Funny that someone in law school doesn't seem to grasp that free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.
And while the other students are free to harass him for invented crimes, he's free to call them out for doing so.
This individual's major risk surface isn't what Yale will do to him... It's that his peers have filed his name away in their personal Rolodex-analog as "Someone very, very clueless about tone and reading a room." i.e. "Someone I don't want as partner in my law firm."
And the legal profession is (relatively speaking) a tiny community... But big enough that there's rarely only one choice of who to work with. He's severely curtailing his potential future options if he doesn't recognize the value of keeping contacts smooth with relative strangers.
IMO, an apology just looks like an admission of guilt in this case.
The letter they proposed is an acknowledgement that his actions were harmful and a specific declaration of lack of intent. It'd have been a good tack for him to take. Doubling down, instead, that the word choice should not be considered hurtful is risky; definitions are semi-subjective, and the history of the term he chose was clear (reference to a controversial left-wing blog isn't really an excuse; it's basically an argument "Well if shock jocks can use it, why can't I?" Because your profession of choice is lawyer, friend, not audio entertainer).
He's still at Yale Law School. His blog post is being circulated on Hacker News. Give me some of those consequences.
Ever hear “through the use of force or threat of force”?
I rarely use this term, but – clown world. Absolute clown world. You are one of the clowns, congrats.
You can't attack other users regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. It's also not ok to use HN for ideological and political flamewar. If you would please stop doing these things and use HN as intended from now on, we'd appreciate it. The rules are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
FWIW, when my most recently flagged comment has 16 upvotes, perhaps there is something to it. On the other hand, this one you’re replying to was aggressive but I think you’ll find it to be an outlier, and that I have sparse history of personal (let alone “aggressive”) attacks against anyone who isn’t a public figure or trying to be.
Anyway, keep up the good work, I’ll avoid the personal attacks. But I’m not gonna change the perspective I bring to these discussions, so if that’s the issue you can just ban me now.