People keep sending me this picture of University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann standing next to a student dressed as a suicide bomber at a Halloween party. (She's dressed as Glinda, the Good Witch.) As you know, I hold people to account for the way they pose at festive events. But I am not going to slam Gutmann for this. Her mistake, only really visible in retrospect, was giving a costume party for students. The lesson of this incident is utterly clear: University administrators must never, never, never have a costume party ever again.
Once students are there and in costume, how could she single out one student to snub? If she had had time to think about it -- and now she says she didn't -- she might have considered that the young man would turn out to be a naive foreign student who meant well and was trying to get in the spirit of America's Halloween. Aren't you supposed to dress as someone evil?
By the way, it is exactly this sort of tolerance and unwillingness to offend a foreigner that Sasha Baron Cohen exploits in the big new hit comedy movie "Borat," which is apparently the funniest movie ever made or the greatest comedy of all time or something.
Bonus discussion question: How will "Borat" affect the election?
ADDED: Eugene Volokh defends Gutmann. (Evil characters for Halloween are the norm!) Glenn Reynolds responds. (Bet she wouldn't have posed with someone dressed as a Klansman!) Eugene responds to Glenn. Glenn "remain[s] skeptical." This interchange, which I read after I posted my observations, brings up the question whether university administrators are politically slanted in their tolerance. More important, I think if a student had arrived dressed as a Klansman, many guests at the party would have reacted vociferously. That student would never have reached the point where he could pose with the president. So what is notable in the Gutmann incident is not so much that she posed with the student, but that other party-goers accepted him into the group without protest. That says something about the political climate at the university.
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And she would have been pilloried for doing that.
Ann:
Some things are worth being pilloried for....
Jewish university presidents whose fathers fled Nazi Germany with their families in 1934 must pose for photos with costume terrorists or else the terrorists will have won.
Um, . . ., something like that.
I think a Klansman would make a great costume.
Same with dressing up as Adolph Hitler or Osama Bin Laden.
Geez - people need to get a sense of humour.
By the way, I guess some see no problem because the Penn student is named Saad Saadi and appears to be of Middle Eastern descent. He has comedic license.
How about me? I’m of mostly German descent and I look it. My wife is Jewish of Eastern European descent and she looks it. She has a sister who could easily pass for her twin.
How about I dress up as Joseph Mengele and they can both tag along dressed as my bloody, vivisected victims?
That would make quite a photo op for Dr. Gutmann and the University of Pennsylvania she represents.
No?
Look, faculty are conditioned to be polite and tolerant to students. You don't make a snap judgment to confront a student or to discriminate against a student. Everyone but you can have a picture with me. It takes a lot to push a faculty member into that position.
I saw Borat last night and parts of it were hysterically funny. Other scenes, particularly a short series with some drunk fraternity boys, were disturbing. The scenes at the Pentecostal revival bothered me the most, since the effect was to mock not just the methods of preaching but the participants' faith itself.
If a teenage trick-or-treater (we get plenty, believe me) came to my door in that costume, I'd send him packing. The rules of Halloween costumes, while unwritten, are quite clear: you don't dress up as a real murderer or other horrific figure, even a generic version thereof: so, no Klansmen, no Nazis, and no terrorists. It's OK to be a movie monster because they're fictional.
I'm not as aghast at the administrator as I am at the students who posed as victims. What the hell is wrong with them?
Fen beat me to it.
I suspect that somebody coming as a Danish cartoon would be shunned.
Ann Althouse said...
You don't make a snap judgment to confront a student or to discriminate against a student.
Except if you are a Duke LAX player or a white male applicant or a freshman in PC correctness orientation or a Veteran or an ROTC student.
I basically agree with Eugene Volokh, and have a hard time getting exercised over what anyone wears to a Halloween Party. Dress as a Klansman, a Nazi, Roseanne Barr, or Madonna. I don't really care.
Ann's point about Gutman's dilemmna is well-taken. Gutman's subsequent statement was pretty straight-forward, I thought, as was the statement the student's Israeli roommate felt compelled to post after this gained notoriety.
Much of this minor tempest strikes me as bearing a passing resemblance to the continuing "problem" of "political correctness for thee but not for me."
Oops. Gutmann, not Gutman.
Anyone who thinks I argued for cancelling Halloween generally is not a very good reader. Or is deliberately distorting... Shape up.
