An artist's rendering of the general flavor of this article.

If you have ever had your moments of doubt about the so-called liberal media, look no further than yesterday’s above-the-fold cover story in the esteemed Cornell Daily Sun. The article describes the pain, dismay, and utter, utter misfortune that 25 prospective students endured at the hands of the evil (Evil?) Office of Financial Aid. What happened was this: FinAid accidentally sent out a high-five e-mail to those 25 students, who had already been mercilessly rejected. According to the article, “Students who received the article said they were confused, disappointed, and outraged.”

Except it only quotes one of the Misfortunate Twenty-Five, whose bitter dejected/rejected ass obviously whines about what is really just a fairly excusable administrative error. Quoth the sore loser: “I can’t believe Cornell would be that irresponsible.” ∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆dpwFN C

Oh sorry, just fell asleep on my keyboard. Where were we? Oh, right. The story continues on Page 4, with the wonderful new headline: “Rejected Students Outraged Over Financial Aid Office’s E-mail Debacle.” Chocolate outrage, y’all. De-BAC-le. Outraged author Lucy Li goes on to describe a far more colossal fuck-up on the Left Coast:

Cornell is not the only school that had issues with e-mail regarding applications and admissions this year. The University of California, San Diego, mistakenly sent acceptance e-mails to all 46,377 students who applied for admission, including the 29,000 applicants who were rejected, according to NBC San Diego.

I trust NBC, even though they’re totally owned by General Electric, but I don’t trust any news outlet in San Diego after that eye-openingly revelatory documentary Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. In any case, the climactic editorialization of a sentence:

These 29,000 students’ brief moments of bliss [because U.C. San Diego is HEAVEN ON EARTH] were crushed [CRUSHED!] when UCSD emailed [sic: you've been using hyphens all along! between the "e" and the "mails." consistency fail.] out their rejection letters two hours later.

I’m glad we have these sorts of tragic news stories to keep us from thinking about, you know, real tragedies like Darfur and Rwanda and starving kids in AfriChina. Also, like how the Green Cafe didn’t have ANY milk to serve my friend when she went there at 5am this morning. Seriously, I’m not fucking kidding you. I feel for her. I feel CHOCOLATE OUTRAGE for her.

While we’re at it (read: actually reading the Sun), there’s a purposefully hilarious story on Page 5. Headline is “Bowling Green State University Bans Art Depicting Oral Sex.” YES. I’m copying it here so it will live in PERPETUITY.

“Sami Drops a Deuce,” “John Put His Head in the Oven” and “The Man Who Hasn’t Seen His Genitals in Years” are just some of the titles of sculptures Bowling Green State University senior administrators deemed “appropriate.” However, roughly two weeks ago, those administrators removed a sculpture from an exhibit on the university’s Firelands Campus titled “The Middle School Science Teacher Makes a Decision He’ll Live to Regret,” sparking a heated controversy surrounding issues of art censorship, freedom of expression and child pornography.

According a news release from BGSU, the sculpture “graphically depicts a female middle school student, on her knees, performing oral sex on a standing male middle school science teacher.”

On March 17, David Sapp, an art professor at BGSU Firelands and director of the Little Gallery, was asked by Firelands Interim Dean James Smith to take down the sculpture because there were complaints that Smith worried would result in “problems with the press” or “legal” issues of the sculpture being labeled as “child pornography,” according to a memorandum Sapp sent to all faculty and staff at BGSU Firelands.

After Sapp refused to remove the sculpture, BGSU Interim Provost Mark Gromko directed Smith to remove the artwork.

According to Sapp, the sculpture was “near the window of the gallery, but could not be seen unless you walked into the gallery.” However, BGSU administrators were concerned that children attending the McBride Auditorium, located adjacent to the gallery, “may have been directly affected by the specific criminal act depicted.”

“As an institution of higher education, Bowling Green State University strongly supports the right of free speech and artistic expression. However, we also have a responsibility and obligation to not expose the children and families we invite to our campus to inappropriate material,” the news release said.

Despite the administration’s concern, Sapp said the McBride Auditorium is not exclusively a children’s theater and he had asked the director to keep the door locked and the gallery closed during children’s theater productions.

Sapp said the art exhibits at the Little Gallery are meant to “promote thought, discussion and a meaningful visual experience in a responsible way,” and he urged his colleagues to be aware of the “visceral force” and “tone” of the administrators at BGSU.

