The controversy over the Harvard Game T-Shirt That Wasn’t is turning out to have more legs than sleeves.
Back in November, the Freshman Class Council designed a T-shirt that quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald calling Harvard men “sissies.” As reported then by the Yale Daily News, a lesbian & gay student group objected, saying the word “sissy” is a homophobic slur. Yale College dean Mary Miller raised concerns and, through an intermediary, asked — or told, depending on whose account you read — the freshman council to ditch the design. Which it did.
Enter the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, with a December 18 letter asking Miller and Yale president Rick Levin for assurances that “Yale will no longer seek to censor ‘the unmentionable.’”
Nearly a month later, Levin has responded:
Dean Miller and I stand by the University’s commitment to free expression, and we would not want to give any students the impression that the content of their speech is subject to censorship.
Levin maintains that Miller merely suggested that the freshman council reconsider. But, he acknowledges, “it would have been possible, and not unreasonable, for some members of the Council to interpret Dean Miller’s counsel as a directive. This we regret.”
In a blog post about Levin’s letter, FIRE’s Adam Kissel points out that Miller seemed to give a different account of the decision-making process in a statement to the Yale Daily.
“Miller defended the administration’s actions,” the News reported, “saying the fact that the Yale College Dean’s Office sponsors the FCC makes a difference.”
“Yale College did not endorse this T-shirt by facilitating its printing by an official organization within the college,” Miller said. “Nevertheless, the T-shirt certainly could have been made by another group and disseminated freely for the football game.”
Kissel concludes: “We have serious questions about the depth of Yale’s real commitment to free speech, but we are gratified that President Levin seems to understand that Yale’s handling of the T-shirt issue was less than ideal.”
You could say that much of the culture surrounding The Game — crude slogans, drunken debauchery, jokes about ugly women — is “less than ideal.” But that would be humorless, wouldn’t it?
