Digging in the Archives: College Speech Rules

While digging through a box of old files yesterday, I discovered a lot of old articles by and about me. No, I'm not necessarily vain; if I were, I wouldn't have stuffed them in crummy old folders that I then put into a box I forgot about for nearly 10 years.

The articles range from editorials and columns I wrote at The Badger Herald student newspaper (when I was a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) to letters I wrote to magazines and newspapers, guest columns for various publications, and articles in which I was quoted.

Most of it will not interest you any more than it (dis)interests me any longer. But a few items were pleasant surprises, including the article above (click on the image to see a bigger version). The article, which appeared in the October 21, 1990, Chicago Sun-Times, reported the reactions of some UW students to the then-hot topic of hate-speech rules. As a columnist and former editor of the Herald, I had written quite a bit about the attempts of the UW chancellor to implement severe restrictions on campus speech. (I won't go completely into it here, but suffice it to say that I think hateful speech thrives in the underground, and it's better that good people take on such statements head-to-head; the average person should be educated enough – or should get educated enough by their university – to be able to refute hateful and ignorant statements; in addition, the proposed rules were so vague that I thought it endangered professors who taught concepts and ideas that offended students; if you're a fundamentalist of any religion and you take a class on biology, that's your problem – I believed and still believe – so prepare to be offended and don't bother me with your offendedness.)

Anyway, the Sun-Times talked to representatives of the conservative and liberal daily student papers, finding both of us opposed to the speech restrictions. That should have been a sign to the UW administration. Years later, when the chancellor was profiled by The New Yorker, she said she had pushed the speech rules because it's what the campus wanted. Untrue.

But that was 21 years ago. Forgotten and placed in a box.

The best news is that in all of that archival digging yesterday, I was successful in finding what I was seeking: my complete collection of Bunky comic strips, the cool but short-lived comic produced by my stepfather, Lyle Lahey, back in 1975. It will play a role in the second edition of my science fiction and science magazine Galaxis (first issue still available free here or for print-on-demand at cost here). Stay tuned.

Redesign at Badger Herald Web Site

My old paper at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, The Badger Herald, has redesigned its web site and it looks very good.

If that's not enough to draw you there, the editors have posted their annual April Fool's issue.

James O'Keefe and the Downward Trajectory of the Right-Wing Campus "Conspiracy"

Photo of the summer 1990 intern cadre posing with President George H.W. Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle. I'm the one wearing the dark blazer. 

A little background can really change your views of someone.

Conservative activist James O'Keefe was previously best known for releasing secretly made videos purporting to show ACORN staffers instructing a fake pimp and prostitute how to traffic in underage prostitutes. ACORN claims O'Keefe edited out the portions of the video wherein the staffers showed that they didn't take the conservative actors seriously. But the damage to ACORN (serving as a stand-in for the conservatives' real target, President Barack Obama) was done.

As I noted above, that was O'Keefe's previous reason for fame or infamy. These days, he's known for being part of a band of conservative activists who were arrested after allegedly lying to get access to a U.S. senator's communications system on federal property. Big-time federal crime, though it'll probably help them that one of the activists' father is a U.S. attorney in Louisiana. Just sayin'.

The interesting angle for me has come from writers who have highlighted the activists' involvement in the conservative movement since at least their college years, including involvement in conservative campus newspapers. If there is a vast right-wing conspiracy (and there is and has been for decades; Hillary Clinton was correct), a key cog in that network is the campus conservative movement groups that train the Karl Roves and Dinesh D'Souzas and the Ann Coulters. They bring them to Washington to meet conservative bigwigs, they give them money to start or support right-wing campus papers, and they give them internships and jobs in the government or in their connected networks of foundations or think tanks.

And I was sort-of almost kinda a part of it for a while.

Let me explain.

