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.

Wisconsin GOP Gov-Elect Doesn't Want High-Speed Trains, Still Wants the Pork

Ever since voters in my home state of Wisconsin shot themselves in the feet last month and replaced Sen. Russ Feingold and elected a conservative Republican to succeed a Democratic governor, we've witnessed the usual short-sighted decisions that this brand of populist conservative has unleashed on our country.

In the latest move, Governor-elect Scott Walker has rejected about $810 million in federal stimulus money that was restricted for high-speed rail, arguing that the high-speed train line would cost the state (horrors!) $7.5 million a year after it was completed.

Now, Wisconsin is not profligate California, but neither is it poor Mississippi. It performs much better than average economically and it has much better than average schools. Though it is now facing large budget deficits as a result of overspending and the bad economy, it will not always face that situation. It will, however, always need innovation and leading-edge developments to stimulate its economy, make use of its world-class educational institutions, and attract talent and investment from outside the state.

If Walker was just worried about the short-term financial situation, then the train project would have been ideal. It is, after all, stimulus money, intended to stimulate economic activity during times when the financial and business systems are unable to do so themselves. Such as, oh, now. But Walker is displaying none of the vision that long-time Governor Tommy Thompson used to show. Thompson, a very conservative and very independent Republican, was vocal in his support for trains in general and high-speed trains in particular. He got it. Walker doesn't, and it will harm Wisconsin's businesses and families in future years as their state falls behind states that are innovating in this technology – and it will increase America's distance behind countries that are leading in high-speed train technology, countries such as China and Germany and France and Japan.

Oh, Newser points out, Walker still wants the money from Washington. He wanted to stimulate other parts of his economy, perhaps, or he wanted to spread it around to projects that made him happy. Either way, he's not making the investment that would have real short- and long-term benefits for his state. The money will instead be redistributed to other states that aren't technophobic.

I think this is just the latest case of short-sighted Americans learning to feel good about giving up the lead in innovation and science and creativity.

Photo from Wikipedia/Creative Commons by Sese Ingolstadt.

University of Wisconsin-Madison's History of Innovation

This is the new commercial from my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Donna Shalala Detained at Airport & Questioned for Two Hours

Donna Shalala, head of the University of Miami and the former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Clinton, was detained for two hours at an Israeli airport upon her attempt to leave the country after a trip there by university presidents.

Shalala was the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Madison when I was a student there in the second half of the 1980s. I always knew she was a trouble-maker. :)

Shalala, of Lebanese descent, took the matter in stride and said she understood the Israelis' security concerns.

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.