| Sumario: | And just as Shapiro was thus right to apologize for his conduct (under this description), I think Georgetown's dean could reasonably have made a careful statement faulting Shapiro for that same lapse - including by highlighting the damage that Shapiro's speech had done to the institutional interest in maintaining a public culture of mutual recognition. After all, a professor might ask students where they are from just by way of small talk, and an Asian-American student would presumably have no reason to find the question troubling if they knew that the professor asks white students the same thing. Given the students' lack of assurance about their status, that is a demonstration that the students have legitimate reasons to want, and that the institution has genuine moral reasons to provide - especially if the alternative, at least relative to the prevailing interpretive norms, is for the institution to convey that it condones the students' felt marginalization. But we should not rush to conclude that the students (and others) who were aggrieved by Shapiro's statement so misunderstood or miscast their own complaint - and indeed, there are other salient reasons for taking offense at Shapiro's statement that I do i relate to the additional content that the critics emphasized. Ideally, one might want to acknowledge the affront that I have just described, and reassure offended students of their standing, I without i reinforcing the interpretive background conditions that made Shapiro's statement so problematic in the first place - conditions that left students vulnerable to the injury that now needs repairing and, at the same time, threaten the very possibility of respectful engagement on controversial topics of obvious importance.
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