When I attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late 1980s, I joined one of the daily student newspapers. (At the time, the UW was the only campus in the country that had two daily student papers competing. A point of pride.) There was the long-running Daily Cardinal, which was the campus left-wing paper. No, not liberal; left-wing. There's a difference. One famous low point for the Cardinal was when Saigon fell to the communists; the Cardinal's big front-page headline was "VICTORY!" Ugh. Anyway, back in 1969, a group of campus students created The Badger Herald as a libertarian-to-conservative counterweight. The Herald went from boom to bust to boom and back over the next decade, but by the time I joined the staff in 1987, the Herald was flourishing. Even without (and probably partly because it was without) any financial support from the university, the Herald had become the paper with the larger circulation, and it went from strength to strength.

An important factor in its appeal, I think, was that it wasn't a doctrinaire, ideological sheet. Nor was the Herald predictable. As editorial page editor for a year and a half, I relied on the "libertarian" part of our identity whenever I ran an editorial or opinion piece that wasn't in any way conservative. But what gave us cred within the journalism school was that we kept our politics in the opinion section and out of the news, entertainment, and sports pages. I was very proud when a staffer came back from her first day in a journalism class and related her professor's plea to his students not to work for the Cardinal because it was garbage. At that very liberal J-school, I'm sure there were plenty of professors who felt similarly about the Herald, but we were increasingly hearing good things from those professors, and that became one measure of our success.

The Herald wasn't part of any right-wing conspiracy. It was just a good student paper doing what a band of writers and editors should do: offer an alternative viewpoint and engaging in the issues of the day. (In the photo at right, circa 1987, the Herald's editorial staff sets alight a copy of the Cardinal. What scamps. But even in that photo, there is everything from a supporter of El Salvadoran Marxist rebels to a news editor to the right of William F. Buckley to apolitical editors to moderates. Healthy debate requires diversity.)

But early in my tenure as editorial page editor, one of the editorial page's Grand Old Dames (he was a man, not a woman, but it's hard to think of conservative elders in other terms) told me about the Institute for Educational Affairs, a conservative Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization that helped network a disparate group of conservative campus newspapers. IEA (which later merged with the Madison Center) provided some funding for papers, but for the Herald, the $10,000 or so that it might get wouldn't be worth it; our budget was something like half a million dollars a year, and we were profitable and proud of our independence. I think the only financial help we had ever received from IEA was help buying a photocopier, before my time there.

(This led to my one and only appearance in Rolling Stone magazine, and an education in how to talk to national media reporters. Sometime around the 1988 elections, Rolling Stone put together an article on the phenomenon of conservative college papers, and I came home one day to find a answering machine message from the reporter. I called him back and talked with him for an hour -- on my dime -- about the Herald, the UW-Madison campus, all the ways we were not a right-wing rag. None of that made it into the article he eventually published. Instead, the only bit of that expensive phone call that was immortalized in RS' pages was in a section about the financial assistance provided by IEA to conservative papers. Noting the typical $10,000 funding amount, I was quoted as saying something to the effect of "that's what we spend on beer in a year." So not only did he not include any of my comments that would have challenged his thesis about these fire-breathing right-wing papers, but the one bit he did use made us sound like a band of drunken frat boys, which we weren't. Sigh.)

Frankly, I rather liked IEA, or at least its Washington staff. They were intelligent, they had interesting backgrounds, and they had a good understanding of politics -- an important asset if, like me, you've always been interested in politics and the issues of the day. They also flew me to Washington, D.C., for conferences (with speakers such as conservative journalist John Podhoretz or Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia). It offered the student journalists a chance to network with each other, see how other papers were surviving and how they met challenges. Since we were pretty much the only non-right-wing paper (i.e., we were moderate to libertarian to conservative, and we were a real newspaper, not just a political sheet), there wasn't a whole lot I could learn from the others, and, let's face it, a few of those papers were pretty scary. The Dartmouth Review (which gave us Dinesh D'Souza and won't take him back) had ridden to success by provocative and sometimes offensive attacks on its political opponents. The Cornell Review was also known for being over-the-top; no surprise that one of its founders was ultra-right provocateur Ann Coulter. And then there was the paper (I forget its name, thankfully) that liked to trade in Nazi insults and illustrations.

