The College Fix

College Fix student contributor Derek Draplin’s spat with a University of Michigan instructor over a cartoon that ran in the Michigan Review, which Draplin edits, is drawing larger attention from student press groups.

As noted already by The College Fix, that instructor not only tweeted at Draplin to “remove” an illustration depicting a guillotine-beheaded football coach but included the campus police in his tweet.

The College Fix‘s Jennifer Kabbany wrote:

The picture was certainly thought-provoking, because that’s what it was supposed to be. It’s not an act of violence or aggression, nor does it even come close to the threat of violence. To imply that it does is chilling. To alert the campus police? Overkill.

The Student Press Law Center followed up Friday with a story about the incident:

Draplin said the student protest [against the hapless coach] had a “mob mentality,” which made him think of the French Revolution. The illustration was meant to be political satire “mocking the students” because they were “in a sense calling for his head and calling for his job,” he said. …

Draplin said he was surprised [instructor Kai] Petainen included the campus police in the tweet. Petainen said he included them in the tweet because, as a university employee, he is supposed to notify the police if he sees “questionable things” around campus.

The instructor will have one more opportunity to be offended next week, because the illustration is running again in the print edition of The Review, SPLC said.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education also weighed in, quoting extensively from Kabbany’s article:

And of course, it would be an utter waste of time and resources for campus police to look into every article or image in the newspaper that someone finds “disturbing” by some allegedly “common-sense” standard. More to the point, it’s a dangerous attack on newspapers’ First Amendment rights that can only chill their expression.

And we at FIRE know we’re not the only free speech advocates tired of hearing sentences that start with “I’m against censorship, but…” They rarely end well. Petainen’s assertion that he is against censorship but a harmless Photoshopped drawing should be removed from an independent university newspaper’s website is indefensible.

For the full SPLC story, click here. For FIRE’s analysis, click here.

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