Media buffaloes Penn

(PDF version) 'Buffalo' fever seen through Penn's eyes By Laura Gitlin The typical media coverage that Penn garners nowadays is its rising rank in U.S. News and World Report or that one of its distinguished faculty members has published a new book. But in 1993, the media pointed a negative spotlight on the University -- bringing headaches to then-University President Sheldon Hackney, as well as vindication to then-College freshman Eden Jacobowitz. After all, it was the year of the Water Buffalo affair, which sparked an unprecedented and as of yet, unmatched media blitz on Penn's campus. What started as a disciplinary case centering around race relations and free speech soon escalated into the media event of the year, as reporters and columnists flocked to West Philadelphia to attack students, the University and its president.

"I think the University was burned by the water buffalo case," explained History Professor Alan Kors, who became Jacobowitz's advisor. Yet, the conflict was not a new phenomenon at Penn -- both race and political relations had been strained for years, but with little public notice. There was the incident in 1987, when Wharton administrators confiscated copies of The Daily Pennsylvanian in Steinberg-Dietrich Hall due to a negative story that ran on an alumni visiting day. Just one year later, activist Louis Farrakhan spoke at Penn, leading to a confrontation between Jewish and Islamic students that "mobilized feelings in a big way," according to Hackney. Still, the national media didn't utter but a word regarding either of these cases. But 1993 proved a different story completely. In addition to the catchiness of the phrase "water buffalo," Hackney's presidential nomination to the National Endowment for the Humanities left him particularly vulnerable to character attack, and the Jacobowitz case provided the media with the perfect vehicle. Even Jacobowitz, who went head-to-head with Hackney throughout the ordeal, agreed that the timeliness of his comment -- combined with Hackney's nomination and the 1993 theft of copies of the DP -- was "almost a freaky coincidence," creating a media outburst about a situation that was far greater than the sum of its parts. "Congress creates a drama in which the nominee is never the protagonist," Hackney said, noting the importance of his political role at the time. "Had I not been a college president, it would have been just a regular disciplinary problem." But reign supreme at Penn he did, and the media attention "was confabulated with [Hackney's] new job and the Washington climate, and it is unfortunate for Penn," current University President Judith Rodin said. Hackney said he believes that the media got out of hand not because of the specific incident, but because "there was already built in the public mind an image of America... and it is easy to connect an event to that narrative for ideological reasons." "Once that storyline gets set, it is very difficult to erase it," he added. The public gets "a truncated view." And it was with this storyline that press releases, news updates and editorials changed the scope of the disciplinary case, affecting all the parties involved. Although Hackney received media attacks from news bureaus across the country, for Jacobowitz, the attention hit much closer to home. Followed around campus by reporters and camera crews and bombarded with phone messages from journalists, the attention that the case attracted interfered with his daily life, even causing him to postpone his final exams. But despite the hassle of the media scrutiny, Jacobowitz feels that in a way, it helped him solidify his case. The media coverage in his favor reaffirmed his convictions and "gave me a great confidence that no matter what, I would be OK," he said. The press coverage didn't drop off quickly -- for instance, a CNN camera crew followed Jacobowitz during the first day of his sophomore year, over six months after the incident. Still, the attention eventually subsided, simplifying his life, and Jacobowitz currently has no complaints about the media in general. However, Hackney, who was criticized in editorials in major papers like The Wall Street Journal and The Philadelphia Inquirer, emerged a bit more wary and cynical toward the media, especially after the popular press dubbed him, in Christian Coalition's Ralph Reed's words, "the pope of political correctness." "I've always hated the press," Hackney said. "This made me a bit more defensive, which I don't like to be.... My faith in human nature and the press has been challenged." "I think I read the news in a more sophisticated way," he added, though to this day, he said he almost never picks up a copy of The Wall Street Journal. While Hackney may have trouble forgetting the media, the media certainly forgot Penn -- or at least left the University to its own devices, largely following a revision of the University's speech code. The University's current policy toward hate speech-- changed in response to the negative attention the Water Buffalo affair attracted -- includes informal and educational means to educate its students, such as discussion panels and conferences. "The answer isn't to suppress" speech, Rodin said of the change in policy. "We have looked over the abyss and decided we aren't going to do it anymore."