“The dean has established a very dangerous precedent for censorship in the Little Gallery and within every part of the college,” Sapp said in the memorandum. “The dean has severely undermined the very nature of the learning environment at Firelands College.”

After administrators censored the sculpture, Sapp closed the entire exhibit of 13 sculptures and is considering resigning from his position as director.

Other sculptures in the exhibit titled “A Bakers Dozen” depicted events or situations connected with the artist’s life, such as his wife combing his daughter’s hair, personal friends who committed suicide or social issues such as obesity.

“Each one is telling a little story, and this was just a series of little stories about people I know, things I’ve read, my family; they’re basically domestic stories in many ways,” said James Parlin, the exhibition’s artist and chair of the art department at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania.

Parlin said it wasn’t necessary for BGSU administrators to remove the sculpture and he supported Sapp’s decision to close the exhibit entirely. The aluminum sculpture in question is about “moral decision making,” Parlin said.

“The intent was to show someone making a bad decision, and I showed the man staring forward at his future of disgrace. In other words, it’s about a bad choice and the consequences of that bad choice,” Parlin said. “I was blindsided by this whole thing; I never expected anything like this in a million years. I didn’t plan this, for god’s sake.”

Parlin said he was not notified before the sculpture was removed, and he said it would have been easy to restrict access to children while still allowing adults to view the artwork. According to Parlin, American society benefits from freedom of expression and institutions of higher education such as BGSU should be environments that “honor that principle.”

“I like to be able to read what I want, listen to what I want, see what I want, and I don’t like other people making that decision for me,” Parlin said. “I think it’s an enormous mistake when we let other people decide that for any of us. Now protecting children is a different issue; I protect my own children.”

The controversy surrounding the sculpture is surprising because so few people have actually seen the artwork, Parlin said.

“This whole controversy is about a piece that virtually no one has seen. It’s not about the piece of sculpture; it can’t be because no one has seen it,” he said.

Nathan Trask, a junior majoring in liberal arts at the BGSU Firelands campus, said he saw the exhibit in its entirety and participated in protests following the administration’s decision to censor the sculpture. Trask said the exhibit wasn’t “overly impressive.”

“It was really more the social ramifications that were involved, the girl giving oral sex to a teacher and a few people committing suicide,” Trask said.

According to Trask, public institutions shouldn’t have the ability to censor art and the ramifications of BGSU censoring artwork reach far beyond Parlin’s sculpture.

“Institutions are supposed to further emotional and social and all sorts of learning, and to tamper with this side of learning, you cannot get the overall learning experience that you’re supposed to get from a state university,” Trask said. “People are careful what they say all the time; they’re careful what they write; they’re careful what they create in art classes because they don’t want all this outrage happening, and it really should be the opposite way.”

Tom Lingeman, an art professor at the University of Toledo, said the BGSU Firelands situation is “clearly” an example of censorship. Lingeman said he can’t be sure about anything specifically because he hasn’t personally seen the sculpture, however, “as far as [he] can tell there is a child sensitivity issue.”

Lingeman said he believes the BGSU administrators have to consider child sensitivity, but other choices could have been made to prevent closing the entire exhibit.

“If indeed the proximity of this to the involuntary viewing of children is a problem, then that needs to be considered,” Lingeman said. “In certain cases, censorship can protect those people who do not have the capability of accurately rationalizing what they see.”

According to Lingeman, the exhibit should have featured a warning label just as films or television shows feature parental guidance warnings.

“Censorship is practiced every day, and we don’t raise eyebrows about it all the time,” he said.

The exhibition policy at The Center for the Visual Arts in Toledo “promotes freedom of expression without restriction on content or form. The views expressed … are those of the exhibitors and may not be those of the department or the university.”

Lingeman said it is UT’s policy not to censor, and students are encouraged to freely express themselves through their artwork. In addition to encouraging UT students, Lingeman said he thinks Parlin should “make sculptures of whatever he wants and to show it. … However, the viewer should be warned that others have looked at the work and deemed it to be potentially … sexually explicit or violent.”

Sapp and BGSU administrators could not be reached for comments beyond the official news releases.

After the group snowballed up and down the rows, they made their way over to the Review’s table and chanted a little about how Cornell must make them go away. And then some guy with a loudspeaker started talking, but I wasn’t really listening. There was a CoPo keeping the peace WHILE sucking on a lollipop (such talent!), and I tried to take a cell phone picture of him but I fucked it up. Anyway, their specific gripes (which a sweaty guy with a clipboard distributed before the “march” to random tables including Kitsch’s, urging us to fight the good fight with him) are after the jump. Also after the jump: why their gripes don’t really make too much sense.

