Last week, a furor erupted on the UVA Grounds over a comic strip published in the Cavalier Daily entitled “Ethiopian Food Fight.” The artist, a fourth-year undergraduate student, was no stranger to controversy: the Cavalier Daily had previously published a cartoon depicting the Virgin Mary as having a sexually transmitted disease and another of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings in a sado-masochistic scene. The latest oeuvre of the cartoonist sparked outrage across the community. The item depicted Africans in a way that struck many as blatantly offensive for its racial insensitivity. There followed a mass protest, suspension and then firing of the cartoonist, and an apology from the editors of the Cavalier Daily.
What defines a community is alignment around core values. Challenges to those values are crystallizing moments: the community must either dissolve or come together in response. The University community responded. The cartoonist’s illustration of ignorance and insensitivity has no place at UVA. It contradicts the standards of leadership and the norms of best practice to which the University aspires and for which it should be known. Such lapses in judgment are the antithesis of the values we must hold dear if we are to be respected participants in the global community.
As a University community, we should value a pluralistic society because of the richness of understanding it offers. Our business is to pursue truth–and so often we find it in conversation with people different from ourselves. The University of Virginia must stand for tolerance and for open, respectful debate. We must stand for the dignity of the individual. We must care about the treatment of every individual because a chain is only as strong as its most vulnerable link.
The editorial judgment of the Cavalier Daily was profoundly disappointing. Though the editors seemed to have learned and changed course, we at Darden strongly encourage an ongoing dialogue, which promotes understanding as to why such illustrations have no place in our community.
Darden stands with its colleagues from around the University in renewing our shared commitment to create a diverse and inclusive community in which all may live and work to their fullest potential.
Posted by Robert Bruner at 09/16/2007 01:30:21 PM