Though I never met Coulter (she is quite a bit older, anyway), I did meet a number of the other editors who were in the campus journalism wing of the vast right-wing conspiracy (to stick with the theme). They ranged from the sort of prep-schooled alumni to blue collar conservatives. Men and women. Very conservative to moderate. One could lampoon them -- after all, being serious about politics in college when most students are just trying to pass courses, find a date, and get drunk is a lampoonable offense in this country. But, even if I don't share much of their views, I respect the majority of them. Even the college kid who wore suits to all of the IEA conferences and had his own business cards. Even the grad student who tried to create a magazine that had no editorial rules whatsoever. Even the one who thought Ayn Rand provided step-by-step guides to life in the 1980s.

I was also the recipient of two IEA-arranged internships. The first was for a major conservative foundation in Milwaukee, where I spent a summer reviewing project files and writing reviews. I can't imagine they got much value out of two interns' views on their funding projects. The second internship was in the office of the Vice President of the United States, where I ... didn't do much at all. Most of the interns did not do much, apparently because most were there due to family connections and were hoping to cement future political roles. I, on the other hand, still saw myself as an editor and writer, and was pretty bored out of my skull, though I did discover that the library in the Old Executive Office Building had an excellent collection of New York Review of Books issues going back many, many years. Since it was the summer that I discovered John Updike and Philip Roth, I spent many an hour going through those old NYRBs looking up articles on their past books.

In the end, my politics solidified much more in the center of the spectrum, ranging from center-left to center-right. (Think German Chancellor Angela Merkel.) It would be wrong to assume that there weren't similar political evolutions for some of the other students who were involved in conservative campus newspapers; they didn't all grow up to be Ann Coulter. So the conservative campus newspaper part of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" isn't in itself something to worry about; it's just part of the lively debate of a civil society.

Where this comes back to James O'Keefe and his ilk, which I do consider to be something to worry about, is where campus conservatives aren't interested in engaging in discussions with their opponents. They don't grant their opponents the courtesy of having ideas or viewpoints that are worth considering and that might change the conservative's mind. They attack. They use deceit. They lie. They are not a political evolution but are instead a political dead-end, in particular the dead end of conservatism. At its best, conservatism can ask good questions about human nature and past attempts to change the world, and thereby provide a grounding by injecting realism into political debates. But conservatives of this radical sort today, who prefer the Ann Coulters and the Sean Hannitys (Hannity, by the way, provided James O'Keefe with his first post-arrest TV interview) to any sort of conversation with moderates and liberals -- that sort of conservative is not a good thing, and we have nothing good to expect from them.

Media Roundup: Controversial Magazine Covers, Christie Hefner, The Upper Room, Just Drive

The latest of interest from the worlds of media (with an emphasis on print):

• The Web Designer Depot blog has a list of the most controversial magazine covers, which is worth a look. There is a lot of overlap with the American Society of Magazine Editors' list of all-time best American magazine covers.
• A sale of Time Warner's print magazine business is said to be in the future, according to one source. That's according to a major shareholder; Time Warner itself ain't sayin' nothin'. Hmm, after they've unloaded print and AOL, doesn't that just make them a Hollywood film studio with a really tall building in New York City?
  