What is a pirate but a terrorist of a bygone era?
And what was Billy the Kid if not a mass murderer? Time heals all wounds, and reduces all (or most) evil characters into cartoons. There was, in the not so recent past, a line of children's clothes that bore the name of Billy the Kid.
"I am firmly of the conviction that if Ann ever became president of a university, she would have the good sense to dress as a bad witch, rather than as some sappy good witch."
People who are interested in their own self-expression sacrifice a lot taking a position like that. Taking the job represents a commitment to behave in a certain benevolent way toward students. That's not PC or cowardly. It's a sense of duty.
If someone went dressed like a Klansman, and that person was black, maybe that would be funny. Or, maybe they would just get an underlaugh.
I don't know the lady, but anyone want to bet on the chances that she would have posed with a student who showed up in an USMC uniform and toy gun? My bet is no she would not, and not only that the student would have been called a war-monger and kicked out of the party.
The problem is not that university presidents are inept in dealing with loutish behavior at costume parties...
...but that they fail to show true leadership when students take over public events or act like drunken barbarians.
There's a general impression that prez's have turned into CEO's who are unwilling to offend any customer/potential customer, but this offense seems to be pretty low on the scale.
The problem isn't that people dress like suicide bombers or klansmen or Nazis; the problem is that they think like them. Prohibiting the costume -- driving all the symptoms underground, like campus speech codes do -- just makes the problem worse.
The Ivy League students I deal with tend to have a triple/quadruple sense of sarcasm. Often they yell out racist/sexist things and its hard to figure out if they're mocking the racists/sexists or mocking the politically corect crowd.
For all we know this student was mocking suicide bombers.
I bet it would have been a hoot watching him drinking, flirting and dancing while he had those fake explosives on him. It serves as a foil to the real uptight anal suicide bombers.
"As to the Muslim student, Saad Saadi, WTF were you thinking!!! Would German exchange students in Nazi gear been PC?"
Is the student Muslim? Is he a foreigner? How do you know he isn't a secular student born and raised in Long Island? I went to a SUNY school and all my Muslim friends were secular surburban kids.
I suppose its the immediacy that is so offputting...? If someone were to dress as Jack the Ripper and pose in pictures pretend-strangling a grinning party goer, who would complain? I can't deny that the idea of posing as hostages with a pretend suicide bomber DOES bother me.
I guess its rather like Bill Maher's tasteless Steve Irwin with embedded stingray barb costume was disgusting while Roseanne Barr's (10 points for the tie in!) Marie Antoinette with head in hand costume was brilliant.
i dont know why you immediately assume the kid is a "naive foreign exchange student"
i think he is actually the opposite, i'm pretty sure he's a born and raised american.
he wasn't naive, he made an ill-advised decision to wear a scandalous outfit to a party with administrators to get a rise out of them. when you're in college you tend to make a lot of bad decisions like this.
what i find funny is that even the smallest of non-events are raised to the level of national news/discussion.
i wish university administrators could have some balls and say, "sure, his costume was inappropriate. so what, he's a college student. next question."
btw, i took ann's call to cancel costume parties as sarcasm.
"i dont know why you immediately assume the kid is a "naive foreign exchange student""
I didn't. I guessed at the mental state of the University president. I think she had to worry that she'd look bad if he turned out to be sympathetic.
And I'm not kidding that this story teaches university administrators to stay out of this predicament in the future. Note how the story teaches any opponents of the administration to show up at future costume parties wearing something that would prove embarrassing in a photograph. Video for YouTube would be even better. It would be naive not to realize that now.
So what is notable in the Gutmann incident is not so much that she posed with the student, but that other party-goers accepted him into the group without protest. That says something about the political climate at the university.
I agree. That other students participated in mock abductions and executions is what shocks. It could be amusing. At first. But in an elite academic environment, I would imagine such joking is less a sign of tolerance and more a sign of indifference to a certain kind of politics. If the kid wore the costume in a "meta"-we-are-publishing-these-cartoons-even-if-you-burn-down-all-our-publishing-houses-and-embassies way, that would be one thing. But I suspect the "humor" arises from the inability to take seriously jihadist terrorism. To many of the students there, jihadist terrorism is a joke. American concern with jihadist terrorism is an overreaction serving the politics of the right.
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