[UPDATE (9/13): Before I get a flood of angry commenters, I want to let people know that I do not support in any way or form the Review. I am sorry that this post comes off like I'm shitting on activists, I'm not. I respect what you're doing here but believe that it's a bit misguided and needs to get its facts straight concerning the Cornell name and ask the administration to do something about the Review with a legitimate claim (aka please check their masthead for a disclaimer, I don't have a copy handy). Please take this into consideration before you post comments.]

This is the text of the flyer (if you can call it that, it was actually just a Microsoft Word doc) the sweaty clipboard man gave out. On the front side is a pseudo-article citing various shit the Review said in their freshman issue:

“RACISM RUNS RAMPANT AT CORNELL

The Cornell Review says:

“…it’s impossible to ignore the nasty, ignorant, and bitter members of the minority community who constantly whine about the brutal oppression they suffer at the hands of whitey. Apparently, part of this oppression involves their admittance to an Ivy League institution, likely as a recipient of affirmative action and scholarships.”

AND

“These reapers of racial rage seclude themselves inside their ethnic ghettos (be it [program houses] Ujamaa, Latino Living Center, or Akwe;kon.” [I don't know whose sic that is, but the semicolon should be just a colon.]

AND

“America has bigger fish to fry, like Abu al-Qaeda and Nawaf bin Taliban.”

AND

“Muslim inbredding in Europe may be link to transatlantic flight clampdown.”

AND

“…political ideology is genetically linked…an arranged marriage between families of radical Islamists, who hate everything about freedom and democracy results in offspring who hate twice as much…”

Here’s the second page, where they present their meticulously thought-out argument:

“This is not politics, this is blatant RACISM. The Cornell Review/Cornell American has intentionally and maliciously published racist propaganda during opening weekend that berates, offends, makes insecure, and intimidates students, especially freshmen.”

Did I miss something here? I didn’t see any pejoratives hurled at scurrilous freshmen overpopulating the good streets of Collegetown or even at students in general. (I know it wasn’t only freshmen littering my lawn with discarded Keystone cans.) Don’t they mean that the Review’s speech offends and attempts to intimidate them personally, them being mostly people living at Watermargin co-op and residents of program houses? (They’re the ones who met yesterday to discuss this whole thing anyway.)

“We can not tolerate this on our campus.

Can the Cornell Administration?

Can you?

Enough is enough.

Find the Cornell Review/Cornell American’s table at Club Fest and tell them you DO NOT want HATE SPEECH targeted at or representing the Cornell Community.”

Find me an instance where the Review purports to represent the Cornell community, and I’ll give you a dollar.

“Tell Cornell how you feel TODAY! Email Julie Paige (jlp10@cornell.edu) and Lynette Chappel-Williams (lc75@cornell.edu) to file a bias related incident report.

Cornell University provides specific authorization and written permission to the Cornell Review/Cornell American to use the Cornell Name. Tell Kent Hubbell you are shocked and ashamed of Cornell’s  endorsement of this racism and demand that Cornell Name authorization be revoked IMMEDIATELY! (dean_of_students@cornell.edu).”

Um, okay… I really don’t see the problem here. “Cornell” is in the title of the publication because it’s based at Cornell University and because there are tons of other publications called the Review. The general idea is not that this great and illustrious university is itself licensing their “shameful” publication; the name is there for mainly locational and conventional reasons. (If any commenters yell at me for defending the Review, please die promptly.)

You know, I’ve heard of this other shameful campus publication that uses the Cornell Name too: The Cornell Progressive! Take a look at their Web site–their use of Comic Sans in a headline (bold-faced, no less!) represents ALL THAT IS WRONG WITH THIS WORLD. They are shaming the Cornell Name with their typographical blasphemy!

