Word: jacobowitz
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Campus-wide debate has focused on Part II since last January, when Penn sophomore Eden Jacobowitz was charged with racial harassment for calling black sorority members "water buffalo." Jacobowitz said he made the remarks late at night from a dormitory window because the sorority members were making too much noise...
...also said that some Trustees wanted to criticize the University earlier in the year, but did not want to derail then-President Sheldon Hackney's nomination as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities. They probably figured that Hackney, who became a national media punching bag over the Jacobowitz case, and whose analysis of the DP incident was that "two important University values, diversity and open expression, seem to be in conflict," was doing a fine job of derailing himself...
...most publicized incident occurred last January but, with a little help from conservatives, escalated into national news after Hackney's nomination. Israeli-born freshman Eden Jacobowitz was charged with racial harassment and threatened with probation for yelling, "Shut up, you water buffalo!" at a group of boisterous black women students outside his dorm. He denied any bigotry in the odd epithet, pointing out that it is Hebrew slang for an inconsiderate fool. On May 24, as the campus churned over the controversy, the women dropped the charges, but only after blasting the school for injustice...
Because not only does Hackney have a distorted view of free expression--he also has awful judgment, and little sense of consequences. The Penn president didn't realize that in condemning Jacobowitz to a drawn-out pretrial period, he would incur the ravenous attention of the national media, and the censure of his own campus...
Hackney allowed Robin Read, a Penn administrator at the school's Judicial Inquiry Office, to perpetuate a near witch-hunt--despite the fact that Penn professors and others in the community rushed to Jacobowitz's defense. Read determined herself that Jacobowitz's remark was a racial slur because water buffalo are black animals native to Africa; in fact, they are endemic to South Asia. Regardless, the last time we checked, the rule was "innocent until proven guilty." Then again, this isn't about the Constitution...