• There's some more info about her exit from Playboy Enterprises to be gleaned from The New York Time's recent profile of Christie Hefner. She alludes to feeling the pressure of knowing her decisions affected the jobs of so many people, and she also was not looking forward to managing the company through yet another economic downturn. So last December she announced her impending departure from the top spot at the company her father founded 55 years earlier. She remains a political and media force. Though the Times notes some of the activities with which she is filling her schedule, I suspect it is only a matter of time before some big project or job comes along to fully utilize her talents.
• Methodists have a long history of publishing, going all the way back to the tracts written by founder John Wesley. The Upper Room is a small (sized) big (circulation -- about 2 million) devotional magazine produced by the denomination. The Tennessean has a report on the magazine's new publisher, who already has a successful track record (ooh, a tract record??) making a Methodist publication a financial success.
• My favorite recent newsstand find is a special issue from the UK's Car magazine. Epic Drives is a deluxe special publication (read that: high cover price, very nice paper, big size) featuring a collection of their recent road trips in various (usually high-end) autos around the world. Porsches, Lamboghinis, Koenigseggs, Jaguars, BMWs, Audis, Maseratis, and more. But you don't have to be a car nut (or a Car nut) to enjoy this collection of articles. Written with typical UK punchy journalism, the articles contain plenty of interesting atmostphere about the places visited, which include the highways of Scotland, the Arctic Circle, Moscow, South Korea, Turkey, and -- again -- more.
• Journalism is dead; long live journalism schools? The Badger Herald reports on an increase in j-school students across the country. Well, someone's got to work at Borders.
  

My previous media roundup.

Badger Herald -- All Grown Up

I was pleased to read an online column by the new public editor of The Badger Herald, an independent daily student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In a compendium of topics, he notes that a former Herald staffer had become spokesperson for the student government, and that the paper was going to be very vigilant about ensuring that it didn't give the government a free pass because of the popular former colleague's new role.

Why am I pleased? I haven't lived in Madison for nearly two decades, and I don't read the Herald regularly even as nostalgia. But I'm pleased to see that they're addressing this potential conflict of interest head-on and pledging their best efforts to avoid problems.

That's a test the Herald failed during my own time at the paper. While I was a young editorial-page editor at the paper (oh, how I, a politically unreliable center-right-to-liberal-internationalist, became editorial page editor of the nation's premiere conservative student newspaper is a story I'll tell you some day as we sit around the fire drinking hot chocolate), our star columnist (and occasional editorial page contributor) was also student government president. He had won the post the previous year in what was one of the cleverest, funniest, and most exciting political campaigns on that campus (which is saying a lot; UW-Madison is, after all, the place that gave birth to the Pail and Shovel Party, which built a replica of the Statue of Liberty on the frozen Lake Mendota. One of the P&S leaders went on to be a leading light of the great Mystery Science Theater 3000 program, which is one more digression than this paragraph can probably handle.)

Our longtime columnist, Steve Marmel, was also a professional standup comic (over that hot chocolate, I'll tell you about accompanying him on some of his out-of-town gigs -- he's the guy who introduced me to the Shakespeare/Dr.-Seuss teamup). The party he founded with his cohorts was indelicately named the Bob Kasten School of Driving (okay, look, I can't get through this without major digressions; Bob Kasten was the then-GOP U.S. senator from Wisconsin, who apparently had some DUI history.) Bloody hell, where was I???

Oh, yeah! So Marmel ran a campaign filled with some sub-Pail-and-Shovel promises (goldfish in one of the fountains, I think, was one) and the best campaign posters I've ever seen. Each one-sheet poster contained the usual schtick, but the real goodies were contained in the microscopic text at the bottom of the poster. (Which, by the way, was how we all inadvertently learned the sexual identity of another campus politico -- seriously, big mugs of hot chocolate, okay? It'll all become clear.) Marmel won big-time, and his party actually did quite a good job in government, running things pretty well and avoiding a lot of the usual lefty ridiculousness of other parties in power. An example: A successor administration gained notoriety by sending one of its co-presidents to a "peace conference" in North Korea. I think we can all admit that it's been many, many decades since northern Korea has been a legitimate spokes-site for peace.

To bring this back to the Herald: I think BKSoD won two successive terms in office, and all through the campaign and his administration, Marmel remained a contributor to the Badger Herald. His column continued to appear twice a week, and he continued to contribute occasional (bylined) pieces for my opinion pages. He was also a friend of numerous Herald staffers, including yours truly.

