Daniel J. Flynn

For several feminist professors at all-male Wabash College, calls for tolerance and diversity only seem to extend to ideas with which they agree. Students are charging professors with hypocrisy and lacking a sense of humor for banning “offensive” clothing from their classrooms. 

At issue is a T-shirt aimed at Wabash’s interstate rival in football, DePauw University. “At Wabash we don’t need women,” the shirt reads on the front. On the back it says, “We’re doing just fine with DePauw’s.” Located in Crawfordsville, Indiana, Wabash is one of three remaining single-sex colleges for men. 

Junior Carl Short wore the shirt to political science class and was the target of an angry outburst by his professor “You’re wearing that shirt,” Professor Melissa Butler announced. “You can either turn it inside-out, change it and come back, or you can leave class.” Short, taken aback by the political science teacher’s anger with his clothing, chose to leave class. Later, Butler attested, “That shirt is a threat to my right to be in the classroom.” She maintained that seeing the T-shirt “creates a difficult environment to work in.” Butler did not return calls soliciting comment from Campus Report. 

A similar incident occurred in Professor Leslie Day’s course last semester. Day, who is chairman of the classics department, spotted a student wearing the shirt in her classroom and ordered him to go to the bathroom and turn it inside out. The student did just that and returned to class. 

When confronted with the fact that the shirt is intended to be a humorous expression of school spirit and not a statement against female faculty members, Day responded, “I know what it is, but all I ever see is the front side. That shirt singled me out as a member of a group to which I and other female professors belong. Students should be more gentlemanly and sensitive to that fact.” Day claims that free expression “has nothing to do with this particular incident.” 

A failed early-1990s faculty drive to institute coeducation has embittered many professors to such an extent that any positive reference of Wabash’s single-sex tradition can spark anger. History Professor Stephen Morillo went so far as to use class time to condemn students who wore the shirts as “sexist assholes.” Other professors who had shouted “free speech” when defending the production of a homosexual play on campus or the showing of a movie depicting genital mutilation and pedophilia, have remained mum on this issue or have come to the defense of those banning the shirt. 

Many students are alarmed at what they perceive to be the administration’s indifference or even tacit approval of the feminist professors policing of their students’ clothing. Matthew Rarey, editor of the traditionalist Wabash Commentary, along with members of the student senate, has launched a campus-wide petition drive protesting the overreaction of many faculty members to the T-shirt. They demand that Wabash President Andrew Ford reaffirm the right of undergraduates to express themselves and that professors cease from attempting to regulate the apparel of students. More then 250 signatures have been collected thus far out of a campus population of about 850 students.  Rarey maintains that the large number of students who support the petition will force the administration to act. “We’re pushing them in a corner,” he maintained. “They have to make a statement.” 

President Andrew Ford declared in 1995 that “The right of a student to express himself is an absolute one.” Despite this, Ford has issued no comment over the current controversy and the University’s spokesman has criticized students for making an issue out of the incidents, while characterizing Butler’s actions as merely imparting a good lesson to her pupils. The University’s public relations officer, James Amidon, called the shirt-banning incident “much ado about nothing.” Butler’s expulsion of the student from the classroom, Amidon claimed, was “a teachable moment.”

“The shirt is intended to be a joke,” explained Rarey, “but even if the student wore the shirt as a statement against having female professors, that should make no difference. If we’re afraid to allow freewheeling expression at college, where else in America would it be safe for such speech.”