Media: U. example of PC gone too far By Lina Shustarovich "Buffaloed at Penn." "Name-calling -- Ivy League style." "PC Alert." During April 1993, the media descended upon Penn, thrusting both the University and then-President Sheldon Hackney into headlines and editorials throughout the nation. Why did two simple words -- "water" and "buffalo" -- create such a media frenzy? The saga began back in January when then-freshman Eden Jacobowitz shouted the now infamous phrase out of his High Rise East window at a group of black sorority sisters celebrating Founders' Day. The story, however, didn't pick up steam in the press until three months later when another racially-charged event led to the theft of an entire press run of The Daily Pennsylvanian. But when it did, it was as a David-and-Goliath style narrative, with the University administration clearly playing the role of Goliath. "There's a very good reason that the story reached so wide a press," said The Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz, who wrote the first editorial lambasting Penn's administration. "The charges were ludicrous... Mr. Hackney was ludicrous."

Others soon followed her lead, as The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Times, The Forward and others all weighed in with a similar verdict -- that political correctness at Penn had gone too far. John Leo of U.S. News and World Report wrote a piece about the scandal and agreed that both Penn's internal litigation of Jacobowitz and the ensuing theft of the DP's press run caught the media's attention. Though Hackney published a statement in the Almanac noting that the thefts were in fact a violation of University policy, the fact remains that the perpetrators went unpunished. "The administration was very reluctant to act with any force at all" in response to either of these events, Leo said. "The stealing of the newspapers calls for a firm free speech response from" Hackney, Leo said, suggesting that Hackney instead seemed to sympathize with the thieves. "I thought that's not the way the president of a university should behave," Leo added. Leo emphasized that the "whole climate of PC across the country" propelled the story into the national limelight. After all, racial tensions in America were high, fueled by the Rodney King police brutality case and the resulting race riots. Hackney was careful to shield his own campus from the racial uproar, ensuring that incidents of "racial harassment" did not go unpunished by the judicial system already in place, and in the process, led Penn into a battle between political correctness and First Amendment rights. The media "was waiting for one incident" to show that the political correctness fad of the time went too far, Leo said. "In this case, it caught pretty well that this guy [Jacobowitz] was cut out to dry." Leo added that Penn's role as a university -- a haven for intellectual expression -- incited the media even more to criticize Hackney for allowing the need for racial diversity to trump free speech. "Free speech is particularly important at a university," Leo said. Not unlike the rest of the media, Rabinowitz said she found herself captivated by Hackney's seemingly PC-motivated actions and decisions. With opinions aplenty, her own editorial appeared in The Wall Street Journal on April 26, boasting the headline "Buffaloed at Penn." "Things happen at large universities," Rabinowitz said. "It's more impressive, it's more telling." "It was bizarre and grotesque on the part of the administration... as everyone else in the universe understood," she added. So grotesque, in fact, that Rabinowitz suggested that Hackney would have received even more negative press coverage, but "he had media friends who protected him." And while Rabinowitz said that, all things considered, the media went easy on Hackney, she also noted that he "is still talking about the water buffalo case.... If you listen to Hackney, you would suppose that the most terrible thing that happened to him was the water buffalo." For her part, Rabinowitz has moved on. "It's all in the... dark past," she said. According to syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, the incident might not even have been a past headache for Hackney had it not been for his emergence into the realm of Washington politics and, thus, the Beltway media frenzy. Krauthammer also attributed his own awareness of the scandal to the fact that it occurred at an Ivy League institution. "I think that might be why I heard about it," he said. "I thought the issues were clear, and Hackney took the wrong side and The Daily Pennsylvanian took the right side." So when Hackney finally did emerge, it was with newfound insight, as well as a personal award, courtesy of Leo. Leo annually assigns the "Sheldon Award" -- an award much resembling an Oscar, except that it shows a man with no backbone looking the other way -- to the college president who looks the other way the most in cases of freedom of speech and media. "There were a whole bunch of college president behaving like weasels even before" Hackney, Leo noted, but Hackney was the epitome of "a president with no backbone."