Letter erred on the facts, hurt reputation
Bill LaFleur and Walter Pruchnik
freshmen
This letter is in response to a letter that was printed in Tuesday's edition of The Observer entitled, "Political correctness taken too far." We agree that political correctness is sometimes taken too far on our campus.
However, the main issue of the letter is what the author perceived as the wrongful confiscation of the T-shirts that were purchased for this year's O'Neill Mardi Gras celebration. Although we are not going to address the political correctness or incorrectness of the original submitted design, we would like to point out that not all of the men of O'Neill Hall support the content of the shirt.
We do, however, wish to address the unjustified degradation of our rector and the Office of Student Affairs. To be kind to the writer of the letter we are addressing, we are assuming that he wrote his letter without complete knowledge of the facts of the situation. Here are some other facts that should be mentioned.
The first T-shirt design was the one described by the author of the earlier printed letter ("The T-shirts in question had the slogan, `Show Us Something!' on the back, with a picture of a large beaver wearing a Mardi Gras hat and beads."). Contrary to the letter's claim, this design was never accepted by our rector.
Because the T-shirt was deemed inappropriate, the committee in charge of Mardi Gras festivities was asked to come up with alternative designs, which they did. It was one of these alternative designs that was approved and accepted. Our rector was under the assumption that the alternative T-shirt design that was accepted would be the design sent to the T-shirt maker.
However, instead of submitting the accepted design to the T-shirt maker, the committee submitted the rejected design. When the T-shirts arrived and our rector recognized this deception, he confiscated the T-shirts.
On a side note, these T-shirts have not gone to "those less fortunate than us [who] are impervious to being offended." In fact, those T-shirts have been donated to an overseas charity where the people who are receiving these shirts would have no concept of the implied meaning. These people are probably just glad to have another piece of clothing.
At the risk of sounding redundant, we hope that these facts have cleared the name of our rector. We also suggest that in the future, the authors of any letter make sure they have collected all of the facts regarding their issue before sounding off and attacking someone else's reputation and good name.
Bill LaFleur and Walter Pruchnik
freshmen
Mike Scharpf, Charlie DeRubeis
and Patrick Miller
sophomores
O'Neill Hall
March 1, 2001
All Viewpoint Stories for Friday, March 2, 2001
