Duke U hastening slowly on "hate speech"

Brodhead is being a lot more cautious now than he was in the Lacrosse team episode.  That cost Duke millions.  Brodhead  was really a d*ckhead in that episode

After recent events involving hate speech both on campus and nationally, administrators and students are debating how to balance freedom of speech with an inclusive, safe campus climate.

Although a hate crime is punishable by law because it perpetrates violence or harm, hate speech is more difficult to eliminate because it is often protected by the First Amendment. Long-standing traditions of free speech on campus have also established a precedent of protecting extreme and even hateful speech. After the defacement of the Black Lives Matter poster with a racial slur along with other racially charged incidents, students have protested and called for administrative action to create policies against hate speech on campus. According to Duke Student Affairs' website, University student conduct policy currently does not specifically mention racial harassment or hate speech.

"We [will] be revisiting and reconsidering the question of whether our disciplinary rules should have specific mention of bias and hate and specific weighting of penalties for those things," President Richard Brodhead said during an interview Friday.

Brodhead added, however, that introducing policies against bias and hate speech runs the risk of inhibiting free expression on campus. As a result, designing such policies can be complicated, and few universities have managed to do so successfully.

"If the great majority of universities in America don’t have that kind of regulation, it isn’t because they don’t care about these things," he explained. "It’s because there are complications in administering that have to be worked through."

SOURCE