Ole fashioned bigotry

Visit any college campus and you’ll likely find a carefully crafted collection of brochures showcasing the wondrous diversity that exists at that institution.

But the idealistic image colleges put forward of students of every imaginable background hanging out together is often not based in reality.

There will be instances of intolerance on most college campuses.

But what’s more important is how universities choose to act in the face of those events.

Last week, University of Mississippi football players attended “The Laramie Project,” a play chronicling the murder of Matthew Shepard, a student brutally beaten, tortured and left to die on a fence because of his sexual orientation.

In the midst of the performance, about 20 of the players verbally attacked the actors on stage with gays slurs, homophobic epithets and laughter.

Ole Miss now has an opportunity to send a message that says this sort of intolerance has no place in Oxford, Miss., and that college campuses will continue to serve as the progressive grounds for fostering understanding they’ve represented for decades.

Anything less will constitute the condoning of bigotry on Ole Miss’s campus and reaffirm the popular belief that Mississippi continues to be the same backward state that saw the deployment of federal troops to address unimaginable violence in the face of its integration in 1962.

Several university officials, including members of the athletic department, have officially apologized for the incident.

The football players themselves were forced to issue apologies, though based on reports of the incident, it’s uncertain whether they actually know why they were prompted to do so.

Several officials have stated this should serve as an “educating moment” for the players and the university as a whole.

Ole Miss’s own Bias Incident Response Team has recommended education instead of punishment for those involved.

The Editorial Board disagrees with that finding.

We believe both punishment and education should equally factor into the reprimand of the students. The players should be held accountable, whether that means taking them off the field, fines, mandatory volunteer work with GLBT youth or releasing the
names of those involved.

If Ole Miss doesn’t move to appropriately reprimand its student athletes, it will be sending a message that the university sees more merit in its football program than in basic human civility.

A status quo of that nature would be dangerous.

Because, after all, it’s that same absence of respect for basic human civility that caused the vicious murder of Matthew Shepard in the first place.

­— opinion@idsnews.com
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