USC’s motto, “Emollit Mores Nec Sinit Esse Feros,” is usually translated as “Learning humanizes character and does not permit it to be cruel.” It implies that moral growth and mental growth are inseparable and that, through the passive act of learning, we become better people.
If this is the case, then the university is wrong — as a general practice — to suspend those who use any slurs in a hateful, but non-violent, way. Doing so will remove from the college environment those people who need the moral “learning” USC offers more than anyone else.
Don't get me wrong — last Friday's suspension of a USC student for allegedly using a racial slur was justified to the extent that anyone using that slur lightly or “as a joke” (in the manner the student seemed to use it) is a reflection of an unacceptable mode of thought.
It is understandable, even laudable, that the university would suspend a student in a singular case to make a strong statement about equality and respect. It's good to know that somebody takes these things seriously.
But in order to fight intolerance as a society in the long term, we must first face the intolerant people in our environment and work to change their outlook. By suspending them, both the administration and student body of USC gives up any chance of changing the way they think about the world. What was justified in one instance cannot become standard practice.
(I should quickly say that anyone who injects an element of violence through racial threats has no place on this or any campus. Violence or the threat of violence, no matter where it comes from, takes any possible conversation off the table. In these cases, suspension is not only right, but necessary.)
Suspension might feel like the only punishment in cases of racism. It feels nice when someone like that "gets what's coming to them." However, suspension is retributive first and foremost and not a rehabilitative measure.
Put short: it makes us feel better, but it doesn't really help in the long run. All it means is that the person suspended will take more trouble not to get caught. He or she will not attempt to change the way he or she thinks, which is the only useful way of overcoming one's own prejudices.
Our goal is to eradicate racism, not get racists to hide their prejudices more effectively. Only through education, and nothing else, can we shift the thought process of others. Suspension only helps play into the "victim" narrative, where the person involved believes that they are the victim of a society gone wrong.
Anyway, wouldn't it be more harrowing for the student in the Snapchat screenshot to walk among her peers every day? Wouldn't her continued presence at the university be more helpful as a teaching experience? To see her own hate reflected in the faces of others?
Someone like that, whose private prejudices are catapulted into the public eye, must now, every day, account for his or her actions in the eyes of every stranger. What could be a more fitting and useful outcome?
Of course, there are people who are incapable of overcoming their own prejudices. Some people have racist thought too ingrained into themselves and their upbringing to change. It would be very easy to simply throw these people out of the university and, therefore, out of conscious thought. It is also very easy to think the university have no responsibility to humanize others.
But if the student body decides that they cannot change racist thought in a university space, and then support jettisoning these people into the outside world like so much useless ballast, we will surely have to meet these same, unchanged people after graduation, when we too must enter the outside world. In this way, we put off a problem that we are going to have to deal with anyway.
Here, the university has a chance to change the character of some of its less thoughtful students. It should use that power while it has the chance.
Let's return to the quote on which USC was founded: "Learning humanizes character and does not permit it to be cruel." This entire argument rests on the idea that racism is, at heart, a problem of knowledge and can be fixed with enough learning.
If this is so, suspension cannot be the singular policy of the school when questions of racism come up.
The university will either have to change our motto or its actions because, if this is the case, USC will have abandoned our proclaimed mission as a learning institution: to humanize through teaching.
That is the responsibility of this university, and it is one we cannot afford to drop for the sake of mere retribution, no matter how good it feels to see it carried out.