Streisand Effect Redux: Clayton (NC) High School

Leen Hijaz giving her speech

Last week, Curmie wrote about Jonas Hole, who gave the salutatorian address at his graduation ceremony at D’Iberville High School in Biloxi despite being misgendered by his principal.  This time, the student graduation speaker to make national headlines is Leen Hijaz, who wasn’t allowed to finish her valedictory speech at Clayton (NC) High School, outside Raleigh. 

Well, that’s not quite accurate.  First off, it was technically a “welcome speech” as opposed to a valedictory address per se.  Curmie isn’t sure why that matters, but perhaps it does.  Secondly, it appears that she was able to finish the part of her remarks that had been pre-approved by the administration.  It was only the add-on at the end that caused controversy.  You will no doubt be shocked to learn, Gentle Reader, that Ms. Hijaz is not the first-ever adolescent to disobey the strictures of authority. 

Anyway, school principal Melissa Moore Hubbard stomps onto the stage and pushes Hijaz away from the podium, allegedly threatening not merely to withhold her diploma, but to deny her graduation.  And what heinous invocation of Satan himself did Hijaz utter?  Well, this:

Before I leave the stage, there is one more thing I have to say.  Every single person here has a voice, and we are privileged to have the freedom to use it when so many people around the world are struggling and suffering to be heard.  Whether it’s the millions suffering in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Afghanistan and so many other countries around the world, or the families being torn apart by ICE, these are not distant issues. They are happening right now as I speak. My point is, we’re not given a voice to stay silent.

(She does repeat a couple of phrases; she explained in a TikTok post the next day that the principal had been yelling at her, causing her to “stutter.”)

You will note, Gentle Reader, that her words were a description of reality.  Are the young adults of the near future going to face a world in which the crises she describes are all too present?  Yes.  Are we, as Americans, however much we might feel constrained by this or that censorial asshat, “privileged” in terms of financial stability, educational opportunities, and constitutional guarantees of free expression, when compared to the inhabitants of much of the rest of the world?  Yes.  Is it appropriate for those with the ability to use their voices for the sake of the common good for them to do so?  Yes.  Are there millions of people in those specified locations (and many others) who are “struggling and suffering”?  Yes.  Are there families being torn apart by ICE?  Yes.

Hijaz argues that “Nothing [she] said was political; it was pure awareness.”  Curmie agrees.  There is no condemnation of Israel for events in Palestine, no insistence that the US intervene to stop the Ebola outbreak in Congo, and so on.  Yes, the line about ICE comes rather close to a comment on that agency’s cowardice, intentional cruelty, and perfidious over-reach, but those descriptors are Curmie’s, not hers.  She may (likely does) agree with Curmie, but all she said was an objective truth.

For her deviation from what we suspect was the pabulum of the approved script, she was shunned by the powers-that-be, or at least so she claims.  The superintendent and several other bigwigs put their hands in their pockets rather than shake her hand when the apparently-not-actual-diplomas were distributed.  Her friend who gave her a hug onstage was similarly told that her diploma would be withheld.  As if denying the high school valedictorian (who graduated a year early, by the way) a piece of paper matters in the least, right?  

Curmie is pretty sure he hasn’t seen his high school diploma in decades, although it might be in one of those boxes he salvaged in 2022 after selling what had been his father’s house.  It’s the transcript that matters, and we’re talking about a valedictorian here; she’s planning to attend the University of North Carolina, and it’s a pretty fair bet she’ll get her degree.  (The school now says she did get her diploma; we trust her friend did, too.)

What’s on display here is the puerile petulance of an all-too-prevalent strain of high school administrators: those whose self-importance completely outshadows any actual competence they might once have had.  Even threatening to withhold a diploma is an act of petulance, a last gasp of self-entitled relevance, and, as someone pointed out on Reddit, an excellent way of turning a minor incident into embarrassing headlines on a national scale.  And that sure did seem like a lot of applause from the audience when Hijaz went off-script.  Maybe reading the room would be a good thing. 

OK.  Let’s grant that deviating from the approved script broke the rules, but in this case, even though it was intentional, was the equivalent of going 57 in a 45 when you’re the only one on the road, not of stealing the car.  Talk to her privately after the event, express displeasure, and move on.  But something Hijaz said on TikTok really stood out: “Obviously, if I said what I was going to say at the end of my speech, if I submitted it to the school, they would have disapproved it immediately, because of how racist they are.”  The first part of that sentence is rather predictable.  Whether it’s true, Curmie can’t say, but young Leen seems a bright lass, and she knows the environment better than we do. 

But attributing Hubbard’s over-reaction to racism seems a bit much.  Curmie has no doubt that Hijaz faced actual racism at multiple points in her academic life.  When she references “all of the stuff that I personally have experienced as a Muslim Arab girl going to school here in Johnston County,” Curmie gets it.  But whether this particular incident in linked to racism is another matter.  As Curmie has said repeatedly for a very long time, all racism is stupid, bur not all stupidity is racist. 

Curmie suspects that if Suzy Creamcheese (bonus points if you catch the Frank Zappa reference, Gentle Reader) had the audacity to stray from the censored pre-approved script to actually say something in a graduation speech, Hubbard’s reaction would have been the same.  It may also be worth noting that whereas Hijaz claims she lives in “a very white area,” US News and World Report lists the minority population at 61%, so there may be some questions of perception here.  (To be fair, she also says “we do have a lot of diversity, still.”)  It’s also important that Hijaz’s comments about racism come after the graduation ceremony.  They are controversial in and of themselves; those tacked on to the end of her speech were not.  You know what was problematic?  The three (Christian) prayers at a public school event.

