Students Challenge Maroon Column as Insulting to Women

One adage of good journalism says: cover the news, don’t be the news. And it looks like the Maroon is having a bad week for news.

University of Chicago students are stamping their feet over Maroon columnist Luke Dumas’s recent op-ed, “A Springtime Strip.” The piece, which was printed on Tuesday and later retracted on the Maroon website, criticized the way students, particularly women, dress when the weather is warm.

According to the Maroon’s retraction, the op-ed was “intended as satirical” but came off as discriminatory against female students. Although most of the offensive material has been removed from the online version, the article has netted more than 50 comments that both criticize and defend Dumas’s piece, some calling for him to be fired as a columnist. (The Maroon does not pay its writers, but editors have the authority to remove students from their staff. FULL DISCLOSURE: I am a former Maroon reporter, and I was asked to leave the paper’s news staff after I accepted an internship with the University’s News Office last quarter.)

One student, Ali Feenstra, took her concerns further, and stamped “This Insults Women” stickers on the front page of hundreds of Tuesday’s Maroon papers after they were distributed around campus. Though Feenstra is a member of the Feminist Majority, a Registered Student Organization that addresses women’s issues, she said she was not acting on behalf of the group.

“The premise of the article is problematic, and its use of words like “skank” and “tramp,” Feenstra said in an interview. “I talked to a lot of people and said we should sticker as many Maroons as we can… It’s to warn people who were picking it up about the kind of materials that was inside. I could have just thrown all the Maroons away that I could find, but being destructive was not my intent at all.”

“Good comedy could deconstruct “skank” and “tramp,” but this is an incredibly shame re-producing article,” Feenstra, a third-year, added. “The [lead story, about civil liberties on campus] talks about free speech and how we have to create a climate for safe and respectful debate to occur. This article is totally antithetical to that. It seals off certain people from being viewed as students… and tells boys you can’t be a real UChicago student unless you’re ashamed about your body.”

Alumna Dana Snitsky agreed with Feenstra’s criticism of Dumas’s satire. “He never hints at the fact that he doesn’t believe these very scary things he’s saying, like that women being present in classrooms makes it very hard for men to concentrate. That was a big argument that people actually have made.”

Supriya Sinhababu, editor-in-chief of the Maroon, wrote a retraction and apology for today’s paper, calling the decision to publish Dumas’s piece “gross editorial oversight.”

“Opinions expressed in Viewpoints inevitably spark controversy from time to time; never offending anyone is not a realistic or intelligent goal for a newspaper. But “A Springtime Strip” was not merely controversial. While it made claims that were intended as satirical, the article read as discriminatory toward female students. The MAROON retracts these remarks, and the article has been amended online at chicagomaroon.com to reflect this action.”

By Thursday, bright green stickers with the phrase “This paper can do better. We'll make that happen.—CM” had begun appearing on copies of the Maroon alongside Feenstra’s stickers. Sinhababu declined to comment on the decision to retract the article, and I could not confirm if the Maroon was responsible for the new stickers. Dumas also declined to comment.