First They Came for the Newspaper Racks

I've just spent the past 24 hours locked in a campus storage closet. I was standing around the Willard Building minding my own business when, like a lifeguard rescuing a flailing swimmer, a dude in a hard hat tucked me under his arm and hauled me outside.

When I asked him to explain himself, he told me he had his orders. "Orders from whom?" I asked as he loaded me onto a truck. He wouldn't say.

The truck made a circuit of the campus, stopping every so often to collect other faculty members from other buildings. No one knew what was going on. In the end, they crammed 35 of us into that storage closet.

It was a long and sleepless night. Faculty being faculty, we spent it hypothesizing about what we had done to warrant our detention and wondering how our knowledge-hungry students could possibly survive our absence from the next day's classes.

What did the 35 of us have in common?

"The only thing I can think of," said the semiotician in the group, "is that some of us are dressed inappropriately."

It was dark in the storeroom and, faculty being faculty, none of us knew how to deploy the flashlight apps on our phones (the concrete lining of the facility, not to mention the demands of this account, prevented us from dialing out for help or at least, pizza). But even in the dim light, we could see that no inappropriate body parts were exposed, which, faculty being faculty, was a very good thing.

Then a sliver of light from a sliver of moon illuminated the silk-screened message on one of our T-shirts.

"Kamala for President 2024," it said.

One by one, each of us positioned ourselves in the moonlight. The count: three "Kamala for President" tees and six that urged students to register to vote. The rest, faculty being faculty, were a miscellany of rumpled and unfashionable shirts and blouses.

We were mystified.

The next morning, another dude in a hard hat loaded us back onto the truck and returned us to the locations whence they had collected us. Around the same time, a letter from Old Main circulated to the deans of our various colleges.

"The faculty members," it explained, "were temporarily relocated by personnel so that the unauthorized ad activity in violation of University policy could be removed."

Apparently, we had run afoul of University Policy AD27, Commercial Sales Activities at University Locations. In a group debriefing, none of us could recall hawking any wares in the hallowed halls of academia. It had to be the Kamala T-shirts.

But why lock us up? Why not ask us to remove the offending garments voluntarily? And why remove the six of us whose shirts bore the voter registration messages, especially since the university is encouraging voter registration efforts in multiple ways. To say nothing of the 26 of us whose clothes bore no messages whatsoever, other than that faculty members tend not to be fashion plates.

In the absence of any coherent official explanation, humans, being humans, fall back on conspiracy theories.

One theory I heard in one of my classes and that has been floated by a Daily Collegian columnist, connected the disappearance of materials promoting Kamala Harris's candidacy to the appearance on campus of right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk.

Might administrators have feared that the presence of pro-Kamala messages and even pro-voting messages on university property would provoke vandalism or even violence on the part of MAGA-hatted Kirk/Trump supporters?

Perhaps. But I noted another coincidence. We the Storeroom 35 were removed just as U.S. News and World Report released its latest college rankings. The official communique from Old Main boasted that we ranked 63rd out of all 436 national universities and 30th out of 225 public universities. Not dazzling, perhaps, but nothing to be ashamed of, either.

What the release did not mention was that 12 of our sister schools in the Big EighTEeN out-ranked us: Northwestern (6 out of 436); UCLA (15); Michigan (ouch!-21); USC (27); Illinois (33); Wisconsin (39); Ohio State (oof!) and Rutgers (Rutgers?) (41); Maryland (44); Purdue and Washington (46); and Minnesota (54). (We tied with Michigan State.)

To be sure, those U.S. News rankings are as arguable as the AP Top 25 Football Poll.

(Want to cry, O staunch defenders of education-for-education's sake?: "Based on statistics," U.S. News tells us in its methodology section, "the top-ranked schools provided ample classroom resources for students and faculty; conferred bachelor's degrees at high rates; and produced graduates who entered the workforce with manageable debt and worthwhile starting salaries.")

Flawed (and money-driven) as the rankings may be, one could see how the Powers That Be might want to distract the media from Penn State's less-than-stellar showing by feeding the beast a story of administrative overreaction and overreach so egregious that it would go out on the Associated Press wire and appear on the websites of news organizations across the land.

Ingenious, no?

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