What Hijaz definitely did not do was to “make it all about [her]self,” as she claims Hubbard accused her of doing.  There are two variations on the theme of irony at play here.  One is the radical misinterpretation of an attempt to represent in some small way the millions of people who, through no fault of their own, are de facto silenced by their circumstances: the exact opposite of her intentions.  The other, of course, is censoring comments about how people ought to be free of censorship.  <Sigh.>

Finally, of course, there’s the Streisand Effect.  As suggested above, the Reddit post about the incident shows two things: overwhelming support for Hijaz rather than Hubbard, and frequent mentions of the simple fact that no one outside the immediate audience would have paid the slightest attention were it not for the attempt to silence a student, a valedictorian, at her own graduation.  Leen Hijaz’s actions are not above reproach, but she’s unquestionably the more sympathetic figure in this episode.  Forward-Bank8412’s comment on Reddit reads, “Streisand this shit, internet!!”  Curmie is just doing his part…

Proving the Relevance of "The Crucible"... by Cancelling It

The Offending Scene... we think

Administrators censor high school plays in many different ways.  Sometimes it’s refusal to put a show on the schedule; sometimes it’s butting into the design process; sometimes it’s shutting a production down during tech week or after a single performance; sometimes it’s firing a teacher/director for doing a show the administration had signed off on.  What’s consistent is that the school officials seldom if ever admit they screwed up, even if they do reverse themselves under nationwide or even international ridicule.

There have been, no doubt, dozens of cases over the past few years that Curmie missed… but there are a fair number he’s chronicled here.  In chronological order (in order of Curmie’s posts, not necessarily when stuff happened): Kismet in PA, Legally Blonde in OH, All Shook Up in UT, Almost, Maine in NC and Spamalot in PA, Indecent in FL, The 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee in OH, The Addams Family Musical in PA, and Dog Sees God in CA and The Laramie Project in AZ… and now The Crucible in GA.

What’s particularly intriguing about this one is that no one is really sure why the show was cancelled after a single performance.  Or, rather, the only thing we know with any certainty is that someone, almost certainly the school’s administration, is flat-out lying. 

Curmie tends to learn about these incidents through one of three sources, all of whom have written about this one: Howard Sherman, Chris Peterson at the OnStage blog, and Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms.  (Curmie hasn’t contributed as much as a comment on EA for months since it took a hard turn from its titular ethics orientation to GOP propaganda, but he suspected that Jack might weigh in on this one.) 

Here’s what we know for sure: a production of Arthur Miller’s McCarthyism-inspired play was scheduled for two performances at Fannin County High School in Blue Ridge, Georgia, and was cancelled after opening night.  We know, also, that the original director (a teacher?) was fired/forced to resign a couple of weeks before the show was to open, leaving a high school student in charge.  This much is about as far as we can go without fear of propagating untruths.  Well, there’s one more thing that we’ll get to in a moment, Gentle Reader…

We do have the school’s official statement on the affair.  Officials claim that “after Friday night’s performance of The Crucible, we received several complaints as to an unauthorized change in the script of the play.  Upon investigation, we learned that the performance did not reflect the original script.”  The likelihood that the school’s statement is an outright lie may be a little short of ontological certitude, but it’s pretty damned close.

You will notice, Gentle Reader, that no specifics about the alleged violation are forthcoming.  The students say they didn’t add, delete, or change any words, and there has been no assertion to the contrary by the administration.  That, one suspects, is because such a statement could too easily be shot down.  Better to leave it open-ended and hope the opposition—in this case, the students—admits to something. 

Well, that happened… sort of.  The production did open with a scene of the girls dancing in the woods, enacting a moment that was only narrated in the script.  One might suppose that you could argue that the scene represents a change in the script, but it’s pretty much of a stretch.  It’s only fair to point out that Jack Marshall writes that a director at the American Century Theater (where Marshall was Artistic Director) wanted to do precisely what the Fannin County students did, but was refused by both Dramatists Play Service and Arthur Miller himself.  There’s no reason to doubt this testimony, but professional and amateur contracts are different (Curmie has handled both), and things may be different since Miller’s death 20 years ago. 

Curmie, who directed about 50 educational theatre productions over six different decades, confesses he would never have even considered the possibility that he’d need permission to stage that scene… and he’s asked permission for a lot of trivial changes: changing “God dammit” to just “Dammit” for a production at a church-related college, changing the title of a Greek tragedy to the one we’d been using in publicity for the new season before deciding on a translation that used a less common Anglicization of the title, and so on.

More to the point, perhaps: Curmie has read, taught, and seen The Crucible multiple times, and he wouldn’t have caught the alleged departure from the text, or at least wouldn’t have thought it noteworthy in legal terms.  He might have been skeptical of the aesthetic choice, but that’s a different matter.  And you’re going to tell me that not one, but several, spectators at a high school production in a tiny town in northern Georgia caught that supposed breach of contract and were sufficiently incensed that they called the principal that night?  And that the “investigation” took only a couple of hours?  Curmie detects a distinct whiff of eau de cow pasture.

