Printed: 5/23/08
Faculty protests about presidential speeches don’t normally bring drag queens to mind. But I couldn’t help thinking of the Kinsey Sicks when I first heard about the Furman faculty angst over President Bush taking the podium at the university’s graduation ceremonies next week.
The Kinsey Sicks, you remember, are the San Francisco “beauty shop” quartet Furman welcomed to its stage last spring over the objections of a student group opposed to spending student activity fees on “hate speech and sacrilege.”
The cross-dressing male performers are renowned for raunchy political and social satire. Religion and “Dubya,” as they headline him, are favorite targets.
More than 60 faculty members signed a petition charging the protesting students with attacking free speech and encouraging censorship. The Sicks were invited to expose Furman to diverse backgrounds and “competing ideas,” reporters were told. Students earned cultural life credit points for attending.
I wish I’d kept a copy of that petition. I’d love to see how many of those 60 names are among the 200 faculty cosigners of the “We Object” petition protesting Bush’s May 31 commencement speech.
Now, I know those who signed both will say the presidential appearance – the first in the school’s 182-year history – is an entirely different situation.
Bush has “violated American values” and shamed the Furman 200 by waging war in Iraq, “sowing fear” after the 9/11 terrorist attack, obstructing progress on greenhouse gas reductions and other offenses you can read on the Furman Web site if you wish.
The four drag queens, on the other hand, provided Furman’s sheltered student body with instructive insights into Western gay culture and alternative lifestyles. Anyone who would object to that has to be “intellectually challenged,” which is precisely what a Furman English professor called the protesting student group – publicly, from up on stage – the night the Sicks performed.
I remember wondering, at the time, how that kind of name-calling squared with the “freedom of inquiry and expression” Furman and its faculty claim to cherish.
Just as I wonder how the faculty’s protest of Bush’s visit squares with it now.
This is, after all, an opportunity for the faculty, at least, to be exposed to competing ideas. Thoughtful arguments do exist – I’ve read and heard them – rebutting all six complaints the Furman 200 make against Bush in their online petition. I’d love to think at least some of those competing viewpoints were explored in the seven-part lecture series, “Assessing the Bush Presidency,” the faculty decided to offer in advance of Bush’s arrival.
If not, I’d love to think President David Shi would insist the professors invite guest speakers to counter their biases. As he told the Associated Press, “how well a university balances competing ideas is an index to its health.”
And should Shi or the faculty protestors dismiss that suggestion as absurd, then the study body has good reason to question Furman’s adherence to “freedom of inquiry and expression.”
Of course, they already are, if the outraged student response reportedly blanketing the university’s internal Internet system is any indication. “We were shocked,” one professor told The Greenville News. Perhaps it’s possible Furman students are more conservative than their professors, another told the AP in wonderment.
Or could it be Furman students really are interested in hearing a diversity of ideas? That they, like student body president Christina Henderson – a self-avowed “big Democrat” – can disagree with Bush’s policies, but respect the office and appreciate the honor of a presidential visit?
Maybe the offended faculty would benefit from some pertinent observations the Kinsey Sicks made last spring at a post-concert give-and-take with the Furman audience. The quartet said they appreciated the debate over their show and understood it. The central question at such times is “if you don’t like the content of certain speech, what do you do?” one said. “Try to shut it down? Not go? Organize speak-ins? What’s appropriate for you to be exposed to?”
Hmmm. That last question’s a kicker. Can the Furman faculty cope with 40 minutes of commencement well-wishes from a president whose views they dislike and oppose?
Maybe if they earned cultural life credit points for attending.
