Me in the WSJ on the "resignation" of a trustee of Gettysburg College due to a yearbook pic of him at a Hogan's Heroes costume party at the college in 1980.
What it's like on campus: everyone is surreptitiously watching everyone else, hoping to catch each other in a lapse (while also rummaging all the yearbooks, old school newspapers, instagram feeds &c, looking for victims). When we fancy we have something, we turn on one another, snarling, and try to mobilize the college to extrude or permanently discredit one another. Students turn on students. Students turn on faculty. Faculty turn on students. Administrators turn on students. Faculty turn on faculty. [I will link or describe all these sorts of cases if you like.] And, unbelievably, presidents turn on trustees, driven to that point by the general snarling. Also the things they're catching people doing are, in many cases, insanely trivial, and the theory underlying the whole thing about the relation of representation to reality is baldly ridiculous. Look, obviously all of this is incompatible with these institutions' stated purposes. The average college campus right now is just precisely the opposite of a community.
Believe it or not, I take myself to be telling people to come together, and back to the basic institutional mission.
I like to imagine what the discussion has been like about the situation at the development office at Gettysburg, and comparable institutions, as they contemplate handing money back for no reason at all. Ringring: "I'd like to endow your new building, but if I do you'll mobilize the whole campus to rummage through every snapshot of me ever taken, pitching me eventually into the dunk tank/septic system. Going with Doctors Without Borders this year."
'Hogan's Heroes' ridiculed the Nazis. To do that, it needed to depict Nazis. I'm thinking that #gettysburgcollege might well have a literature professor or two who could run the students and admin through the rudiments of textual interpretation. Punching Nazis was sort of popular a couple of years ago. And since 1930, ridiculing and parodying them has been a central dimension of attack. Now, evidently, ridiculing and parodying Nazis is verboten, as it were: it's anti-semitic. The approach is puzzling.
Let's say that many people at GC are having thoughts along these lines, and not only in Development. Can they express them? If you were an untenured prof, would you express your reservations? (Unfortunately, timidity does not wear off with tenure.) What would happen to you as a student if you objected to this whole approach strongly? What would people call you? Now, you are creating an atmosphere where everyone pretends to agree. Look around you. I say you don't know whether any of these people agree with you or not, no matter how vociferously they may be nodding along. Meanwhile, the only means you have to address things like this is to provide 'opportunities' for frank, honest, open dialogue. Are you sure you're not just trying to lure people into a misstatement or inadvertent self-revelation, so you can gasp? I might not be attending.
['The sign of the Double Cross']
I'm a bit concerned that y'all aren't fighting oppression or injustice at all, just pictures of it. Quite the waste of energy.
The offending image is very much in the same genre as those above, I feel. Many people, thinking about this, are comparing this case to Northam and blackface (also a yearbook). Or, I imagine that's what people at Gettysburg were thinking. The images function very much the same way, which is why they are completely different politically. That is, they ridicule the people they purport to depict. Right. But blackface ridicules black people by dressing up in a parody of black people, which is bad. The G-burg image ridicules the Nazis by dressing up in a parody of Nazis, which is good. Like, why am I having to point this out?
