In 1952, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education made it clear that segregation in education was a violation of the constitutional rights of those students who were excluded.
For another decade, the University of South Carolina broke federal law by continuing its policy of rejecting the admissions applications of all African-American students.
Thankfully for the sake of human dignity and equality, we live under a constitutionally limited government which protects individuals against the tyranny of the majority.
In our system, individual states and their various agencies cannot deny the rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, no matter how large the number of people that vote for them to do so.
Any policy that those agencies enact or attempt to enforce that would violate the Constitution is therefore unconstitutional and will be defeated by the courts, as was USC’s segregation policy when Judge Robert Martin ordered that Henrie Monteith, an African American, be allowed to enroll.
Monteith was ultimately joined by James Solomon and Robert Anderson as the first African-American students at modern University of South Carolina, defeating university policy under the protection of constitutional rights.
University codes of conduct or honor codes are no exception to the subservience of public university policy to constitutional rights.
In 2006, the College Republicans at San Francisco State University (SFSU) held an “anti-terrorism” rally that included the debasement and destruction of flags for the terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah, which contain Arabic writing on them including the term “Allah."
Many students at the university found this demonstration to be highly offensive and in violation of their Code of Conduct, which required that all SFSU students to treat others with “civility." Charges to that effect were filed with a university judiciary committee for assessment and punishment.
The College Republicans took SFSU to real court, arguing that the student code of conduct was too broad in its restrictions and directly violated their first amendment rights.
In College Republicans v. Reed, the Court agreed with the College Republicans: a public university cannot require its students to be “civil” because such a requirement necessarily violates student’s first amendment rights, and that university could not punish the College Republicans in any way for violating those unconstitutional sections of the SFSU student code of conduct.
The “respect” required in our Carolinian Creed is synonymous with the “civility” required in SFSU’s code of conduct and is just as unconstitutional. This weekend, many of us saw on Twitter and on various news sites a picture of a USC student writing things on a whiteboard that were disrespectful to say the least.
Many of us also saw dozens of tweets and comments suggesting violence towards said Carolinian that were less than polite. This speech is all deplorable, disgraceful, despicable, in violation of the Carolinian Creed and protected by the first amendment.
The legal precedent is clear: the governing rules of our university cannot trump the governing rules of our country. USC cannot quash protected opinions that it (or the student body) finds offensive by enforcing the unconstitutionally restrictive speech rules in the Carolinian Creed any more than USC could deny education access to protected races they found offensive by enforcing unconstitutionally restrictive segregation rules in 1963.