The Cake Was Not the Scandal at Utah

A student at the University of Utah brought a cake mocking the killing of Charlie Kirk and set it near the College Republicans' table. That was September 10. She apologized. The College Republicans accepted the apology. As far as anyone can tell, nothing further happened to her.

The two students facing an expulsion hearing this week are the ones who took the picture.

Rylie Barnes, vice president of the chapter, posted the photo. The campus College Democrats then filed a complaint with the Dean of Students asking that Barnes and another College Republican be thrown out of school for "threatening or endangering behavior." Not the cake. The photograph of the cake. That is the case, as reported by The Gateway Pundit and the students' own posts. The university has said nothing publicly to confirm or deny it, which is its own kind of answer.

I have read enough of these files to know the shape before I read the details. The offense is never the offense. The offense is the record of the offense. Whoever writes it down becomes the defendant.

But I am not writing today about the double standard. Everyone on our side can already recite the double standard. We have been reciting it for forty years while losing ground the whole time.

I want to talk about what happened after the complaint was filed.

Someone on the other side knew the conduct code. Someone knew which office takes complaints and what language to put in them — "threatening or endangering behavior" is not a phrase college sophomores invent over lunch. It is lifted from a policy document. Somebody read the document. Somebody organized a filing. And when the hearing came up, that side had a position, a paper trail, and people willing to sign their names to it.

Now tell me what our side had. Two students. A photograph. And a tweet from Harmeet Dhillon at the Justice Department that read, "Utah... wth is going on over there."

Utah... wth is going on over there.

— Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights

I am glad she said it. It is not a defense. It is a man watching a house burn and remarking on the smoke.

The left brought a filing. We brought astonishment. Astonishment has never won a hearing.

Here is the pattern, and it repeats because we permit it. When one of theirs is in trouble, twenty of theirs show up — organized, quoted in the paper, filling the hallway outside the hearing room. When one of ours is in trouble, we forward the article to each other and shake our heads. The student stands alone in front of the dean. The dean does the arithmetic any administrator does: one side will make noise for months, the other side will be angry on the internet for a day and a half. Then he rules.

That is not a conspiracy. It is arithmetic. And it is ours to change, because the numbers are not against us — the organization is.

This is the Mountain of Education, and it is the mountain where we have been most content to complain and least willing to do the unglamorous work. Reading the handbook is unglamorous. Learning the name of the associate dean who chairs conduct hearings is unglamorous. Driving forty minutes to sit in a room and be counted is unglamorous. Posting is easy. Posting is why the young woman with the cake walked away and the young woman with the camera is fighting for her enrollment.

Scripture does not treat uneven judgment as a minor administrative flaw. "Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment... but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour" (Leviticus 19:15). Uneven scales are named as sin, not inefficiency. But that verse cuts at us too, because a process only stays even when somebody insists on it out loud, and insisting is a thing we have outsourced to whoever happens to be trending.

So do this. Find your institution's student conduct code — your own school, your child's school, the university you write a check to every fall. Find the section on complaints. Find who decides them and what standard they apply. Print it. Then, when the next Rylie Barnes appears on your campus, you will not be posting about the double standard. You will be in the hallway with the policy in your hand, asking the dean one question in front of witnesses: was the same standard applied to the cake?

He will not have a good answer. He has never been asked, because we have never been there to ask.