It’s also important to point out that terms like “as written” in licensing agreements not only need not, but literally cannot mean that literally everything in the staging must be exactly as prescribed.  Acting editions differ from published editions.  The latter version is what the playwright wrote; the former is generally transcribed by the stage manager of the original production.  Thus, for example, a character may be described physically according to what the actor in the Broadway show looked like; Broadway Licensing isn’t going to come after you if the “beautiful blonde” of a script is played by a beautiful redhead (or a beautiful Latina, Asian, or black woman, for that matter) unless there’s something in the dialogue that demands that she be blonde.

Curmie remembers seeing a production of The Crucible performed in the round.  So what?  Well, the opening stage direction in the acting edition says “One emphatic source of light is at the left.”  There is no left or right in arena staging.  Is DPS going to forbid all but proscenium productions?  Of course not; they make their money, and their clients’ money, by getting as many legitimate productions as they can.  Some discretion is mandatory.  (Note also that the opening sequence in the acting edition is considerably more detailed than in the regular published form.)

The situation is aggravated by the fact that, according to Howard Sherman, two different parents contacted Broadway Licensing (now the parent company of Dramatists Play Service), and both were told that the licensing company did not shut the production down and would have been very unlikely to have done so, especially if the opening scene were removed.  You can hear both ends of one of those conversations here.  (We’ll casually avoid talking about the ethics and legalities of recording a phone conversation without the consent of the other person on the line.)

Sherman reports that students were initially told that the second performance was cancelled because of parental complaints that the show was “evil and disgusting and things like that.”  Fannin County is almost too stereotypical a place for this to happen: rural (not many county seats in the country with fewer than 1300 residents), overwhelmingly white (93% white and not Hispanic/Latino), overwhelmingly Christian, especially Protestant (over half the county’s congregations are Southern Baptist); MAGA (Donald Trump got over 82% of the vote in the ’24 election).  It is, in other words, precisely the kind of place where brie-eating, Chablis-sipping, clove-cigarette-smoking elitists (or, indeed, anyone with a little knowledge of the world) would suspect the locals would get their collective skivvies in a twist over a high school production of an American classic.

And then, as if by magic, the complaint changed to a strained argument about production rights.  Oh, by the way, Caden Gerald, who played the leading role of John Proctor, says in a video posted to Facebook that administrators saw the scene in question “every morning that we ran it.”

Curmie finds it difficult to argue with Chris Peterson’s conclusion that the administration “didn’t stop the play to protect a license. They stopped it to quiet the backlash. They threw their students under the bus for the sake of avoiding Facebook drama.” 

Someone is lying.  All the students, their parents, and two customer service reps from DPS… or a chickenshit principal (the usual apologies for redundancy).  That seems like an easy call to Curmie. 

But there’s one more point to make.  Even if the administration is telling the truth, they are still 100% responsible for the fuck-up and for the nation-wide embarrassment wrought upon their school.  Let’s assume for the sake of argument that it was appropriate to fire the original director, and that there are legitimate reasons for not making the details known.  Let’s assume, also, that the students are lying about administrators’ seeing rehearsals, about being told the play was shut down because of content complaints, and about the administration only discovering (as opposed to announcing) the alleged violation two days after cancelling the second night.

It’s still the school’s fault.  It is the responsibility of the school, not of a high school senior, to comply with the licensing agreement.  In the absence of a responsible adult director, the school had an obligation to ensure that someone in a position to speak for the school be able to sign off on the production’s adherence to the licensing agreement.  If someone from the school saw even a single rehearsal, it was that person’s responsibility to ask the simple question, “did you change anything?”  If Caden Gerald is lying, and no one from the administration saw any rehearsals, they bloody well should have.

The Crucible remains in the canon and on stages throughout the country because it speaks to conditions far beyond colonial Massachusetts or even mid-century hysteria about the Red Menace.  It’s about the problems created when people abandon truth and justice in order to pander to the mob.  To say that the actions of Principal Scott Ramsey and his minions in shutting down the production is thus deeply ironic is to err on the side of understatement.

Expelled for... um... Greenface?

Back in the halcyon days of the 2010s, the big annual event of this blog was the Curmie Awards, presented to the person or organization who most embarrassed the profession of education.  Curmie would compile a list of nominees from stories he’d covered during the calendar year, and readers would vote on the most (un)deserving recipient.

There won’t be any Curmies awarded this year or in the foreseeable future for three reasons.  First, Curmie has written a lot less of late about educators behaving badly.  That doesn’t mean there haven’t been cases, of course, but, perhaps because he’s no longer in the game, as it were, other stories have done more to pique his interest.  Plus, the unethical or incompetent protagonists in most of the education-related stories Curmie has covered recently have been non-educators: students, politicians, or organizations like the NCAA.

Second, blogspot no longer supports the gadget that allowed polls, so there would have to be a link to an outside site like Survey Monkey or something, and Curmie doesn’t want to deal with all that noise.

Finally, there are a lot fewer of you.  Individual posts are garnering only 20% or so as many hits as in yesteryear.  You, Gentle Reader, are a member of an elite, not to say miniscule, group.  It doesn’t make sense to continue the poll if a half dozen votes would win the election.

All that said, Curmie’s netpal Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms alerted him to a story that, if Curmies were still a thing, would mean that what passes for a brain trust at St. Francis High School in Mountain View, CA, like Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando’s character in “On the Waterfront”), coulda been a contender.

Our story begins in 2017, when three 14-year-old boys took a photo of themselves posing with anti-acne masks covering their faces.  One of the three apparently had rather severe acne, and the other two joined him in what Reason’s Jacob Sullum describes as “an act of playful solidarity.”  The medication started light green in color, but grew darker as it dried.  The lads photographed themselves because they “looked silly.”  Importantly, the boys did not post the photo to social media.

