(Updated: New links below video.)
Full Disclosure: It's tough for us to write on this issue in Roxie's World. The story has gone viral and global in the last few days, but for us it is painfully local. It's close to home on a number of different levels and it makes this blog's usual strategies of sophomoric humor and casual snarkiness seem woefully inadequate. We know, like, and admire the QTU administrators who made the decision to cancel a screening of Pirate's II: Stagnetti's Revenge this past weekend after a state senator threatened to cut off funding to the university if the screening went forward (at midnight, on a Saturday, prefaced by a Planned Parenthood presentation on safe sex). We also know, like, and have worked closely with a number of the students involved with the Student Power Party, which mobilized to screen the film within the context of a teach-in on free speech as a protest against State Senator Andrew P. Harris' effort to use the state's budgetary authority as a way to control the content of speech on campus. (It's important to understand that the Student Power Party was not a part of the original plan to screen the film. The group stepped in and made the film a cause only after the university capitulated to the senator's blackmail.)The teach-in took place this evening in the building that houses the department of English. Goose was on the panel of four experts assembled to talk about freedom of speech, and Moose was in the audience (a packed house, by the way). By the time the panel convened, the university administration had issued a statement supporting the event for offering the type of discussion "characteristic of a vibrant educational community." Shortly before the show got underway, Moose was amused and pleased to see most of the president's senior staff enter the lecture hall and take seats in the back. They stayed throughout the entire program, which included the first thirty minutes of Pirates II as well as some pretty forceful criticism of the administration's actions. We're guessing that the short excerpt of the film, which felt rather excruciatingly long to us, was actually the more discomfiting part of the program. We also imagine it involved a good deal more frontal nudity than the president's staff sees in the average cabinet meeting, but that is sheer speculation.
The vid below is from the DC Fox station (and, yes, that's Goose you see in the end, invoking one of her favorite lines from Mr. Bruce Springsteen [via voting-rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer] -- "Nobody wins unless everybody wins"). It's a surprisingly even-handed story that treats the issue fairly and conveys the important point that the students were acting far more responsibly than many of the grown-ups involved in the controversy. The porno-obsessed Senator Harris is still determined to force the university's board of regents to devise a policy on the use of sexually explicit materials on campus -- because, golly, no one's ever thought about that before. Administrators are trying desperately to placate Harris and the herd of gutless wonders in Annapolis who are terrified of appearing to support pornography while at the same time battling to preserve academic freedom and the ideal of the university as a space for rational debate on controversial subjects. Good luck, guys -- and gals.
Bottom line? The students are, as the reporter in the story suggests, the real winners here. They were also, we are proud to say, the real leaders and the best teachers. They appreciated the serious nature of the threat posed by Senator Harris' attempt to use the power of the purse to regulate speech. They knew a bully when they saw it, and they refused to be intimidated. They stood up, they organized, and they fought back -- fairly, eloquently, reasonably, righteously.
And, mercifully, they only subjected their audience to thirty minutes of incredibly cheesy hetero-porn. For which everyone in Roxie's World offers a grateful, thank dog!
A.M. Link Update:
Wa Po has a good video up that makes time for all four of the speakers on last night's panel, including our in-house literary porn promoter, Goose. It's here.
Post Metro columnist Marc Fisher comes down pretty hard on QTU administrators for their initial handling of what Moose has started calling The Pirates of Porn-zance. That's here.
The report in the campus newspaper, The Diamondback, concludes with a pithy quote from Dr. Goose:
"Most of the literature I've taught has pornographic elements," said English professor Martha Nell Smith, citing Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson as authors of works with heavy sexual content. "I don't believe [sexual content] should be censored in my classroom. [The university's] job is to work together to contextualize it."It's here. Yes, we are waiting for Hollywood to call and ask Goose to consult on the making of Pirates III: Emily DICKinson at Sea. Seriously, people. Call us. Those retirement accounts aren't getting any plumper.
As someone who occasionally teaches sexually explicit materials at QTU, I thank and am proud of the students, faculty, and administration involved for standing up and speaking out for academic freedom. Go Goose, go Moose, go Student Party!
ReplyDeleteGreat post Rox.
When a learning environment has been created, any teacher knows that students often end up being the best teachers. I salute the courageous students of QTU who led us. May their faculty gain courage by learning from their example!
ReplyDelete--Goose
I saw this reported in the Denver Post this morning (!) so you're very right that it's gone viral. I watched both videos--good job, Goose!
ReplyDeleteI still vehemently disagree with screening porn for entertainment purposes on a college campus. Would the university permit other factions of the student body to be objectified in this way, the way women are objectified in mainstream crap heteroporn like this movie? Would it be OK to have a minstrel show on campus that was just for fun, because a lot of white students really get off on minstrelsy and it's just good, clean fun? Are there limits to what the university will sanction in the name of entertainment?
I'm glad you provided this upate, with all of the video links. (Man, that movie looked really bad!)
With you on the wrongness of porn as entertainment on campus, Historiann, though perhaps not as vehemently -- because so much goes on on campus nowadays that strikes us as obscene that a dirty, exploitative flick just doesn't seem that appalling. Indeed, it seems in keeping with the trend of making the university a commercial space. Give the people what they want, and if they want food courts and porn, then, by golly, they shall have them.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, this issue quickly got re-framed for us in terms of the deep, broad threat posed by Sen. Harris' efforts to blackmail the university into doing his bidding. The scale of his reaction -- threatening to "deny ANY funding to a higher education institution that allows a public screening" of a XXX-rated film outside the context of a course -- was so in excess of what the situation might reasonably have required that the whole issue of the original plan for the screening ceased to matter to us and to a lot of other people on campus -- particularly the brave, wonderful group of students who arranged last night's program. It was important -- urgent even -- to respond forcefully and collectively to Sen. Harris' dangerous attempt to use the budget process to micromanage campus activities. The students led the charge, and we commend them for it.
As we said over at your place the other day, this ain't no beer riot. Our students are heroes who waged a fight the grown-ups on campus were too nervous to start.