Incoherent weasel sighting

Stop campus shootings: ban prop guns- And while you’re at it, be sure to carefully cover your “but” (even at the expense of clarity):

“All of us have a healthy respect for the freedom of artistic expression that college theater represents, but and all of us agree that out of respect for the families of those victims of the tragedies at Northern Illinois University and Virginia Tech, but and from an abundance of caution, but it is best at this time not to undertake a campus production that contains the portrayal of graphically violent scenes.” - Robert C. Brown, president, Arkansas Tech University

This mound of incoherence is by a university president? It must be rough to try to do the politically correct thing without seeming to do so.^[1]  (And then there's the “thinking” behind the decision.)

I guess what Mark Twain once said about school boards now goes double for university administrations.

(Having said that, Assassins is one of Sondheim’s suckier efforts.)


^[1] UPDATE 080222 23:56:  A late comment to the insidehighered.com story by a poster identifying him/herself as an ATU faculty member (no permlink, scroll to the comment by “D, at 4:30 pm EST on February 22, 2008”) offers:

A third option... that certain parties may simply have felt the content of the play was distasteful and inappropriate...
Arkansas is a red state with a deep patriotic bent, maybe the administration (or some influential alumni) simply felt the play to be inappropriate...

Accepting this explanation, rather than the obvious no-guns-on-campus one, requires believable answers to the questions of why the play was scheduled in the first place, and why the administration, once it had determined to stop  performances, felt it necessary to mask its reasons for doing so.  It is a possible scenario, and one that would lead me to change the above sentence to, “It must be rough when you have to scramble for a politically correct excuse to mask what’s actually censorship.”  But it is also worth noting that raising the possibility of censorship is a good way to shift the blame for a (now embarrassing) action;  from politically-correct motivations of the  administration to agitation by unidentified red-state rednecks. 


Via: Althouse (at IP) who notes:

The bright side of this is:  Because it's high-class musical theater that's getting censored, even the usual prissy anti-gun types should get pissed off.

Ox, gored, etc.

Posted by: Old Grouch in Rants at 19:34:50 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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