What Should Colleges Do to Discipline Students Who Spew Hate?

A college student says, posts, or does something racist. The university condemns the act, expresses outrage, and investigates. In some cases, the student is then suspended or expelled.

The final leg of that process — the discipline — plays out in a much-less-public arena than the first two. And it’s often a more-complex endeavor than a casual higher-education observer might imagine.

As campuses across the country respond to a spate of racist incidents, it’s worth looking at what disciplinary options a university has and what its ultimate goal should be.

At the University of Missouri at Columbia this week, members of a black student group reported being accosted with racial slurs by a group of white students. The interim chancellor, Henry C. (Hank) Foley, said the school has zero tolerance for such behavior and mentioned suspension or expulsion as possible punishments.

But kicking students off campus after such an incident would be a missed opportunity, said Thomas L. Hill, formerly senior vice president for student affairs at Iowa State University. “When you suspend or remove someone from the environment, you no longer have an opportunity to influence their behavior,” he said. Mr. Hill instead suggests finding creative ways to educate students who do say or do something offensive.

It’s in the spirit of educational institutions to make their disciplinary processes a learning opportunity. At some point though, the presence of an individual spouting hate speech on a campus stands in the way of other students’ learning.

But advocates of nontraditional disciplinary measures say they are more effective and help the campus community heal after a traumatic incident.

“Institutions should have a variety of methods for addressing the spectrum of behaviors that can occur, including both traditional student-conduct procedures as well as alternatives that go beyond discipline,” said Laura Bennett, president of the Association for Student Conduct Administration.

Ms. Bennett acknowledged that one obstacle to disciplining racist speech is that most forms of speech are protected by the First Amendment, and thus are not policy violations — at least on public campuses.

Legal issues aside, expelling or suspending students can have the side effect of making them into “First Amendment martyrs,” said Gary Pavela, a legal expert who has consulted with colleges, and creating a distraction that could yield further divisions on a campus.

In 2015 the president of the University of Oklahoma, David L. Boren, quickly expelled two students who had led a racist chant that was captured on video — a departure from the more considered, deliberative responses colleges typically employ.

A Tragic Decision

David R. Karp, a professor of sociology at Skidmore College, said that decision was tragic. “The university, in a sense, absolved itself of any responsibility for the healing process by just expelling the students,” he said. “And they placed the burden on the aggrieved community to take up that educational role.”

Mr. Karp is a proponent of the restorative-justice approach, which focuses on teaching the perpetrators of an incident through dialogue with the victims. The approach is gaining traction at colleges and universities. The University of Maryland at College Park’s president, Wallace D. Loh, mentioned it last year in a letter to the community after an offensive email written by a fraternity member went viral.

“We repair the harm to our community, in part, by restoring the wrongdoer as a responsible member of society,” he wrote. “I appeal to ‘the better angels of our nature’ and ask all members of our university community to join me in forgiving him in our hearts, not for his sake, but for our own.”

The restorative-justice model can take different forms depending on whether the offender is known. The offender is required to take responsibility for his or her actions as part of the process. As a result, restorative justice can clash with the student-conduct process, which tends to be more adversarial.

“We want to create the conditions in which it’s safe to slowly admit what they have done and take full responsibility,” Mr. Karp said.

Mr. Hill, of Iowa State, used a form of that approach in 2012, when the university’s student newspaper published a comment that was interpreted as a slur against Asian-Americans. He brought together newspaper staff members and Asian-American students, who then talked about their experiences and why the comments had been offensive. Mr. Hill said it was a poignant meeting.

“Voices quivered, heartbreaking stories were told, and it became obvious that this Iowa State community that we all call home does not feel at home to everyone in it,” the editor in chief, Jake Lovett, wrote in the newspaper’s apology.

Mr. Hill said he wanted to make sure an alleged perpetrator has a meaningful experience with people who are different. “You can’t structure it so that it’s a box-checking kind of thing,” he said. “To me, that’s worthless.”

But he acknowledged that Iowa State’s approach requires resources from staff members as they devise and monitor those meaningful experiences. “You don’t stick somebody in a highly pressured situation that could be emotionally charged and just leave them,” he said. “That’s irresponsible.”

Mr. Hill stressed that colleges should adjust their approaches based on their individual situations. “There’s no cookie-cutter model,” he said.