Nothing to see here, right?  Well, not to any rational person, no.  But this is a story about high school administrators, remember?  Two of those lads were about to enroll at St. Francis, a high-priced private school.  Again: so far, so good.

Flash forward three years.  It’s now 2020 and the aftermath of the George Floyd incident in Minnesota.  Some recent St. Francis grads had posted an apparently not-PC meme about Floyd’s death, so there was, perhaps, some increased tension.  Unbeknownst to the two boys attending St. Francis, the other lad in the photo had sent a copy to a friend, who “tagged a music playlist on her Spotify account with a copy of the photograph.”  And one of her friends (the administrators undoubtedly know who, but that information seems not to be available to the rest of us) saw it there, recognized the boys, and proclaimed them to be in blackface.  The photo was to be regarded as “another example” of racism at St. Francis.

Well, no self-respecting (i.e., self-important) school administrator wants that kind of publicity, so instead of…you know… listening to the mother of one of the boys, who explained the truth of the matter, they decided that due process was far too much to ask, so they summarily issued an ultimatum that the boys either withdraw or be expelled.

To be fair, those masks are pretty dark (see the photo above), and it’s not too outrageous a leap of faith to see them as blackface, especially if you’ve been prompted to do so.  So some of the furor, though not justified, was at least comprehensible.  But that doesn’t get the school off the hook.  They leapt to a false conclusion when even a cursory glance at the so-called evidence would have revealed that the boys did nothing wrong.  (Curmie isn’t convinced that what 14-year-olds do ought to be held against them years later even if they were in blackface, but that’s at least an arguable position.)

As Curmie has noted several times in the past, it’s important to get names out there if possible.  We may not know the name of the student who posted that photo, but we do know that President Jason Curtis immediately piled on without bothering to check the facts, and that Dean of Students Ray Hisatake called the boys’ parents but obviously didn’t care that they offered a reasonable and indeed true rebuttal to the accusations leveled against their sons.

The money quote, though, is that of Principal Katie Teekell, who said her decision was based not on the boys’ “intent,” but on “optics” and “the harm done to the St. Francis community.”  Of course, there is no indication that the student whose posting of the photo was obviously intended to demean the school has suffered any punishment at all.  Meanwhile the boys who did nothing wrong, and weren’t yet students at the school when the supposedly offending photo was taken, were almost literally run out of town.  The world knows that, now.  So, Ms. Teekell, as Matt Damon might have said in “Good Will Hunting,” “how do you like them optics?” 

This being an education story, and Curmie being a career educator, it seems only appropriate that we attempt to discern the explanation for the administrators’ actions with a multiple-choice quiz.

So…

They acted the way they did because…

a.    They have been so infected with a socio-political agenda that they are incapable of seeing the world except through woke-colored glasses.

b.  They have the ethical sensibility of a hungry cobra and the backbone of overcooked angel’s hair.

c.     They’d come in third place in a battle of wits with a dead battery and a turnip.

Yes, I know, Gentle Reader, “d. all of the above” is likely the best answer, but perhaps your mileage may vary.

This story has received new life of late because the boys sued the school and the jury recently awarded them over a million dollars.  The award is based on a new California law which demands the equivalent of due process from organizations like private schools, unions, hospitals, etc.  This is the first case to invoke the new law in a suit against a private secondary school.

The initial suit sought over twenty million dollars in damages, but the jury rejected claims of breach of contract, defamation, and violation of free speech.  Curmie reminds you, Gentle Reader, that he is not a lawyer, but he confesses astonishment that falsely labeling Bay Area teenagers (OK, they’re into their 20s now) as racists doesn’t qualify as defamation.  Still, each boy will receive over a half million dollars, and the school might have learned its lesson.

Yeah, that’s likely to happen…

 

 

Why There’s a Teacher Shortage: Exhibit A

One of Curmie’s friends and former students (we’ll call him L for the purposes of this post) teaches theatre in a public school.  He recently posted on Facebook about a confrontation he’d had with the father of one of his students.  The boy had failed to do three significant assignments, and, curiously enough, his grade reflected that fact.

Ah, but you see, the lad is an athlete, and a failing grade made him academically ineligible.  So Dad screams for “about 15 minutes.”  My friend responded like this: “I want him to be able to play […], too. I understand how important it is for him to have that outlet. But if I want lights on in my house, I gotta pay bills. If I wanna drive a car, I gotta pay to put gas in the car. So, if _______ wants to play […] then he’s gonna need to stop being lazy and do what is required in this class. Not to mention the other three classes he is failing.” 

L got literally dozens of positive responses: “likes,” “loves,” and comments, including from Curmie. Indeed, although he’d done some great work as an actor for me, and had subsequently had no little success in the professional world, I’ve never been prouder of him.

What he described, of course, is a familiar situation to anyone who has taught for even a short while. Some students—especially but by no means exclusively athletes—not only want, but expect, special treatment. Their parents do, too. Sometimes their coaches get into the act. I once had a “student-athlete” bring his position coach along to whine about his grade. The latter demanded that I change the grade of his star player. Yes, demanded. Not “asked if there was anything that could be done,” demanded. I told him to get out of my office, that I wouldn’t discuss grades with anyone but the student himself. He went stomping down to the department chair’s office while I told the student that there was no way I’d change his grade.

