Dr. Frank's What's-it

Will this bumpersticker be on

Will this bumpersticker be on the test?

This is pretty funny.

University of North Carolina-Wilmington professor and all around wise-acre Mike S. Adams decided to test collegiate attitudes on "diversity and tolerance", deliberately violating a university prohibition against faculty political endorsements by placing a "Clinton/Gore'96" sticker on his office door:

After two years without any complaints, I decided to replace the sticker with one that said "George W. Bush for President." Within a few weeks I heard reports from two faculty members and one staff member saying that someone was preparing to file a complaint about the Bush sticker.

Since the faculty handbook specifies "appropriate disciplinary action, including discharge from employment" as one possible consequence of violating the aforementioned rule, I decided it was time to let the faculty in on my little experiment. I did this by sending an e-mail to everyone in the building which began as follows: "You have all been involved in an experiment in tolerance which, unfortunately, some of you have failed . . ."

There follows a string of examples of bumpersticker jousting. Only the Gore portion of the Clinton/Gore sticker and Bush sticker appear to have violated the anti-endorsement rule (which seems sensible enough in theory, if improbable in practice.) The others seem merely like good-natured, mildly iconoclastic, cultural-political envelope-pushing that would be unremarkable anywhere but in the Halls of Sensitivity and Learning. The double standard as to what kinds of stickers tend to reap potentially career-endangering complaints is interesting, if not surprising.

One of the controversial stickers placed on the professor's office door by one of his (female) students was this one: "So You're a Feminist... Isn't that cute?" This prompted an offended co-ed to have her father write a letter of protest to the Board of Trustees. Way to subvert the dominant paradigm, sweetie!

Is the line between the Practical Joke and the Scientific Experiment always this blurry? Perhaps so.

Or perhaps it is simply the familiar, useful explanation that most of us tend to fall back on when caught red-handed. Whether you're a starlet with a shoplifting problem, a rock star with an underage porn "situation", or an academic with a sense of humor, the response is essentially the same: Research. Yeah, that's it.

At any rate, I'm not sure what all this "proves" with regard to free speech and tolerance. Finding things to be offended by and filing grievances about them is, as I recall, the defining feature and most energetically pursued activity of campus life, par for the course for faculty and students alike. If you're into tolerance and free speech, an American university is the last place you want to be. I doubt this has changed much, though Professor Adams obviously knows more about it than me.

But how is it that this guy, in this supposed Oleana Age of ours, still has an office door to hang his sticker on after all these politically incorrect shenanigans? Maybe things aren't quite as bad as some of us think they are.

(via Joanne Jacobs, by way of Natalie Solent.)

Posted by Dr. Frank at May 30, 2003 08:22 PM | TrackBack