I was hoping someone more courageous than I would do this first.
I won’t pretend to be a leader, because I’m not. I’m just another Cal State Long Beach student trying the best he can to graduate and move on.
But as the year has gone on, I have waited for someone, anyone, to stand up to the Union – no one has. So I guess I’ll have to.
I have only casually met a couple of people who work for the Union, and from my short interactions with them, they seem to be good people.
But much of what the Union publishes on their back page, The Grunion, has been continually despicable and by no definition is it funny or satirical (like the page claims).
I am a big believer in the First Amendment. As long as the Union doesn’t start publishing where our troops are in Iraq, it can put whatever it wants in its paper.
I also believe the press and public have a responsibility to watch over each other and to criticize when it is needed.
The Union did this to perfection last year, as it laid out legitimate reasons to the student body why it should not vote for a referendum, which would have given money to the Daily Forty-Niner. I disagreed, but the Union’s points were valid and to its credit, its campaign was successful.
Now it is time for campus leaders to speak out against the Union, but to me, it appears the opposite is happening.
Last week, Cal State Long Beach President F. King Alexander had an editorial published in the Union. In that same edition, there was a photo of a young woman with her skirt up, exposing her slightly blurred genitalia.
Maybe Alexander didn’t know exactly what was going to be in the paper last week, but the photo wasn’t exactly out of character for the Union.
I talked with Alexander this summer about the role of campus media. During our discussion, he brought up the Daily Illini, the student-run newspaper at the University of Illinois, and how earlier this year the paper published the controversial cartoons that angered many Muslims around the world.
He said it was a mistake to publish the cartoons and that he understood why the editor in chief got fired for the publication of those cartoons.
A few weeks ago, the Union published a computer-edited picture of the Pope flipping off the camera. To many Catholics and others, this was obviously offensive, but instead of speaking out against the doctored photo, Alexander wrote an editorial for the Union a few weeks later.
The most cowardly thing the Union has done this year was its unprovoked attack against a member of the Daily Forty-Niner.
Although the Union would argue that it was meant to be funny or satirical, the paper called one of the nicest people on this campus a whore, and of course, had no evidence to back up this accusation.
In the coming days, the Union will probably say I have thin skin and I should get a sense of humor and that I’m only writing this because the Daily Forty-Niner has a vendetta against the Union.
Well, I have no vendetta (I like most of the paper, except for The Grunion) and I won’t apologize for thinking it is not funny to call someone a whore.
Alexander told me this summer that he reads all of the campus publications. If that is true, and he read an unwarranted attack on an innocent student and did nothing about it, what kind of president do we have?
What he should have done (and still should), was personally go down to the Daily Forty-Niner, tell the person attacked that he is sorry she had to read that garbage by a paper that receives funding from the university, and that he would speak out against such unethical accusations in the future.
Instead, he writes editorials for the Union.
Alexander has told me he is friends with many people at the Union and I understand it can sometimes be difficult to stand up to your friends.
That said, he is the president of this university, and if he can’t stand up to his pizza buddies, who can he stand up to?
I’m standing up. Now it’s your turn.
Patrick Creaven is a senior journalism major and the sports editor for the Daily Forty-Niner.