The student had a D on one hour-exam and failed the other two. He routinely failed the reading quizzes. He didn’t write either of the two required papers. He got something like a 21 (yes, out of 100) on the final exam. Plus, we had a departmental policy that no one with seven or more absences—including excused absences—would pass the course. I can’t remember exactly how many he had… eleven, maybe? Ah, but he seized on that: one of those absences should have been excused, you see. Note that the policy doesn’t differentiate between excused and unexcused absences, that he’d still be over the limit, and that with those other scores he’d have failed even with a perfect attendance record. Oh, and the reason he missed class on that one occasion was that he was in court, being convicted of a violent crime.

The good news in this scenario was that my department chair had my back. Yes, that should be expected, but it isn’t always the case, especially if we’re talking about a star athlete, or the kid of some influential politician or wealthy donor or whatever. I don’t know if they tried to bully the dean when neither my chair nor I would give in, but if they did, he sent them packing, too.

This being a rather perspicacious readership, I suspect you know where this is heading, don’t you, Gentle Reader? I’ve been lucky enough to have spent virtually my entire career in places where I was trusted to do my job; my grading decisions were always final. But it is not always thus, as my former student discovered.

The school administration—as is too often the case, a perfect storm of cowardice (a.k.a. weeniedom), sloth, and stupidity—made my friend change the kid’s grade. Apparently, they exerted similar pressure on the other three teachers, as well, as the lad miraculously became eligible again. I’m not sure of the exact circumstances, and the Facebook post that reveals that sports (or maybe just parental bellicosity?) will always trump classwork at that particular school has been taken down. Maybe my friend capitulated to pressure; maybe the administrators just changed the grades themselves.

Anyway, I apparently saw the post in question only after it had been up for a while. I was about to tell my friend to get the hell out of that school, but then I looked at the other comments. At least a dozen other teachers, some of whom had also been my students, chimed in the they had endured similar situations at their schools, often several times. It didn’t matter where they taught, or what they taught, or how long they’d taught: same story. Students were not allowed to fail, no matter what they did…, or, more likely, didn’t do. And any attempt to apply any academic standards whatsoever must be quashed.

On the one hand, it was heartening to see my friend get support, or at least commiseration, from so many fellow travelers. On the other hand, it was chilling to see the ubiquity of the problem. It’s bad enough at the college level, where I taught. Certainly the fact that I doubted not merely the competence, but the integrity, of people up the food chain from me (different folks from the administrator(s) I mentioned earlier) was a factor in my decision to retire when I did. It’s even worse in the secondary schools.

Still, the comment that most caught my eye wasn’t one of solidarity. I can’t quote it directly, but the substance was that since my friend can’t do anything about the current situation, he should just document it and move on, because one of his students might need similar… erm… “assistance” in the future: if the administration can change grades so X can play his sport, they can change grades so Y can be in the musical.

I can certainly understand that argument as a survival tactic. It is, in some ways, equitable, but it is also an option unavailable to someone who teaches history or biology. Plus, of course, it serves to legitimize an irresponsible, anti-intellectual, and unethical process. Still, it is a metaphorical arrow in L’s quiver, whether he would ever use it or not, and he would probably be wise to let the administration know it’s there. I’m enough of a Confucian to believe that every situation is different, and it’s not difficult to imagine a scenario in which such a strategy might be at least ethically neutral.

Ultimately, all I can do is to hope that L finds a responsible way to move forward. The professions (both theatre and teaching) need people like him. He’s a good man and apparently a good teacher, too. But I couldn’t blame him if he decided that quitting would be the only ethical choice.

This is another piece originally posted on Ethics Alarms.  There are some comments there if you’re interested.  They’re also there if you’re not interested.

Yet Another High School Show Shut Down by Morons

A little over a week ago, Curmie wrote about the supression of the a production of Paula Vogel’s Indecent by the censorious asshats at the Douglas Anderson School of the Arts in Jacksonville, Florida. That was bad enough; this is worse. 

First, this one is personal. Curmie found out about it from a Facebook post by his nephew, an alum of the school in question, Cardinal High School in Middlefield, Ohio. Curmie’s Beloved Spouse, sister-in-law, brother-in-law, niece, and nephew all worked on shows at Cardinal in one or more capacities: on stage, on tech crews, and/or in the pit orchestra for musicals. 

So that’s one thing that’s especially irritating. The other is that the show that’s been cancelled is The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which may not be as innocuous as Kismet, but it’s pretty close. The post on the Curtain 440 Facebook page describes the play like this:

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is… sweet, moving, hilarious, and yes, sometimes irreverent, it shows all types of kids and their imperfect lives. It shows that no matter how much someone appears to have it together, they are going through struggles just like you. It shows teamwork, competition, friendship, puberty, growing up, conflict, working with people who are not like you—things that EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US has gone through.

A scene from the Off-Broadway production.

That pretty well sums it up. When Curmie was teaching, he would see dozens of résumés each year from high school or junior college students auditioning for admission into and scholarships to the university program in which Curmie taught and directed. 

 For the last decade or so, i.e., since the musical became available for amateur productions, Curmie would guess that, as a conservative estimate, 15-20% of those kids had worked on a production of Putnam County. The show is a staple of both high school and community theatres across the country: as recently as a couple of years ago, it was the fourth most produced musical in American high schools. It’s hardly an unknown commodity. (And a 15-second Google search would alert you to potential problem areas.) 

