May 01, 2007

Gravity Outrage at Brandeis

There's another big scandal going on back at my alma mater, and this time, for once, we get to check off the box next to Scenario B ("racial slurs published in student publication), rather than Scenario A ("controversial on-campus speaker.") But regardless, I'm sure it'll all lead to Scenario C ("Candlelight vigil.")

Here's the story (from the Justice): The campus humor magazine, Gravity, ran a fake advertisement in its recent issue pushing a fake product called the "BlackJerry," which used a photo of a black man dressed in minstrel-like style. It was an incredibly ill-considered and unfunny bit, which the people responsible for should have known better than to publish.
The most shocking thing about all this? Gravity still exists. When I was at Brandeis I wrote for it a few times, but it never had a staff of more than 7 or 8 people, and the students behind it (the founders, I believe) were all university tech support employees who filled each issue with lots of pro-tech support jokes.

Indeed, it doesn't sound like the staff has gotten much bigger; the Justice story says that while the editor has resigned as a result of the controversy, he will remain on staff, because "the magazine would not have enough people without him."

Posted by Stephen Silver at May 1, 2007 05:01 PM
Comments

During my years there Gravity was an off/on thing.
Occasionally they had some funny stuff.

Though in the new Campus center"media room", when working on the (now defunct?) Free Press (my good friend was the EIC), we found older issues of Gravity, which were more on the humorous side.

Will scenario C occur or will finals take priority?

Posted by: jaws at May 1, 2007 09:00 PM

I am headed up to school from DC this weekend. This should make for an interesting trip.

Posted by: matt at May 2, 2007 09:18 AM

Even with finals coming up in the next week or 2 ... Scenario C will definitely occur.

Posted by: LilB at May 2, 2007 12:06 PM

Gravity is still tiny, but there's another humor newspaper on campus called blowfish. They print once every few weeks (8 pages) and are often pretty funny. Too bad for Gravity editors though...this campus loves witch hunts (I was around for the Justice one).

Posted by: Igor at May 2, 2007 05:41 PM

Hey, I'm the Chief Editor that decided to put the article in. All that stuff has been discussed, and I'm sure you can find all the discussions if you looked. Just updating the situation for your blog:
- The public apology and actions have been posted here: http://union.brandeis.edu/news.php?id=127
- There probably won't be a Situation C, but there have been lots of meetings among all sorts of different people
- The meetings I have attended have been the most mature and professional things I have ever witnessed at Brandeis in my time here. They were amazing, and mediated very well. I think there has been much understanding gained on all sides.
- We're working on several pro-active solutions. It's difficult because we don't want to make any form of censorship, but we also want to have some entity for all media publications to run sensitive articles by before print. It will be a long process, but I'm also coincidentally in charge of the BMC and Media Board (which was revived btw) so I'm in the position to work closely on this.

Just giving you some info. If you'd like to see the issue, I have a PDF link I'll gladly send to you if you email me.

Posted by: Ben at May 2, 2007 09:26 PM
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