Word: oakes
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Until last month, residents of Adams House trudged into the dining hall every Friday morning expecting to find a snide, wryly offensive, humorous-but-hurtful "Oak Leaf" on a table next to ID checker Jane's desk. Handwritten by semi-anonymous editors, the comments on the back of the "Oak Leaf" in its classic form variously taunted, sent up, amused and enraged house members. "In/out" lists distinguished the cool from the merely average...
...anymore. Occasionally, the "Oak Leaf" editors went too far. Last spring, one "in" list implied that certain residents--the editors named names--were hiding their true sexual orientations. This fall's editor published nude photographs of himself. The house office fired him, although Loker Professor of English Robert J. Kiely, the house master, says the photos had nothing to do with it. The official notices had become "garbled," Kiely says. Anything the editors choose to do on the back, he says, is fine, "as long as individuals not be attacked or offended." Were there complaints...
...houses that matter. In the days of ordered choice, the Adams House stereotype offended few house residents. Most people chose the house partly for its reputation. But times change. As the nude-photo editor says, "Just the fact that some people got offended at it says something." And the "Oak Leaf" story hints at just how the non-ordered choice system has strained house life...
...Oak Leaves" came out on Friday, October 13. One was the product of a troika of new editors--I was one of them, and we lasted only three weeks. When we got the job, the instructions from the house office went something like this: cleaner, more legible, more inclusive. In: the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and typography. Out: new Madonna and "outing." No names, no offense...
Though my co-editors and I fall somewhere in between the two extremes, strict adherents to the old Adams religion considered our sanitized "Oak Leaf" a sacrilege. Overheard in the dining hall, for example: "It's just not funny if it's not offensive." And: "They've got to name names." One woman at Tommy's told me that I needed help figuring out who the "popular" people were. Of course, I hadn't heard the word "popular" applied to another student since I left North Cumberland Middle School. Another hard-core Adams woman taped her own in/out list, written...