April Fool’s editions of college newspapers are a storied tradition on American campuses. They are also a never-ending source of cringe-worthy jokes that end up on the wrong side of the line between satire and offense, genuine outrage and bashful after-the-fact apologies from their creators.
(As evidenced by these “f*ck-cats;” this issue, which included stories on gang-raping dwarf frat brothers and Cinderella as a prostitute; and the joke death of the editor who actually did accidentally report the death of Joe Paterno a while back.)
And Marc Tracy over at Tablet points out this charming incident:
An article called “Jesuits Gone Jewish” in the April Fool’s edition of a Fordham University undergraduate newspaper has prompted an angry reply from the school’s president… calling the satirical piece “directly insulting to Jews, and offensive to every member of the University community,” and asking that the paper apologize.
The Ram, which serves Fordham’s larger college in the Bronx, has not posted the article online, and I’ve been unable to obtain a copy. The Ram’s editors have not replied to a request for comment. According to people who saw it, the joke was that Fordham, a Jesuit university with campuses in Manhattan and the Bronx, was going to turn Jewish.
Tracy goes on to explain that most of the jokes were just that. But then there was the byline: “Herschel Q. Goldberg, staff investment banker.”
Oh, no! Anti-Semitism! Etc.
Anyway. My college newspaper, The Acorn at Drew University, does one of these most years (The Acron, this year’s edition of which, I might add, was pretty good). When I arrived at The Acorn in 2007, the wounds were still fresh from a huge racial incident that erupted in the wake of an ill-advised byline in the joke issue a couple years before. The article was written in Ebonics. Need I explain more to make it clear how offensive it was?
At the time, Drew University was pretty racially homogeneous, anger had been building within the small black minority on campus for a while and the story was this story was the last straw. The apology would have been easier if the story had a real byline. Instead it had a joke byline, no one publicly confessed to having written it, the editor resigned and made himself scarce and the university launched a witch hunt.
In the end, it all led to a fruitful conversation about diversity at Drew, which is now one of the more racially diverse schools of its small, suburban liberal arts variety.
But my point is that April Fool’s issues of college papers just need a bit of accountability. After taking a couple years off, The Acorn eventually brought back its joke issue, but this time with real bylines — and there haven’t been any problems since.