Anyway, the official policy states that “Use of the name ‘Cornell University’ or ‘Cornell,’ in publication titles or organization names implying or tending to imply some official connection with the university, is prohibited except with the written permission of the university and under such restrictions and explanations as it may impose.” So there you go folks. OFFICIAL CONNECTION. The Review has never purported to be affiliated with the administration or faculty in any substantial way, so I think this claim is kaput. And would the university ever really license itself out to the Review? Srsly? What were their “restrictions”? “Don’t go too easy on them liberals! Yeehaw!”**

But there are other, real things to think about! The Review may or may not receive money from the SAFC (I’ve heard they have rich alums who donate so it might not be necessary), but that money is given out to publications with a VERY SPECIFIC STIPULATION (this is new, too, within the last year or so) that you put in your masthead a disclaimer stating that the views of the publication are TOTALLY not Cornell’s and that Cornell does not review what is being published. When I checked out the “About” page on thecornellreview.com (which by the way does not have any of the new stories up there), there’s no disclaimer. They ought to put that in there if they get money from the SAFC! Also, someone check their masthead, it should be in there too. Email dean_of_students@cornell.edu and let him know if it ain’t.

Lastly, people really ought to be up in arms about what a piss-poor layout the Review has. I’ll scan some and post them at a later date.

*One such sign, constructed on brown cardboard, said “STEREOTYP” on one side, which I thought was odd until I realized the other side said “STEREOTYPES ISOLATE.”

**I emailed the Dean of Students to check this shit out, just to make sure I’ve got my bases covered.

This makes times quite trying for we students who did not write down our schedules before 1:30am the night before the first day of classes. And since some unnamed students did not get all the classes they wanted and a bag of potato chips in PreEnroll, some unnamed students are kinda pissed off. And so this colors their decision to send what would normally be a very peaceable and professional email to the evil-sounding UnivRegistrar@cornell.edu. After the jump, the offending email.

Send an angry email of your own to univreg@cornell.edu, just like the Schedge admins told you to! Seriously, do it. I did an interview with Ross Skaliotis, the creator of Schedulizer, a while back, but we never ran it in the magazine. Nonetheless, he was a really cool dude (a member of the rare breed of Cornell-to-Ithaca transfers, no less!) so you should have his back. I know I do.

UPDATE: Ross Skaliotis is indeed the creator of Schedulizer, but he sold it to some Cornell kids a little while back when he got an offer from Google.

So how’s it doing the second time around? Let’s let the people talk for themselves:

Quoth Katherine Crocker, creator/artist/funnywoman of Kitsch’s own webcomic “Mu the Cat”: “staring into the black hole of massive (yet somehow inaccessible) bandwidth, you question not only Cornell’s wisdom in switching to a new system and the merits of the technology common to your existence, but smaller, more personal things like whether your mother loves you, or if chocolate really exists.”

“I am dismayed and outraged by this new cost increase,” said one student who happens to be myself. ”What’s next–$6 for a sandwich at Trillium?”

Some university administrators attempted to construct flimsy excuses defending the change, citing the expensive materials and skilled labor needed to produce Cornell IDs. “The ID department has been in the red for years,” said some lady at the office.”Mostly because of the first replacement ID is free.”

Pseudo-fake newsing aside, THIS IS SO FREAKING ANNOYING.

“Not only were the auditoriums packed both nights (over 1000 tickets were sold all together), they were packed with both genders. I was impressed that the male audience members accepted the various stabs at their gender nobly, not letting the show’s feminist nature interfere with their overall enjoyment.” (italics mine)

Uh oh, Suzy Q… did you just make the blanket claim that all feminists are men-hating bra-burners in a review of the Vagina Monologues? Watch out–you might have a herd of violent lesbians at your door soon, whose feminist nature might interfere with your overall enjoyment of your night.

Suzy Q also commits the gaffe of calling the performers girls instead of women: “Most of the “monologues” were actually performed by more than one girl. The inclusion of so many actresses added to the performance’s empowering, original mood.” Barring any comments I might have about the last sentence’s helpless triteness, did it not at least cross your mind that the Vag Mo is a very feminist play, and as such its acting “girls” might not appreciate being pushed into a diminutive, cutesy nomenclature?

Last time I read the Feminine Mystique, I tried to make sure that its feminist nature didn’t get in the way of my enjoyment, but somehow all those uppity girls got on my nerves.

Too bad they didn’t read Kitsch’s article on gay Craigslist entries (“Hooking Up”), which is infinitely more relevant given that m4m ads comprise up to 25 posts a day, paling in comparison to the m4w’s 5 to 6 average and w4m’s 3 to 4.

IvyGate suggests the Sun do another of their devilish underground “investigations” as a m4m pretender in order to scare Cornell’s closeted population, but is it really worth the trouble? The result will be an assemblage of questioning freshman, closeted frat brothers, and unattractive grad students—not to mention the occasional self-debasing “fat pig” who urgently “needs to be used.” (Bacon, anyone?)