Curmie’s university did a production as part of our summer season a few years back. A lot of people in town came, brought their kids, and really enjoyed it. We did not, by the way, do the alternate version to the “erection song” (“Chip’s Lament”). Didn’t matter: there were no protests, no stomping out of the show, no letters to the editor. This is in a place represented in Congress by Louie Gohmert, remember: not exactly the most liberal community on the planet. 

Ah, but the self-appointed Guardians of All Things Decent in northeastern Ohio have declared, without any clarification of terms, that the play is “not family friendly” because of the (now bowdlerized) “Chip’s Lament,” a brief scene in which Jesus shows up to say He doesn’t concern himself with spelling bees, and (OMG!) a student’s having two dads. 

Of course, despite the fact that the production team say they were told that the “two dads” business was a cause for concern, Superintendent Jack Cunningham, who is probably the idiot who said that but is also aware that being outed as a homophobe is probably not in his best interest, denies the allegation. That’s because he’s a superintendent, and superintendents are, even more than principals, more interested in covering their asses than in telling the truth. 

Side note: one of Curmie’s most treasured memories from teaching Theatre Appreciation to non-majors came in the discussion of a production of John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation. There were two guys in the back of the classroom who purported to be thoroughly grossed out by an inter-racial kiss between two men. Curmie wondered aloud why it’s okay to show axe murders on stage but not an expression of affection. 

Then, in a moment of inspiration, he looked directly at the two junior high refugees and said “maybe it’s because you know you’re not an axe murderer.” Curmie is pleased to note that although neither of those young men understood the barb, a woman in the front row nearly exploded, trying to control her laughter. 

Revenons à nos moutons… there are a lot of reasons why this action by the Cardinal board was, shall we shall, ill-considered. (Curmie resists, for the moment, at least, language invoking bovine fecal matter.) 

First, as you have no doubt already concluded, Gentle Reader, the play wouldn’t be performed so frequently in so many different places if it couldn’t attract audiences of all descriptions… and if it hadn’t passed the scrutiny of literally hundreds of different school administrations and community theatre boards. One wonders what all those other folks missed that the Acme Vulgarity Detector Kit at Cardinal caught. 

And trust me, Jack, ol’ boy, if you stroll through the hallways of the school during the changeover between classes, Curmie will absolutely guarantee that you’ll hear far more “vulgar language” than anything in Putnam County. Of course, that would require a modest attempt to understand what life in a high school is actually like, and we can’t have that, can we? 

Second, if what you mean by “family friendly” is that it might not be appropriate for 6-year-olds, fine. So make it the equivalent of a PG-13 movie, which is precisely what the production team was doing in requiring parental approval for junior high kids to see their preview. Cunningham sniffs that (undefined) “vulgarity” made the show “not suitable for our pre-teen and teenage students in an educational setting.” Erm… Jack… Sweetie… it’s a high school play;  there are no pre-teen students in your high school. Just sayin’. 

And the subsequent plaint that only productions which “community members of all ages may enjoy without adult supervision” should be allowed is a). transcendent in its stupidity (you really want to have toddlers determine your season?), and b). absolutely guaranteed to be applied capriciously. 

Once again, the school had at least de facto if not explicitly signed off on the show. You don’t get rehearsal scripts or scores to a musical until you’ve paid the royalties, so there was a check written for probably well into four figures. Theatre directors in high schools can’t just do that; it takes administrative approval. 

Oh… wait… Cunningham himself signed off on the check! Well, glory be! Tie me to an anthill and smear my belly with jam! Who’da thunk it? Ah, but, you see, the production team didn’t do what no one had ever expected them to do before and submit a script for board approval. That, you see, means it’s their fault the principal and the superintendent didn’t do their jobs. 

By the way, the parents of all students involved in the production met with the production team early on. The director and her staff explained that they were using the alternate version of the one song, and explained the context of other potential areas of concern. None of the parents pulled their kids from the show. In other words, as with the cancelled production of Indecent, the people most concerned with the welfare of the students—their parents—had no issues, or at least not enough to prevent their sons and daughters from active participation. 

Of course, the all-too-familiar “the board has received complaints” line demonstrates the ubiquitous cowardice of censors, in this case both the anonymous (of course!) complainants and the board themselves. As for the former, there’s a simple solution: don’t go. As for the latter: get a life. 

Third, there is something very important but easily overlooked by people outside the profession. The majority of the characters in this show are adolescents, meaning that high school actors a). understand them better, and b). don’t have to “take age” either in their acting or their physical appearance. That makes for both a better production and better development of young actors. 

Fourth, if you’re going to shut down a show, the time to do it is before students and faculty have put in literally thousands of person-hours in rehearsal and the shops: they’re a month into rehearsals. You know, like a good time might have been before you signed the scripts and royalties check? It would also be a more sound business practice to have done so before spending big money on the production: Curmie’s guess is that scenery construction has already begun. Even if that isn’t the case (one of the show’s attractions is that it doesn’t require much of a set), you’re unlikely to get your full royalty payment back, and you have a 0% chance on the rental fees for scripts and scores. 

Finally, this year’s seniors have already lost one show to COVID (after weeks of rehearsal). That may have been unavoidable. Taking away yet another show, for reasons that smack more of a socio-political agenda than of any legitimate concern for the welfare of students or their families: this is definitely not unavoidable. 

There is an email-writing campaign, by the way. Curmie will probably abstain, lest he offend the tender sensibilities of the school board by engaging in vulgarities to describe the extent of their stupidity and hypocrisy. If you are interested and can channel your frustration a little better than Curmie suspects he’s capable of at the moment, click here for info. 

