Several of my cronies are scandalized at this prank (sic?) story in the Reed College newspaper alleging that the good folks over at Lewis and Clark are gassing Jews.
I'm not going to waste any cortical tissue trying to defend the Reedies but I will offer a bit of perspective. Seems to me that the educative function journalism was and always will be its providing the opportunity to make just this kind of mistake. I.e., you are 19, you are full of yourself, you've got a big organ to play with (oh tee hee)--and you publish something appallingly tasteless.
And guess what? The world lands on you with hobnail boots. All of sudden you are in the bunker fending off incoming and for a while, you really do not know what hit you. You get to meet the President who perhaps does not pitch you out but does, if he knows his job, give you holy hell. And you go away wiser and perhaps think twice before you make that sme mistske again.
1 comment:
From my own reading of the story in the Journal of Higher Ed, the Reed kids did not "go away wiser." They went away sullenly arrogant and at best defensive.
"Hey, I didn't know anybody would let my [published] remarks get noticed," is a pretty lame excuse.
Would these kids "satirize" lynchings? Would anybody mind if I suggested hanging the editor of the "humor" magazine by a piano wire so as to give the rest of the campus a better perspective on the nature of how satire works? (I suggest this only in an entirely satirical manner, of course.)
During my own senior year at my college, two rival fraternities from a different college took to burning crosses on our own campus. As it happens, two reporters for our college paper (I was one of them) unmasked who the perps were. (The cops were useless.) Our college dean, a lovely man named JD Dawson, called their college dean, in high dugeon. Both frats were both grounded for the year.
I'd favor suspending the kids for a term or two, as a means of humoring the rest of us.
Yours very crankily,
The New York Crank
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