The people in the wrong in that activity were, of course, the editors of the Herald. (To salvage my own college journalism reputation now, I'll note that the editorial pages are supposed to be opinionated, so I'll throw the news editors and EIC under the bus here.) But really, though there were some voices on staff that at least raised questions -- often heeded -- I don't think an active office holder being a newspaper staffer is a good idea.

In the many years since those events, everyone involved has more than redeemed themselves, and Marmel, in particular, can be found with his name slathered all over numerous TV programs. A few years after I left campus, the student government there was actually voted out of existence -- a longtime goal of many on campus, not just right-wingers. It eventually reappeared, but chastened, I think. The Herald, I'm very glad to report, remains a vibrant and independent voice on campus.

SF Examiner Saves Money, Cancels Spell-Check

The front page of this morning's San Francisco Examiner, the Left Coast's own little right-wing tabloid, gives us a preview of what journalism will be like in the next year or two, as newspapers lay off more and more of their staff. See the cover above to witness their spell-check problems. Or perhaps it's a result of California's education system. I don't know; the mind boggles at all of the snarky comments I could make.

And yet ... I have sympathy. When I was an editor at my independent college daily, The Badger Herald, we once ended up in a journalism magazine's department displaying embarrassing headlines and bad prose. And The Onion, when it was only a University of Wisconsin-Madison coupon-supported humor rag, made great sport of the Herald's copy editing challenges.

But, enjoy a print newspaper while you can.

Update: A New Parodic Interruption

Back in April, I wrote about magazine and newspaper parodies, and noted my own brief involvement in the trade when I worked on the USA Today parody put out by my college daily, The Badger Herald, in the mid-80s. In the blog post, I noted that I didn't have a copy of the parody any longer, and I asked if anyone did.

And the internet gods did provide, in the form of the Herald's editor, Jason Smathers, who pointed me to a scanned copy of the entire issue on the Herald's web site. It also links to some of their other April Fools issues, which are definitely worth checking out.

Many thanks to the current denizens of the Herald Tower.

The Onion for Sale?

A long time ago in a city far, far away, a young cartoonist named Scott Dikkers drew a comic strip for a college paper. The comic strip was a bare-bones, stick-figure affair, and it was occasionally funny. Then Dikkers got involved in another enterprise at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: The Onion, which started out in the mid-1980s as a coupon-supported humor newspaper on campus.

Dikkers drew his comic for The Daily Cardinal, a left-wing campus daily that competed with my own centrist/center-right daily campus paper, The Badger Herald. (Madison was a great city for student newspaper wars and competition.) In those early years of The Onion's life, the targets of its satire were local, including the Herald and the Cardinal. I remember walking into our offices one afternoon while our news editors were moaning about some Onion lampoon of the campus dailies. I didn't moan; the Onion's satirization of us was usually dead-on, hitting us at our obvious weak points, which for us included some fairly weak copy editing.

One such satire was a one-column box that sought to explain the difference between the Cardinal and the Herald. One of the bullet points for the leftist Cardinal was that its staff supported the El Salvadoran marxist rebel group FMLN; as for the Herald, it would misspell FMLN.

That's good. A better bullet point was that the Cardinal editors were all rich kids from the north shore of Milwaukee; the Badger Herald's editors all wanted to be rich kids from the north shore of Milwaukee. Perfect! There was truth to it, and it played up to the stereotypes of the two papers.

Anyway, The Onion began to widen its circulation and broaden its sights. No longer was it mainly supported by coupons for local pizza joints running along the bottoms of the pages. And a few years later, it was sold to a New York firm, which has continued to expand the company over the years.

Gawker reports that The Onion is for sale, and the New York-based owners are negotiating with a large media company to buy it. Please, please, please, don't let it be News Corp.

I was sorry to see The Onion lose its Madison base in its first sale, and I'm sure it won't regain it in this sale (there being no "large media company" in Madison). But it was another great midwestern humor creation, like Mystery Science Theater 3000 (which also included some UW-Madison alumni, plus Green Bay native Joel Hodgson) in the Twin Cities, and it went on to conquer the humor world almost as much as National Lampoon did in the 1970s.