Curmie has made the point repeatedly in the past that if you look hard enough, the chances are really good that you’ll find something objectionable in virtually any play ever written. And this is one of the tamer shows out there, especially if the alternate version of that one song is used.  Idiots on school boards are everywhere.  They will come after your next show, whatever it is, just to show that they can.  They, like all the other opponents of free expression Curmie has talked about of late, must be stopped.

From Curmie’s perspective, Superintendent Jack Cunningham and the school board members are, in no particular order, authoritarian, censorious, stupid, craven, lazy, and mendacious. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, did you enjoy the play? 

Above all, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee does not deserve to be censored just because a couple of school board members need more bran in their diet.

TWO UPDATES: 

Rachel Sheinkin, who won a Tony Award for the book to the show is now on record, saying in an email to assistant director Mandi Matchinga, “Specific words are easy to change to match the community’s needs. It sounds like this could be a mask for other issues and that by now you’ve moved on to considering other shows. But know that you and your students have our sympathy and support.”

And there’s now a Change.org petition which you are more than welcome to sign, Gentle Reader.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The school board has reversed their decision!  Thanks to everyone who signed the petition or otherwise supported the cause!  Taking this episode nationwide had to have made a difference.  People like this aren’t going to admit they’re wrong unless the embarrassment reaches an unendurable level.  Apparently, it did.

From the "It Could Have Been Me (or Anyone Competent)" Files

About the only Hamline-related image
Curmie could find that didn’t
make him want to barf

Curmie’s profession being what it was, he applied over the years for scores of academic jobs all over the country in three rounds of job searches that culminated in accepting positions in Kentucky, Iowa, and Texas. He may have once applied to Hamline University in the Twin Cities; why else would he have heard of the place prior to the last couple of weeks, after all? 

If Curmie did apply there, they showed no interest, which, it turns out, may have been one of the best things to have happened in Curmie’s professional life. Sometimes not getting what you want is the best possible outcome. 

Curmie first heard about the recent brouhaha at Hamline, in which an adjunct professor was fired without either legitimate cause or due process, from a friend’s post on her Facebook page. She and another friend both described the situation as “complex.” Loath though he was (and is) to disagree with two of the most sensible and intelligent people of his acquaintance, Curmie suggested that there is nothing complex here at all, but rather that “Stupidity, laziness, and cowardice are in a death struggle to be the administration's defining characteristic.” Curmie stands by that analysis. 

On October 6 of last fall, Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor of art history at Hamline, showed a pair of images depicting the prophet Muhammad in her course in global art history. [Note: a number of articles Curmie links here show a photo of the Rashīd al-Dīn work mentioned below. Recognizing the possibility of causing inadvertent offense, Curmie does not include this image on the blog page per se, nor will it appear on the CC Facebook page. If you do not want to see this image, do not click on the links; if you do, then click here.] 

According to an article by Sarah Cascone on the Artnet site, “One of the artworks was an illustration of the archangel Gabriel delivering his revelations to Muhammad from a 14th-century manuscript by Rashīd al-Dīn called the Compendium of Chronicles, while the other was a 16th-century work by Mustafa ibn Vali showing the prophet with a veil and halo.” 

As is fairly common knowledge, some sects of Islam regard viewing images of Muhammad as idolatrous. But three points need to be made. 

First, as López Prater herself pointed out, “there is this common thinking that Islam completely forbids, outright, any figurative depictions or any depictions of holy personages. While many Islamic cultures do strongly frown on this practice, I would like to remind you there is no one, monothetic Islamic culture.” 

Second, an art history course which does not show images such as these could reasonably be said to be lacking in the “global” element advertised by the course title. Indeed, such an omission could legitimately be regarded as Islamophobic, as it would signal a disregard for Islamic contributions to world culture. 

Finally, and by far most importantly, Prater warned students in the course syllabus (see?), urging students who chose not to view the images to contact her (no one did). She also issued a “two-minute content warning prior to the artworks’ appearance, to allow students to opt out of viewing the potentially offensive imagery should they feel it was against their faith.” What more could possibly be asked of her? Wait, let me re-phrase that: what more could a sentient adult have asked of her? They are, as shall become clear in a moment, very different questions. 

By now, you’ve long since figured out where this sordid tale is headed, haven’t you, Gentle Reader? Student Aram Wedatalla, the president of the university’s Muslim Student Association (MSA), was a student in the class. Of course, she did nothing to avoid seeing the images in question, because that would have been the mature and intelligent thing to do. Rather, she claims to have been “blindsided.” (Pay no attention to the aroma of cow pasture here, Gentle Reader; it will pass. Eventually.) 

Naturally, she went whining to The Oracle, the student newspaper: “As a Muslim, and a Black person, I don’t feel like I belong, and I don’t think I’ll ever belong in a community where they don’t value me as a member, and they don’t show the same respect that I show them.” Oh, no. Trust me, you narcissistic little brat, you don’t want to be treated with the same level of disrespect with which you regard anyone who might be sacrificed on the altar of your quest for victimhood. It really doesn’t matter if it was your petulance or just your laziness that is foregrounded here; the point is that if you want to see the culprit in this incident, look in a damned mirror. 

Of course, the student newspaper is complicit in all this, but at least the editorial staff there has a three-fold excuse: they’re post-adolescents, there are no longer many examples of journalistic integrity to be used as role models, and, alas, they’re being “educated” at Hamline. “Hamline teaches us it doesn’t matter the intent, the impact is what matters,” quoth one student. The real problem is that she’s probably right. 

