Oh No You Di'n't!

When I attended a college not too far south of Wisconsin, I learned the phrase "cheeseheads," which was applied to the state's residents as descriptive of one of their state's best-known products and the fact that their intelligence was not significantly greater than that product. Some folk at the University of Wisconsin-Stout have gone above and beyond in bearing that out -- although to be fair I do not know if the university officials in the story are actually from Wisconsin. My apologies to actual cheeseheads if they are not.

A theater professor placed a poster of  Nathan Fillion's Firefly character, Captain Malcolm Reynolds, on his office door, complete with Reynolds' explanation of why Dr. Simon Tam need not fear being killed in his sleep: "If I ever kill you, you'll be awake, you'll be facing me, and you'll be armed." With these words, Reynolds explains that while he is technically an outlaw, he has a code of honor that he won't break, and that code doesn't include murdering people in their sleep.

Well, some Stout cheesehead didn't like the poster and rather than act like a grownup and talk to the professor about it, complained. Thus the university police chief e-mailed the professor saying that the poster -- his property, mind you -- had been removed. Again, neither the police chief nor anyone else asked the professor to take the poster down or noted that the reference to killing might be problematic or took any action anything like what adult human beings need to do in order to make their societies function.

The professor, somewhat energized by this treatment, responded with some energetic e-mails and another poster, warning people to beware of fascism. This poster too was removed and the professor was told he would have to meet with university officials, as the police chief and the Stout "threat assessment team" wanted to discuss concerns the posters had raised. The professor got in touch with a legal advocacy group called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which likes to remind public universities that they are, like it or not, subject to the same laws as everybody else in the country and don't get to suspend things like the Bill of Rights just because they think they're smarter than everyone else.

Now, the Stout police chief showed herself to be very silly by having the poster removed at all. The quote doesn't advocate violence; it spells out Mal's choice against violence except as absolutely necessary, such as facing a threat to his own life. But even if it was a problem, why in the world could she not simply speak to the professor about it? Why have it removed when he's not around and then hide behind an e-mail? Is it because she knew she would look silly and figured she might be able to hide from that by avoiding face-to-face meetings?

So far, Stout officials are standing behind their decision. This will probably not end well for them, because the people at FIRE have spent years feasting on bureaucrats whose positions of authority in the tiny fiefdom's of academia's backwaters have given them delusions of grandeur (as well as adequacy). If they continue on this path it probably won't end well for Wisconsin taxpayers, either, because FIRE loooooves to take these cases to court and almost always wins, and the taxpayers will wind up paying for all the costs the university racks up defending the indefensible.

ETA: I don't know why, but this post never did show up yesterday even though the time stamp tells me it did. Go figure. The delay lets me add another quick reference to the story, found at Big Hollywood, which is co-written by the Hero of Canton himself, Jayne Cobb (aka Adam Baldwin).