The President and the Buffalo

The University of Pennsylvania has gone to the dogs. Or, perhaps more properly, the water buffalo.

One midnight four months ago, Eden Jacobowitz, a first-year, was attempting to study in his dorm when he was interrupted by a group of Black sorority members screaming and stomping their way through an initiation ceremony outside his room.

The annoyed Jacobowitz implored, "Shut up, you water buffalo!" Other students yelled racial epithets at the young sorority sisters, but Jacobowitz was the only one who owned up to having said anything when University police stormed the building looking for racists and grabbing at straws.

Invoking the school's speech codes, the sorority members filed a charge of racial harassment against Jacobowitz, reasoning that "water buffalo" is a racial slur. Up until this point, both sides' idiotic behavior--the shouting and the charging of Jacobowitz--could be dismissed as overzealous love of study and complaint, respectively.

Enter Robin Read, the campus judicial inquiry officer, who is long on authority but woefully short on brains. After her Orwellian questions about the possibility of Jacobowitz having "racist thoughts" got her nowhere, Ms. Read drew on her pitifully deficient knowledge of the fauna of the world.

Her subscription to Ranger Rick having long since lapsed, Read reasoned that the use of the term "water buffalo" was meant as a racial slur since a water buffalo is "a large black animal that lives in Africa." Pity for Read that water buffalo are found in Asia and not Africa.

Maybe Read had a premonition that the geographic distribution of water buffalo would not back up her wildly inaccurate flailings, for she offered Jacobowitz a deal: He could conduct a racial sensitivity session or he could face trial and clear his name--or get himself expelled.

By choosing a trial, Jacobowitz, an eighteen-year-old first-yeardisplayed a degree of courage that was not to be found in the president's office of one of the nation's most prestigious universities.

Fortunately, those charged with the pursuit of truth in Philiadelphia came to Jacobowitz's aid. Dr. Elijah Anderson, a sociology professor and expert on Black culture submitted that he had never heard "water buffalo" used as a slur. The director of Penn's Afro-American studies program also agreed that "water buffalo" was not a epithet he was familiar with.

Professor Dan Ben-Amos, an expert in Black culture and a linguistics expert, corroborated Jacobowitz's contention that "water buffalo" was a derivation of the Yiddish word "behema" which means "water oxen" and is slang for a "stupid person" or "fool."

Yet as the evidence refuting this charge mounted, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Sheldon "Behema" Hackney, remained strangely unmoved. He said, "I thought it was much better to let the process work."

Theoretically, this idea might have some merit, but when the process is conducted by people like Read, who blur together the entire Eastern hemisphere, and who allow a 18-year-old kid to be dragged through a public trial for the sake of placating Greeks without gripes, Hackney should have intervened on the side of truth and justice with all possible speed.

The president of Penn knowingly let a student who was falsely accused face possible expulsion because of his staff's incompetence and his own laziness. His cowardly refusal to end a Kafkaesque trial of lies, innuendo and gross stupidity shames not only himself but the University of Pennslyvania. Brickbats to president Clinton for nominating this gutless man to head the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Penn should consider itself lucky to unload Hackney, and his spinelessness and reverence for a illogical bureaucracy will ensure a long tenure at his new post. The arts in America, instead of life at Penn, will suffer if he is confirmed.

The tragedy here is that the environment of free speech and expression has been poisoned at one of America's ostensibly finest instutions and those in charge, by their inaction and cowardice, aided in the process. Those concerned with freedom of thought and expression should join water buffalo everywhere in taking offense.