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.

Marooned

I almost changed my mind on Friday, when a student asked me "who are you writing this for?" while I was researching an article on a student-run lecture series. I didn't know how to explain that I had left the Maroon, but was still writing articles at will. For who then, this blog? It seems like a compulsion, not a job, when I'm asking people questions with no strong idea where to publish them.

Oh yeah, to reiterate; I quit the Maroon last week.

I've wanted to be a journalist since high school, when a friend of mine and not- so-secret crush helped found a quarterly opinion journal. After that I interned with a local weekly newspaper, the La Jolla Village News. I liked feeling immersed in the News, the What Was Going On in my community, city, neighbors' front yards—The short version of the story is the same for every writer, I think: A few bylines, and I was hooked. The best part was going jogging on Thursday morning in my beach-side community and scanning the freshly rolled papers in the driveways for my name peaking out above a rubber band.

This is to say, I have much less sentimental value for the Maroon than I might otherwise. They didn't teach me how to self-edit, how to beg someone over the phone for Just a minute! or how to habitually write ledes on my way to classes. But the Maroon is the first place I wrote alongside and was edit entirely by my peers, and I disagreed with a lot of their editorial decisions. There are good journalists at the Maroon, this I'm sure of, but if there's a place on campus to do good journalism, this probably isn't it.

It would be in poor form to re-hash the problems I've had with my editors, especially when I have so much to be proud of: Like this feature story about dormcest on campus, and a story on the Kuvia Winter Festival that meant waking up at 4:30 in the morning last year. With so many deadlines I learned how quickly one could change the content and character of a piece by removing a quote or re-arranging a lede, and get lots of people very angry.

I have some new projects to get to work on; I won a grant to report on the 2016 Olympic Bid and its impact on the South Side, and I have another issue of the Midway Review coming out by the end of the month. You can also look for more of my writing on the Universitys' homepages, through my freelance work with the News Office.

But for now, as this blog post suggests, I'm all alone—unprotected by the Mastheads that I will continue to insist are essential to journalism even in this digital world.

Hopefully the Maroonatics will keep doing their homework, because I'll be reading—and writing, too.

My name is Rachel, I'm 19, and...

Who am I again? I've spent the past couple of weeks wrestling with various forms of the verb to be, (Wittgenstein would not be happy with me!) and shame on me for failing to even find the time to write a blog post. I may not have written all of it down, but I've been on a series of pretty involved searches for a summer job, an apartment to sublet with the boyfriend (found!), and places on campus and in Chicago that are thinking of sexuality and activism in the same ways as me. UChicago's student feminism group, Feminist Majority, has already pleasantly surprised me with some events on porn and communication that are all about getting people talking outside of their preconceptions.

In lieu of writing ten blog entries, here are four things I did this week that I promise to update readers on in the future:

1) Applied for a University of Chicago Summer Action Grant to spend the warmer months researching and reporting on the Chicago 2016 Olympic bid and its impact on South Siders. Wish me luck—it's $1,500.

2) Interviewed for a summer job at Backstory Cafe. They needed to hire someone right away, so that didn't work out for me (you know, with the whole four classes and one part-time job thing going on) But this place is cool! By far my favorite coffee hang-out on the South Side, Backstory follows a sustainable, community ethos that translate into tasty soups and sandwiches made from scratch, and interesting program ideas like movies and board-game nights.

3) Baked a delicious set of pumpkin empanadas. Yum. Recipes to come.

4) Scheduled the first University Community Service Center Book Club and potluck for Friday, May 1st from 7 to 9 pm. We're reading Gang Leader for Day, and all are welcome.

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And with that out of the way, Here is a pair of articles from the week that do everything for me but answer the question I posed above (Come on, neither of us really thought it was that easy):

*This just in! David Carr says Journalism is Dying! Really, we mean it this time. The NYTimes Media Equation columnist evaluates the state of the newsroom, again.


*In, "Tempest in a Compost Pile," Hyde Park Progress blogger "chicago pop" de-mystifies the ridiculousness behind the University's decision to close the 61st St. Community Garden. He tells it better than I could.

And lastly, I hope everyone here in Chicago enjoys the 70 degree weather.

A couple topics of interest...

A big thank you to Dan Savage of Seattle's The Stranger for writing about the horrible death of New York journalist George Weber in last week's column. It's something I was afraid to write about the day I saw it up on nydailynews.com on my parents' computer. The alleged details of the meeting (between Weber and a 16 year-old, self-described "Satan-lover"), which you can read about at the NY Post, the NY Daily News, Fox, etc. but I have no desire to link to because I think they're badly reported, cast a severely negative light on internet dating and alternative sexualities in general, and they shouldn't.

I don't know how to argue this right now, but I know they shouldn't. It only disturbs me to think that there can so much going right in the world at the same time so many things are going horribly wrong. But I'd like to think that working to banish fear and ignorance a la Dan Savage is one way to go about creating a society where sex like that doesn't happen (note, I did not say where internet hook-ups and kinky sex don't happen), and fortunately he's not the only person out there trying to accomplish this.

Thank goodness David Brooks is not my editor...

The Maroon printed a trippy re-imagination of the University of Chicago undergraduate's trajectory yesterday in Grey City, the Maroon editors' pet "magazine" project. Books, gargoyles and diplomas taunt the wayward columnist as he describes his meanderings through a "pseudo-prestigious university"—UChicago, of course. Oh, and the columnist himself? Yeah, it was David Brooks, circa 1982.

The bloggers of Gawker think Brooks was on a lot of acid back then. But I'm more convinced this column was the product of one too many all-nighters in the Reg—he's just lucky he printed this piece in the Maroon instead of handing it to his Hum professor.