Matthew Joyner is a junior at Michigan State and a member of the College Republicans. He recently penned an op-ed for the Detroit News about Professor William Penn’s anti-Republican classroom diatribe.

Where college begins, tolerance ends

Last week, during a literature class at Michigan State University, Professor William Penn was filmed berating Republicans by saying that Republicans were a bunch of “dying white people” he continued his tirade by saying: “If you go to the Republican convention in Florida, you see all the old Republicans with dead skin cells washing off them…They’re cheap. They don’t want to pay taxes because they have already raped this country and gotten everything out of it they possibly could.”

I ask myself whether these are comments that should be allowed to be made by public university faculty. Michigan State University, of course, is funded by Michigan taxpayers who represent a variety of politically diverse backgrounds.

Mr. Penn goes on to say, “This country is still full of closet racists. What do you think is going on in South Carolina and North Carolina? Voter suppression. It’s about getting black people not to vote. Why? Because black people tend to vote Democratic.”

The Republican Party does not promote racism. The Republican Party’s principles state, “I BELIEVE in equal rights, equal justice and equal opportunity for all, regardless of race, creed, sex, age, or disability.”

What Mr. Penn is doing is an overgeneralization of Republicans and ultimately asserting his worldview on his class. These kinds of views and comments are all too common in Political Science classes, but hearing that these comments were being made in a literature class was a great surprise.

Under the University’s Harassment policy it states:

“…the University community holds itself to certain standards of conduct more stringent than those mandated by law. Thus, even if not illegal, acts are prohibited under this policy if they:

■ Harass any University community member(s) on the basis of age, color, gender, gender identity, disability status, height, marital status, national origin, political persuasion, race, religion, sexual orientation, veteran status, or weight.”

Certainly Mr. Penn is entitled to his first amendment rights. However, as a faculty member of Michigan State University one has to ask how this incident was not a deliberate infraction of the University’s harassment policy.