Youthful impetuosity cannot be used as an excuse for the utter incompetence of the university administration’s handling of all this, however. The major players should never be allowed on a university campus again without a ticket to the basketball game or the orchestra concert. Nur Mood, the MSA advisor and Assistant Director of Social Justice Programs and Strategic Relations (is that title sufficiently pretentious?), blathered that “the harm’s done,” blithely ignoring the fact that his paranoid fantasies are far more responsible for “the harm” than Professor Prater will ever be. 

Oh, and speaking of ridiculous job titles, how about “Associate Vice President of Inclusive Excellence”? That would be one David Everett, whose email to everyone at the university declared Prater’s actions (he doesn’t identify her by name, but how many people at Hamline teach a course in global art history?) as “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.” Two responses: 1). Bullshit. 2). Do your damned homework and provide a little due process before you slander a faculty member, Davy. (Curmie sincerely hopes López Prater will sue the snot out of this preening twatwaffle.) 

This is also the same guy who was later to write that “In lieu of this incident, it was decided it was best that this faculty member was no longer part of the Hamline community.” (The school later lied about dismissing Prater.)  Erm… Davy… “in lieu of” means “instead of,” not “in view of.” It always does Curmie’s heart good to realize that illiteracy is no impediment to a career in university administration. (Wonder why Curmie is retired?) 

Most remarkable, however, was the outrageous statement over the names of both Everett and university president Fayneese Miller that “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.” First off, there is no legitimate education without academic freedom (Ron DeSantis, please take note!). It would hold on any university campus worthy of the name, even if there really were something to get upset about, and even if it were intentional. 

To be fair, academic freedom doesn’t completely kick in until tenure, but Hamline (of course), purports to guarantee it. The university’s website includes this intriguing sentence: “The University embraces the examination of all ideas, some of which will potentially be unpopular and unsettling, as an integral and robust component of intellectual inquiry.” Wouldn’t it be fun if they actually believed that? 

Oh, Curmie nearly forgot. A Hamline faculty member who actually knows what he’s talking about, Religion Department chair Mark Berkson, wrote a letter to the student newspaper, too, pointing out that “in the context of an art history classroom, showing an Islamic representation of the Prophet Muhammad, a painting that was done to honor Muhammad and depict an important historical moment, is not an example of Islamophobia. Labeling it this way is not only inaccurate but also takes our attention off of real examples of bigotry and hate.” 

He also points out that, contrary to what Hamline seems to try to instill in its students, that intentions are irrelevant, “the Prophet Muhammad himself said that people will receive consequences for actions depending on their intentions.” Professor Berkson’s letter was removed from The Oracle’s website two days later; whether this was by an editorial staff longer on zealotry than on competence or at the insistence of the Stalinistic administration is impossible to determine. 

The hypocrisy, lack of due process, cowardice, and outright stupidity are the subject of a lot, and Curmie does mean a lot, of commentary. Yes, there are a few indignant whimpers from those whose lives have no meaning unless they can perceive themselves as oppressed, but—Allah be praised—everyone else is of a single mind. 

Curmie isn’t an art historian, but Christiane Gruber, author of an article titled “An Academic Is Fired Over a Medieval Painting of the Prophet Muhammad: The dismissal of an instructor at Hamline University on baseless charges of ‘Islamophobia’ raises concerns about freedom on campus,”  is.

Curmie isn’t a Muslim, but Aman Khalid, author of an article titled “Most of All, I Am Offended as a Muslim: On Hamline University’s shocking imposition of narrow religious orthodoxy in the classroom,” is. [This one may be behind a paywall. If so, trust me on this…] Khalid writes: “Barring a professor of art history from showing this painting, lest it harm observant Muslims in class, is just as absurd as asking a biology professor not to teach evolution because it may offend evangelical Protestants in the course.” 

Curmie is not a lawyer, but the folks at FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) are. And they’ve been busy: check it out here and here and here and here and here and here and here. 

The American Freedom Alliance describes Hamline’s actions as “an egregious violation of academic freedom,” and argues that they “severely damaged the intellectual climate at Hamline University and told every scholar who sets foot on your campus that free and open inquiry is circumscribed by the sensibilities and sensitivities of the students.” 

The article on the National Association of Scholars site is titled The Death of Academic Freedom at Hamline University. 

PEN America’s article argues that “Hamline University has committed one of the most egregious violations of academic freedom in recent memory,” and that “Non-renewing a professor’s contract under these circumstances is academic malpractice of a type that chills speech among all faculty, particularly contingent faculty who cannot rely on the status of tenure to protect their academic freedom.” 

Hamline is getting hammered across a wide spectrum of outlets—Curmie hasn’t even cited them all. Good. Perhaps, just perhaps, the principles of academic inquiry and free expression will be upheld, at least at other institutions which would rather not have this kind of publicity. The Hamline administration, however, has proven to be not merely craven and ridiculous, but mendacious, as well. They need to be gone. All of them. 

Now, the Trustees have gotten into the act. Curmie has a distrust of such people, born of over four decades in the trenches. But they couldn’t be any worse than the administration. We can hope for the best, but admitting they’ve put the wrong people in charge isn’t what Trustees are best at.  Alas.

EDIT: For what is perhaps the best statement of support for Professor López Prater, check out what the Muslim Public Affairs Council has to say.