“anything else is an affront to civil rights”
Huh? You have a “civil right” to form student groups at so and so college? We really love throwing that term around, don’t we?
The term “civil right” is indeed tossed around loosely these days but forming groups of like minded individuals is indeed a right detailed in the Constitution I believe.
The people have a right to “peaceably assemble”, at least for now.
No one has a right to form a student group, and a school could legally forbid them. But once a school allows some students to organize along certain lines (in this case racial lines) disallowing other students from doing the same is an affront to the rights of those students. For instance under the equal protection clause it is impermissible to say “for Whites the rule is A but for Blacks the rule is B.”