I have to say I largely agree with Tyler Graf’s comments on vandalism and discourse (“Box-dumpers show intellectual cowardice,” ODE, April 7). Since I have arrived on campus, I have personally experienced acts of intolerance and vandalism.
I’ve watched the unfolding of campus incidents like the Johnson Hall sit-in over hate mail in an online discussion group and the subsequent racist diatribe espoused in the winter 1999 issue of Oregon Quarterly alumni newsletter.
The free Sociology Department Film Series fliers are consistently removed. I have also been targeted personally through a not-so-veiled death threat by e-mail and the constant vandalizing of the bulletin boards outside my office. Just in the last week, I have had to update the bulletin board three times.
Unlike the case of the Commentator, in which the culprits left no trace, these “intellectual cowards” have left calling cards. In one instance, the perpetrator(s) wrote “Go Republicans” over the picture of an elderly man carrying a dead child. I realize these acts are committed by a small minority of extremely reactionary people who fit the profile of the ignorant bigots described in the film “Racism 101.” (In the film, a group of student newspaper writers targeted and harassed an African-American professor.)
Censorship is a means to attempt to silence other views, and it varies in its effectiveness depending on the size, political power and financial resources of the censor. In this case, censorship works momentarily, and I have even began taking pictures of the bulletin board to facilitate replacing the lost and defaced fliers. What the perpetrators may not know is that my friends and I are quite humored by the silly quotes left behind, and enjoy devising humorous responses to these ineffective acts by “intellectual cowards.”