The 1999 Sheldon
The coveted annual prize that goes to a wimpy college president
Exhausted staffers for this column have finished wading through dozens of nominees for the third annual Sheldon Award. Named for Sheldon Hackney, who scaled the heights of Sheldonism as president of the University of Pennsylvania, this coveted prize is given each year to a craven college president who looks the other way while campus newspapers are stolen.
Like binge drinking and complaining about dead white males, newspaper theft is a major campus activity these days. Sensitivity-minded campus groups are strongly inclined to destroy newspapers that contain articles they don't like. College presidents know that they are supposed to overlook these thefts, so they do. Remember: Spinelessness alone will never win a Sheldon. Competition is too keen. Judges look for double standards and mumbled "Hackneyisms," such as "You can't steal free newspapers," "Removing offensive papers is a First Amendment right," or "Sensitivity is the issue, not a few missing papers."
Two such Hackneyisms were uttered after a theft at the Ohio State Lantern, which had run a comic strip poking fun at the women's studies department. A Lantern editor reported that one of the thieves said it was "part of her First Amendment rights" to steal the papers. A noisy crowd took their protest to the front porch of cartoonist Bob Hewitt and attempted to burn a bra, but thanks to consumer protection regulations, the flame-retarding brassiere failed to ignite. Nobody was punished or reprimanded for the thefts, though the cartoonist was fired. Staking out a strong Ohio State claim for the Sheldon, a public-relations woman said, "The big thing was the cartoon, not the missing papers."
Burn, baby, burn. The season's first threat to burn lots of papers was made at the University of Central Arkansas. A residential director threw away many copies of the Echo to protest a column he disagreed with. "I won't forbid my residents from having it in the building," he said, "but I won't have it in my lobby." He called for a vote on whether the Echo should be allowed in his lobby. A flier invited students to attend a bonfire "to watch the Echo burn." No word yet from the college president.
Georgetown University is back in the hunt for the Sheldon. Last year the two main student papers, the Hoya and the Voice, reacted badly when thieves made off with 3,000 copies of a conservative magazine, the Georgetown Academy. The Voice ignored the theft; the Hoya applauded it. Georgetown's president, Leo O'Donovan, reacted limply and won the 1998 Sheldon. This year 5,000 copies of the Voice were stolen, and everyone reacted limply once again. Why not? It worked last year.
Judges were shocked when one president, Jamienne Studley of Skidmore, took herself out of Sheldon competition by actually punishing a perpetrator, who happened to be her own admissions director. After admitting the theft of 1,200 copies of the school paper, the admissions officer was reprimanded, assessed $500 for the cost of the papers, and told to study up on academic freedom. Luckily for the vibrancy of the Sheldon competition, such presidential behavior is rare, in fact almost unknown.
At Yeshiva University in New York City, the culprit was believed to be another high official or perhaps the entire administration. Copies of the feisty campus paper, the Commentator, have been disappearing whenever outsiders visit the campus. The last straw was removal of an issue with an article reporting that Yeshiva employees were taking the papers. Last month, without admitting any university responsibility, a dean sent the editors a check for $1,850 along with a letter opposing removal of the papers. Sadly, Yeshiva has been declared ineligible for a Sheldon--administrators are supposed to look the other way, not conduct the thefts themselves.
The last finalist is Donald Gerth, president of California State University-Sacramento, where 3,000 copies of the State Hornet were stolen in October. But first, a quiz: Suppose a campus has bomb threats, four outbreaks of violence at the football game (one of them fatal), and a picture in the campus paper of a dangerous chokehold being applied to a man who resisted arrest at the game. Which of these events would cause the campus to erupt? Answer: none of the above. A major eruption came because the man shown resisting arrest was a Latino, thus reflecting badly on all Hispanic-Americans. Because of this editorial insensitivity, Latino students stole the papers, used them to barricade the editorial offices, then presented a list of nonnegotiable demands, including a permanent ban on publication of any material depicting minorities in a negative light.
During this uproar, President Gerth said nothing. When the State Hornet got a bomb threat and death threats, he did nothing. But a month later, when the ethnic studies department received a bomb threat, he whirled into action. He called out campus police and contacted the FBI. He sent out a stern campuswide letter condemning the threat and demanding tolerance. Citing the obvious double standard, a faculty member said, "I think we've got your man for the Sheldon." Yes, you do. Congratulations, Donald Gerth, Sheldon laureate 1999.
This story appears in the January 3, 2000 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.