Right Angles has a post about how Multicultural Student Affairs at NC State is proud to subject students to a Tunnel of Oppression:
“People may have never been placed in these types of situations, and they obtain a sense of what it actually feels like to be oppressed or discriminated through the sights and sounds they experience,” said Ray. “While the Tunnel may be disturbing and upsetting, it is an effective tool used to teach people about how it really feels to be in the situation the images present.”
… The tunnel shows personal accounts, slurs, and other images and messages that aim to educate and challenge people to think more deeply about oppression.
Ray, by the way, is Tracey Ray, Director of Multicultural Student Affairs and African-American Student Affairs, who incidentally had this to say about the Free Expression Tunnel controversy last year:
Tracey Ray, director of the Multicultural Center, gave an impromptu emotional speech, in which she said the University should have informed the public of what was written in the tunnel, and she wanted the students’ involved treated as criminals.
“I want the names. I want them prosecuted,” she said.
I wonder if Ray should surrender herself to the authorities for prosecution? Here she is a year later deliberately offending students with racial slurs (gosh, in a tunnel, no less). Oh, but hers is for education, and the Free Expression Tunnel is not? Well, whose fault is that?
One wishes earnestly but with little reason to hope that somewhere at N.C. State or within the UNC system could be found an educator who could use the incident as a teachable moment about the importance of free speech and the free society’s ability and responsibility to use more speech rather than tyranny to overpower noxious speech.
In other words, Ray and the rest of her peers at NC State had the ability — and I would add, the educational duty — to use offensive speech in the Free Expression Tunnel as teaching opportunity back then. They don’t need to import their own offensive-speech tunnel to insult students and then teach them afterwards. The thing is thoroughly redundant, it makes a mockery of their already risible grievances against the Free Expression Tunnel, and assuming the university spent money bringing it to campus, it’s an atrocious waste of resources.