The informal policy of The Student Life has been to avoid responding in writing to allegations launched at it. Letters-to-the-editor have traditionally been the most appropriate venue to discuss issues about content; larger issues involving management, editorial decisions and policies should be addressed to the Print Media Committee. TSL as an institution is answerable to this committee which in turn is overseen by the ASPC.

However, long-standing complaints and misunderstandings about the function and freedom of TSL disregarded these proper courses of actions (partially due to the disappointingly marginal role the PMC has played). Attacks and accusations have been launched at us outside of our own domain, treating us as an institution, in effect have raised our profile and empowered us.

Ironically, one of the direct effects of our new status is that The Student Life, in all probability, will be brought before the Judicial Board. No mediation attempts were made. Facing the threat, whether fulfilled or not, of punishment, I realized my being called into the Dean’s office to be presented with formal charges was an act not in the interest of the communication of ideas–an ideal the College purports to uphold–but of persecution.

It is out of the necessity to personally defend my free-speech rights to the administration and senate and the unconventional nature of the attacks that I have also found a discrepancy in our very definitions of such free-speech rights. I find it a chilling existence at a liberal-arts institution that the very foundational ideology of our country has been implicitly questioned and must be academically defended.

Hence, pardon the breach of journalistic integrity as I break a standard I require my editors to uphold: avoiding in what I like to call metajournalism (writing about ourselves).

Every newspaper has at its core the responsibility of disseminating information with the goal of engaging discourse. Circulation of reactions to the content of our pages is as necessary a tool in the operation of the media as in the production of the content. We strive to be honorable instigators of communication, which is in its own turn an instigator of change.

It has been argued our goal of fairness is a joke, our reporting questionable at best. Such is the fate of a newspaper in a college in which journalism is viewed as a hobby. Regardless of whether or not the articles on the News page can be taken as honest attempts at objective representation of the truth (and I do believe our standards of journalism are based upon such an objective), ideas are still transmitted.

The tradition of our joke issue is the most clear example of the multifaceted production of discourse. Parody and humor relies on obscuring the definitions of acceptability to question the operation of certain modes of discourse. For instance, the front-page article of the last joke issue parodied an issue on which we had seriously reported in varying degrees and ways: the Irvin Landrum, Jr. case. The cops who killed this man were interviewed about the case in many local newspapers; our joke issue parodied the most prominent interview. In the joke article, the officers attempted to defend their pure intentions by asserting they could not be racist because they had friends and lovers who were black.

The appropriation of the offensive concepts and terminology at the core of this article served, primarily, to make you laugh. But those who were amused weren’t laughing at the expense of a minority, they were laughing (and most likely uncomfortably) because of the exaggeration of a very serious racial issue embedded in our speech and actions of those whom we know to be racist. Those who chose to be offended by this article or other articles reacted to their sensitivity to the surface engagement of the seriousness of the racism. Comedy isn’t always easy or pretty: sometimes we laugh out of discomfort at exaggeration and parody of serious issues.

While we used the names of the CPD officers Jacks and Hana, it is a case of something more than an ad-hominem attack on these men; they represent something far more powerful to the students and community than two misled men; we find them offensive as people because of what they stand for. Our joke issue across the board had nothing to do with specific people; it had everything to do with what they stood for.

I feel many members of Pomona College have chosen to be sensitive and easily offended, but the problem is not just a simple matter of not sharing my sense of humor. It is more deeply rooted in the mistrustful operations of our community in which we must constantly defend and define our ideology and actions (as I am doing now) to a skeptical audience. This is not a nurturing environment in which our students, faculty and administration blossom, it is a passive-aggressive, defensive, oversensitive community that is training its members into patterns of disillusionment, distrust, and cynicism. I, for one, am certainly not exempt from this, but am at least attempting to redefine my role within it.

I now invite your criticism.

Sincerely,

Megan A Purn