Parodic Interruption

A legal threat from a major newspaper publisher can kill a career in comedy.

That's what we found out in the late 1980s. I was the editorial pages editor of The Badger Herald, the independent daily student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and we had to come up with an idea for our April 1 issue, the annual April Fool's edition. We hit upon the idea of doing a parody of USA Today, mimicking its design, colors, and -- most important -- its editorial tone of "we're all happier today."

The parody we produced was, if I many say so myself, quite good. We got lots of great feedback from readers, including someone at USA Today who wrote to let us know they loved the parody so much they'd like us to send them some extra copies, which we did. Feeling on a roll, the next April 1 issue was planned as a follow-up USA Today parody; in preparation, one of our editors contacted that paper to ask for the exact colors of the logo and the name of the typeface, so we could better mimic it on our end. The word came back from the East Coast that parodies are all fine and good, but if we did it again they'd sue us.

So, no follow up.

But I've always been a fan of good parodies. Magazines and newspapers are perfect targets for parodies, because readers have spent a lot of time with them, and the editors and publishers have spent years designing the magazine so that it's memorable in tone, design, and quality. It lets a (hopefully talented) humorist play in a world made by someone else, tweaking them, bringing them down to earth, and playing with their ego.

There are a couple masters of the magazine parody: Harvard Lampoon and National Lampoon. Both have published books with compilations of their magazine parodies: 100 Years of Harvard Lampoon Parodies (Harvard Lampoon, 1976) and National Lampoon Magazine Rack (National Lampoon Press, 2006). The older of the two, Harvard Lampoon, is the granddaddy of the genre, and it keeps active with last year's National Geographic parody (pictured). The USA Today parody picture on this page, by the way, is from the Harvard Lampoon, not the Badger Herald. I don't know where our Herald copies are.

But parodies have been done by many, many others. Playboy once published a parody of competitor Men's Health. Mad and Cracked did many parodies over the years. Mole magazine, a short-lived humor magazine in the early 1980s, included a New Republic parody in its first issue (not exactly reaching for a wide audience with that one, I'm afraid).

Playboy itself has, naturally, been the target of many lampooners over the decades, going all the way back to the 1950s. Harvard Lampoon produced one of its most popular parodies with its 1966 parody, PL*YB*Y (which featured, among many other treasures, an interview with the Magic Eight Ball). You've got to love a magazine that lists in its next-issue section a featured interview with Christopher Robin. Very early in its run in the 1970s, National Lampoon published its Playdead parody. But it was the 1980s when the leading men's magazine faced an onslaught of parodies, including Playboy The Parody (which featured "The Girls of Penthouse" -- cute joke, that) and Playbore (whose editors seemed to rather dislike Hugh Hefner quite a bit, judging from his portrayal in the magazine).

Harvard Lampoon's still at it, of course, even well into its second decade of ruling-class humor. Last year it published its National Geographic parody (which I neglected to pick up, and have been kicking myself since), and its five-times-a-year magazine continues to be published out of the Lampoon castle near Harvard U.

And parodies are international. In the mid-1980s, there was a German-language parody of Playboy published, Playbock, which included translations of articles and photos from the English-language Playboy The Parody and Playbore, as well as original material specific to readers of the long-running German edition of Playboy. The same German parodists produced take-downs of venerable German news magazine Der Spiegel and Stern (pictured). If you don't read German, it might just be wasted paper to you, but for those who do know the language, it's proof that Germans do, after all, have a sense of humor.

What all this (and more; there've been parodies of Sports Illustrated, Time, The Economist, Fangoria, Newsweek, and tons of others) means is that a lot of other snarky writers and editors didn't let a little thing like the threat of legal action deter them from having fun in someone else's playground.

Does anyone know where I can get a copy of the Badger Herald USA Today parody?

7/27/09 UPDATE: Yes, someone does.