Thursday April 21, 2016
Volume 112, Issue 52
northerniowan.com
Opinion 3 Campus Life 4 Sports 6 Games 7 Classifieds 8
INSIDE THIS ISSUE
FILM REVIEW Film critic doesn’t think wildly of “The Jungle Book.” CAMPUS LIFE PAGE 4
SEXUAL ASSAULT Columnist thinks “gimmicky” awareness events are not enough.
By Nick Fisher, Executive Editor and Clinton Olsasky, News Editor
OPINION PAGE 3
SOFTBALL Panthers earn two wins in a doubleheader against Drake. SPORTS PAGE 6
LIBRARY HOURS Turn to page 5 to find out Rod Library’s finals hours. CAMPUS LIFE PAGE 5
Whether it’s a racial slur casually tossed around on campus or a racially charged comment in the classroom, limiting speech is up for debate at UNI. Does a potentially hurtful comment stimulate dialogue or suppress voices? “When this is not a difficult issue for someone, I don’t quite trust them,” said Jim O’Loughlin, associate professor of English. He went on to say that the problem arises when the issue becomes simply “free speech at all costs,” or simply, “no one should ever be offended.” “The fact is that it is complicated,” O’Loughlin said. “There is a tension, and it should be discussed.” For many, the possibility of limiting speech and expression is complex; there are few clear solutions. A CONTEXT OF TENSION Hateful or hurtful speech, as well as microaggressions,
have become a prominent topic of discussion as recently as last semester. Racist speech in particular has received attention at multiple forums that were held in the fall. During that time, students voiced concerns over encounters with what they called ignorant speech, and a perceived pattern of neglect on the part of administrators One forum was for students only, and a following forum was attended by faculty, staff and administration. Over the course of three hours, some 80 students shared personal experiences on campus about when they felt uncomfortable or hurt by racially insensitive comments. “We can’t change what [individual] students think,” sophomore elementary education major, Chloey Arispe, said at the time. “I mean, when I hand out a flyer for the baile and someone goes, ‘Oh, this is just a beaner thing,’ I can’t control what’s coming out of their mouth. But I want [to]; I want to
control what happens when I report it — when I say, ‘Hey, I’m not feeling comfortable.’” The forums came on the heels of a boycott by the university’s multicultural student recruitment arm, Ethnic Student Promoters (ESP), of a university recruitment day that advertised a multicultural emphasis. At the time, ESP in a letter to President Bill Ruud said they did not support “the recruitment of students who could potentially be blindsided by this hostile environment.” Hansen Breitling, senior philosophy major, arranged the ESP boycott and subsequent forums. He said there were many students of color who shared stories at the forums. “Microaggression after microaggression, comment after comment, incident after incident. They all just piled up on one another,” Breitling said. “[There was] so much unaddressed hurt and so many voices that have been
silenced by the lack of proper procedures and protocol [on the part of] the university.” Breitling, director of diversity for the Northern Iowa Student Government (NISG), said he receives biased incident reports outlining situations in which students feel they experienced offensive behavior. He said that he recently received a report of threats made against a male black student and a female white student, who are a couple. They received notes under their door denouncing interracial relations and the following statement: “You’re going to be the next Trayvon Martin.” SPEECH IN THE CLASSROOM For others at UNI, the complexity of limiting speech emerges when discussing what should or should not be said in classroom settings. See FREE SPEECH, page 2
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