in place that allows a student to be dismissed for displaying openly racist, threatening or disrespectful actions toward a student or groups of students.” If not, they won’t play.
But the players have overextended themselves here. First of all, the state university would probably be unable to expel the student without violating the First Amendment. According to Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet, “A student at a public university making an extremely offensive statement on social media is almost quintessentially the kind of thing that should be protected against sanctioning by public authorities. And sanctioning would include expulsion from a public university.”
That one moronic tweet could bring down the entire Kansas State football team is a testament to the failures of the university, and it’s one we’ve seen before. The University of Missouri erupted in outrage in 2015-16 over isolated alleged incidents of racism, many of which were dubious and poorly attested to. The resulting rash of protests included the football team’s threat to forfeit a game against Brigham Young University unless the president of the university resigned. The mess of protests that year led to Missouri’s steep drops in enrollment and donations and more than 400 jobs on campus being cut.
It’s too early to tell whether Kansas State will go down that same pit. Once one incident lights the fuse, these protests tend to get out of control quickly. The football team’s demand right out of the gate (a likely unconstitutional punishment on a private student for his opinions) could give way, as it did at Mizzou and at Evergreen State College, to an environment where students feel they can dictate the terms of their education to administrators and faculty. At that point, the school will have failed in its endeavor to prepare students for the real world.
Kansas State isn’t the first university to be put upon by the professional protester class that its faculty has cultivated, and it probably won’t be the last. It’s high time the public evaluated whether these universities are net positives or net negatives for society in their current form.
