Meet Allen Zaruba, the latest sacrificial lamb to get the knife in the neck on the altar of political correctness.
Until last week, Zaruba was an adjunct professor of art at Towson University in Baltimore County. Officials at the state university fired Zaruba for making what some news stories called a “racial remark” in class.
So successful have the PC hellhounds been at keeping rational discourse at bay that some of those news stories couldn’t even tell readers or viewers what the “racial remark” was.
That’s how intimidated television news directors and newspaper editors are. But I got the details from Richard Vatz, a tenured professor at Towson University whom university officials can’t get rid of as easily as they canned Zaruba.
Vatz gave me an account of what Zaruba said to his class. He got it, verbatim, from the Towerlight, the school newspaper.
“Allen Zaruba was teaching his Visual Concepts class on Monday, Feb. 22, and discussing ‘Themes of Contemporary Art,’ a textbook by Jean Robertson and Craig McDaniel, which Zaruba described as ‘very politically incorrect.’
“While reviewing a chapter about identity and the body, Zaruba referred to himself as ‘a nigger on a corporate plantation.’ ”
One of Zaruba’s students complained to her mother, who then whined to university officials, who then went into full-blown PC mode.
Three days after making the remark, Zaruba got a phone call from his department chairman, telling him he was fired and that the dreaded n-word was “never, never, never to be used anywhere on campus,” according to an account of the incident in the March 3 edition of the Baltimore Sun. (The story in that newspaper never mentioned the n-word; it said Zaruba had used “a racially insensitive term.”)
If Zaruba’s account of his discussion with his department chairman is true, then Towson officials have “some ‘splaining to do.” (Oh, I’m sorry. Did I just use a racially or ethnically insensitive phrase?)
Are Towson honchos saying that a communications or writing professor can’t show his class, for example, the infamous “Stop Snitching” DVD?
I’m a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University, and I’ve shown the DVD to my writing class a couple of times. The first thing my students, most of whom are white, notice is that the n-word is used more times in the first 10 minutes of the film than they’ve ever heard it in their lives.
There are no white people in the DVD.
If the n-word is not to be used anywhere on the Towson campus, then English and literature professors can forget about having their students read, write about or discuss “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Author Mark Twain sprinkled that word liberally throughout the novel that Ernest Hemingway hailed as the standard for the American literary tradition.
But America’s literary tradition be damned, the PC crowd is determined to tell us. The nation is now about soothing hurt feelings, not great literature. (I suspect the student who complained about Zaruba’s clearly metaphorical remark not meant to be offensive to anyone is one of those people who specializes in being offended.)
Now before anyone tries to accuse me of condoning what Zaruba said, let me say I’m not. But Zaruba’s punishment should fit the crime. He was referring to himself, not blacks.
“I think Zaruba should not have used the term,” Vatz told me in an e-mail. “That said, to fire him is an unmitigated politically correct overreaction. There was no indication of prior offenses or prejudice of any kind. There was no malicious intent.”
Except, maybe, on the part of the administrators who fired Zaruba.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
